New Wives tale

The Wives creator Helen Black recalls the journey to making her first original series, explaining how the drama champions female camaraderie and why writers should “hold their nerve.”

While broadcasters might lament the falling number of young people still watching traditional television, writer Helen Black is courting a share of the audience she feels is under-appreciated with her new series, The Wives.

“Quite often we forget that the largest group of TV watchers is women of a certain age, and they quite like to see themselves on screen – but not like old biddies,” she tells DQ. “So it was really important that all our main characters have a lot of agency, have active sex lives and act like they’re very messy and very funny and argumentative, but in their own right. Their menfolk are all there, but that’s not the thrust of the series. It’s called The Wives. It’s about the wives.”

Produced by Gaumont for Channel 5, the six-part domestic thriller series follows how one family unravels over the course of a single summer that changes all their lives.

Twelve months ago, four sisters-in-law and their families escaped to their Maltese holiday apartments as they’ve done every summer for 15 years. Sylvie Morgan (Tamzin Outhwaite) was happily married, Natasha Morgan (Angela Griffin) was swimming in wealth, and Beth Morgan (Jo Joyner) and Annabelle Morgan (Christine Bottomley) were thick as thieves.

But this year, everything is different. Sylvie’s now single and loving life, Natasha is hiding a desperate financial situation, Beth is barely keeping her life together – and Annabelle is dead.

When Annabelle’s widower Charlie (Jamie Bamber) arrives in Malta with new partner Jade (Katie Clarkson-Hill), Beth tries to be happy for them. But Charlie’s odd behaviour and her suspicion that Annabelle’s death wasn’t an accident results in Beth partnering with Sylvie and Natasha to uncover the truth, beginning a journey that leads them to confront corrupt officials, drug cartels and career criminals.

Shot on location in Malta, The Wives is the first original series from creator Black, who previously penned the BBC’s Bafta-nominated single drama Life & Death in the Warehouse. She also co-wrote season two of Jimmy McGovern’s prison drama Time.

From the outset, her idea for the series revolved around what it’s like when a second wife comes into a group, leading everyone to compare her to the first wife. She then centred on one of the key dynamics of the series – that Beth, Sylvie and Natasha are sisters-in-law, rather than simply friends.

That means “they’re not forced to be friends, they don’t have to be, but they are suspicious of the incoming wife and start looking into whether she had anything to do with the first wife’s death,” explains Black. “But really, it’s about their relationship [together] and their long-standing marriages. I was really interested in exploring what it’s like for middle-aged women to be in long-term relationships, and fortunately Channel 5 were really good at letting me run with that.”

That the three protagonists are related by marriage, rather than blood, means that at any minute, they could just walk out on each other. “It’s very hard to pull apart siblings. That’s a big decision,” Black says. “But for a sister-in-law to just go, ‘You know what? I really don’t want to spend my summer with her again,’ it feels like it can fall apart at any moment. That’s one of the fun things about it. But ultimately, they choose to remain friends. It’s also about female camaraderie because we see loads and loads of shows of females competing with each other and I have no interest in that. I wanted to show camaraderie, but messy camaraderie.”

Black wrote the series with Ciara Conway (Screw) and Jamie Jackson, who penned an episode each, while Claire Tailyour (Phoenix Rise) and Paulette Randall (Waterloo Road) were the directors. Facing a tight deadline to turn the scripts around ahead of production, Black also “nicked” her Time S2 script editor Joe Griffith and had previously partnered with the show’s EPs on projects that hadn’t got out of development. “So we were quite a good team. I was really well supported in that regard,” she says.

“When Time aired [last year], this had been greenlit and I was working on this and, in classic Channel 5 form, we were basically good to go. There was none of that hanging around, which is bloody fantastic. But you’ve got to hit the ground running. You’ve got to get those scripts in and they’ve got to be good enough to go out to actors and heads of departments to get boots on the ground quite quickly. All our actresses that we approached all said yes, so we were dead lucky.”

Fans of Time and Life & Death in the Warehouse might be surprised at how darkly comic The Wives is compared with Black’s other broadcast work. As the author of 11 published crime novels, she also knows how to sustain and escalate a mystery. Here, however, the focus is on not just discovering the truth behind Annabelle’s death, but also creating characters viewers can invest in for six hours.

“[The plot] is the culmination of the central mystery, which is what’s happened to the first wife, and has the second wife got anything to do with it? But it’s very bouncy and very irreverent as well,” Black says.

It’s not cosy in any shape or form. It’s all a bit fruity and a bit naughty, and they [Channel 5] were very good at letting it be. Spoiler, but there’s a sex scene with strawberries. Everybody was a good sport about it. When we had the [script] readthrough, Joe read the action lines about these strawberries and where the strawberries were being put, and it was just so funny because he was dying inside.”

Moving from writing novels to writing television, Black has found the latter industry to be “collaborative from the off,” whereas penning a novel means “sitting on your own for a year.”

“You’re in constant touch with your TV collaborators, for good and bad,” she notes. “The upside to books is, if you’ve got a contract, whatever happens at the end of that year, there’ll be a book on the shelves. With TV, a lot of it goes into development and never gets made, and that was a bit of an eye-opener for me when I stepped into TV. I was like, ‘What? We’re not going to make this show? Why have we spent all this time and money and we’re not going to make it?’

“Then you quickly come to understand that’s how it is, and even the most successful writers aren’t getting everything away. They’ve got strings of stuff in their drawers that never got made. It’s mad, but TV’s so expensive to make and there is only a certain number of slots.”

Black is also an executive producer on The Wives, which is distributed internationally by Banijay Rights, and used the opportunity to learn more about problem-solving on set and working with budgets. “I take my lead from them [the other EPs] as to what the best way forward is, and I’m going to get better and better at that as time goes on,” she says. “You can only learn in telly by doing, and it’s only by having the experience of it that you’ve learned then what the solution to that was. I thoroughly enjoyed that.”

Towards the end of filming, she was able to fly out to Malta to watch The Wives being made first hand – and join the wrap party. “By then, everybody had got through all the hard graft of making the show and everybody could see the end in sight, so you’re coming at a really nice time when everybody’s feeling a bit demob happy.

“It was a lovely last few days. I got to stay in the place where we did some filming because it was a suite in a hotel and they’d finished [filming] that, but they said, ‘Well, we’ve paid for it until the end of the shoot so why don’t you stay in it?’ So I stayed in this enormous suite.”

With The Wives now airing across two weeks having launched on Channel 5 last night, Black already has ideas for a follow-up should viewers have as much fun watching the show as she did making it.

On the back of her first original series, she advises other writers to “hold their nerve” when it comes to steering a project from script to screen, just as she has in weaving her own sense of humour through the mystery at the heart of The Wives. “Just trust the process,” she says. “Trust the process of writing and the scripts will get there. Don’t panic, and get the best possible producers you possibly can, who can make a little money and a little time go a very long way.”

tagged in: Banijay Rights, Channel 5, Gaumont, Helen Black, The Wives