Payback time
Writer Gabbie Asher invites DQ inside The Revenge Club, her Paramount+ series about six strangers who plot revenge on their exes. She discusses the adaptation process behind the show, the nature of modern relationships and the challenge of writing police procedurals.
You’ve heard of Ocean’s 11. Now prepare to meet the “Poundland Ocean’s 11” – a group of disparate characters who come together to exact revenge on the people who broke their hearts in Paramount+ series The Revenge Club.
The six-part, darkly comic drama introduces six lonely, hapless strangers who are brought together by a divorce support group, each reeling from betrayal and heartbreak. With little in common beyond their emotional baggage, they form an unlikely bond and come up with a wildly misguided idea to seek revenge in an attempt to heal themselves.
But what starts as a cathartic outlet quickly spirals into something far more chaotic, as their retribution escalates from petty pranks – forged exam papers, tarot cons and rat invasions – to deadly accidents. As the group’s plans grow bolder, the line between justice and madness begins to blur – and someone might just take things too far.
Martin Compston, Aimée-Ffion Edwards and Meera Syal lead the ensemble as Calum, Emily and Rita respectively. Sharon Rooney plays Rachel, with Douglas Henshall as Steve and Chaneil Kular as Tej. The cast also includes Amit Shah, Owen Teale, Aoife Kennan, Rob Malone, Niamh Walsh, Wil Coban, Christina Bennington and Eoin Duffy.
Produced by Gaumont for Paramount+, where the series debuts this Friday in the UK and Ireland, The Revenge Club is the second series released this year from writer Gabbie Asher, who previously worked on the adaptation of Michelle Francis novel The Girlfriend for Prime Video. Another book-to-TV transfer, The Revenge Club is based on JD Pennington’s The Othello Club, with Asher writing four episodes and Matt Jones and Adam Usden picking up one each.
“The Girlfriend was different in that I came on late stage. This one was interesting because I had the book, and it was one of those where I’ve just read it and it came fully formed,” she tells DQ. “It’s quite difficult to find a place for character-driven stuff that isn’t comedy. You’re writing either big thrillers or these very propulsive dramas but with less character, because there’s no time for it, or there are these lovely comedies. So I just thought, ‘God, this is actually an opportunity to do both,’ which was really exciting. All these people who had been swimming around [in my head], I thought, ‘Oh my God, I can put them all in here.’”
The Revenge Club also offered Asher the opportunity to write about pain and love, from the perspective of a group of characters who come from different walks of life, are all of different ages, and who for a split second find an unexpected connection through circumstances – a “moment of pain” – without which they would likely never have met.
She also found the series gave her the chance to write about a group of “losers.” “We all find ourselves on those days where it just feels like everyone else is on the island of fabulous, and you’re drifting away on a boat, you just don’t know what to do with your life, and you don’t know if there’s going to be life after the life you’ve already had,” the writer says.
Each episode is bookended by scenes in a police interview room, where a pair of detectives are questioning members of the Revenge Club about a death – or potentially multiple deaths. The action then flashes back to explore how the group came together and mapped out numerous madcap plots to exact revenge on each of their exes, as the series marries ex-of-the-week storylines with a thriller element that will emerge by the end of the story.
Throughout, Asher was keen to bring as much nuance to the story as possible, not simply presenting the exes as the show’s “villains.” The real reasons – and circumstances – behind the breakups become apparent as each relationship is interrogated, with the series opening as Emily discovers her husband is having an affair with her best friend.
“When you meet anyone and they’re split up, obviously their ex is going to be their enemy, the villain. But often in these stories, there are two sides, and you get to see the nuances,” Asher says. “There are so many characters to serve as well, but they all feel broken, they all feel slighted and they are all the wronged ones. But as it goes, that’s not necessarily the case once you see the other side of it.
“Also, every breakup is different. Some of them are catching your other half in bed with someone, and then others, you have that moment where you just look across the room at a party and you think, ‘This is wrong. I’m in the wrong life.’ It’s divorce by 1,000 cuts.”
Then there are the marriages involving people who have “almost forgotten how to live together in the real world,” says Asher, noting the interference digital devices can have in modern relationships.
“We’re all into these virtual worlds and get so engrossed and involved with other stuff, and you stop looking at each other. You save the best part of you for work, for the office and for other people. Then when you get home, you’ve just got your disgusting self on, and you forget that other person is the person you chose to spend the rest of your life with,” she says. “We only cover six marriages, and there are infinite situations. Everyone is different. I didn’t want to do a thing where it’s like, ‘Oh, my ex is a bastard. My ex is a bitch and we’ve got to avenge ourselves.’ It just felt stupid. I wanted to relate to it and I wanted other people to as well.”
