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.
After seeing a young patient with a severe head injury that can’t be explained, A&E doctor Liz’s routine response would be to inform social services to investigate the case and the child’s wellbeing at home.
But when that child is the baby daughter of her close friend Jess, Liz faces a moral dilemma – and her decision to do her job and follow protocol has unforeseen and far-reaching consequences, not just for their friendship but also for their families and wider social circle.
Liz’s decision sets off a chain of events in Paramount+ original series Little Disasters, which debuts on the streamer today. After being thrown together at their local antenatal class, Jess (Diane Kruger), Liz (Jo Joyner), Mel (Emily Taaffe) and Charlotte (Shelley Conn) have supported each other through the subsequent births and early stages of motherhood. Yet when seemingly perfect stay-at-home mum Jess turns up in A&E one night, where Liz is the on-duty doctor, she can’t explain the injuries suffered by her daughter Betsey. And after Liz reports the incident, Jess’s life begins to crumble in the face of police and social services investigations that also draw in Mel and Charlotte.
Old grudges and judgements then rise to the surface as their friendships crack, leaving them all questioning what really happened to Betsey, what Jess’s family might be hiding – and whether any of them are the good mothers they claim to be.
“Liz has got a very real, very difficult dilemma, which is that she knows the right course of action – and there are a lot of eyes on her at work – which is that she has to report this incident because it doesn’t add up,” Joyner tells DQ. “Then at the same time, she knows this woman to be a wonderful mother, somebody she has aspired to and has always kind of been in her shadow as a parent. It doesn’t make sense to Liz and she has to make a very difficult call.
“After that, she feels very isolated because she feels Charlotte does perhaps understand her a little bit, but Mel certainly doesn’t and Jess absolutely doesn’t. So you’ve lost some of your real core friends in the process of making that decision. But equally, there is a little hint in the show that Liz has experienced from her own life the fact that good people can do bad things. I do think that’s a very real thing that would happen. It would explode friendships, like it does, and it sets the cat among the pigeons, for sure.”
Mel doesn’t agree with Liz’s decision and backs Jess, says Taaffe (The Rising), who describes her character’s loyalty as both her greatest quality and her biggest flaw. “That’s the journey for her throughout the series, going from someone who’s very black and white to allowing the various shades of grey to come in, and how that affects her in terms of her friendship and her relationship, and allowing her to go through changes that maybe are necessary,” she says. “She has to learn that being very definite isn’t always the greatest thing to be. When we meet her, she’s very much on one side or the other and, as she progresses, she learns that maybe that’s not the way to live your life.”
Charlotte can also be quite “monochromatic,” observes Conn (Bridgerton), though she initially takes the opposite of Mel’s stance. “She has a straightforward relationship with