Asher describes The Othello Club as a “real page turner.” The setup to the series is the same, but she notes how the book is “much darker” to the point that “you’re wondering which one of them is a psychopath,” with many more murders unfolding on the page.
When she first considered adapting it for television, she simply found herself wanting to understand the people who form this group and make “mad” connections at a time when they think their lives are almost over. “It gets so intense so quickly. And if you’re believing that all the characters are potential psychopaths from day one, you’re gonna hate them all,” she says. She also wanted to have more fun with the revenges, noting how “slick” they are in the novel, whereas the series shows the revenge seekers to be “idiots” – hence the “Poundland Ocean’s 11” line that features in an early episode.
“Obviously, when you adapt something, it becomes its own thing,” the writer notes. “If you did the book truly as an adaptation, it would be a really strong, edge-of-your-seat movie. I’m glad no one did that, though, so I could do it as a six-part series.”
The show certainly leans into the characters and their marriage woes in the early episodes, before Emily and then Calum take centre stage. At that point, Asher says the volume is turned down on the show’s thriller elements. But by episode six, “the thrill is going up to 11.”
“I just thought I didn’t want to have the first murder in the first episode, because otherwise there’s no fun,” she says. “I know it’s been done before, and we all know why, but you start now [in the present day] and then flashback and you know something’s coming. Then there are little hints as we go as well. That was really important. And then I really wanted to go into each one of them [in each episode].”
She admits she set herself up for a big challenge, weaving a thriller with numerous character journeys and caper plots in six episodes. But the hardest thing about writing the series – which was filmed in Bray in Ireland – proved to be the police interrogation scenes that see each character come under the spotlight for a crime that is slowly revealed.
That was in part due to the sheer number of police dramas elsewhere on TV, as viewers have seen countless examples of such scenes. “Jed Mercurio with Line of Duty, you don’t get better than that. So you know that whatever you write, you’re going, ‘This sounds like a sketch from The Bill. It’s like a pastiche.’
“At the beginning, the police characters had quite a big journey, and then you realise you can’t do it, because the focus has to be on those six and their exes. So I found writing those scenes was really challenging. Every line just sounds so cringe, because we’ve seen so many of those shows now.”
The other tricky element for Asher was creating the scenes featuring the central six in therapy sessions led by a particularly eccentric therapist. “It’s all rooted in research, then it’s invented, and then it was checked,” Asher says. “I wouldn’t say that was how most [therapists] operate, but it’s just plausible, so that’s fine for me. As long as some professionals tell me it could be done [that way] then it’s OK.”
Asher, who is also an executive producer on the series, praises the alchemy between the team behind the scenes that ensured everybody was trying to make the same show. “The execs, the script team were amazing – and then Tim Kirkby, the director, came on board.
“But then the cast, everybody loved their characters. It was quite a fast turnaround in the end and it was so wonderful to know you could just trust everybody. You didn’t have to be all over it. It was really exciting seeing it all come together.”
Asher now hopes people “really enjoy” The Revenge Club when it rolls out on Paramount+. “That sounds really banal, but I love watching telly. I love watching dramas, and my favourite ones are always the bittersweet, character-driven stuff,” she adds. “I just enjoy being with those people and maybe relating a bit, and going through it with them a bit.”
Like that? Watch this! Suggested by AI, selected by DQ
Dead to Me: A tightly wound widow and a free-spirited stranger forge an intense friendship in grief therapy, but secrets and past crimes twist their bond into something darkly dangerous.
Big Little Lies: A tight-knit coastal community of mothers hides a shocking violent act, as rivalries, affairs and lies slowly reveal the toxic secrets holding their friendship together.
Bad Sisters: Four Irish sisters, desperate to save their sibling from an abusive husband, find their murder plot dogging them long after his death as insurers circle and suspicions mount.
RELATED CONTENT
Planning for Disasters
Jo Joyner, Shelley Conn and Emily Taaffe reflect on the moral dilemma at the heart of Paramount+ emotional thriller Little Disasters and discuss how they came together to create the drama’s central characters, whose friendships are torn apart by secrets and revelations.
Married to the mob
While she may be best known for playing lady’s maid Anna Bates in Downton Abbey, Joanne Froggatt has built a career defined by variety. Here, she tells DQ about her latest part – starring opposite Tom Hardy, Pierce Brosnan and Helen Mirren in Guy Ritchie’s new TV drama, MobLand.
As the Crow Girl flies
The Crow Girl writer Milly Thomas and executive producer Tony Wood discuss their Paramount+ adaptation of this “sprawling,” dark Swedish crime novel and reveal how a celebrity fan partnered with them to bring it to the screen – Guns ‘n’ Roses guitarist Slash.
tagged in: Gabbie Asher, Gaumont, Paramount, The Revenge Club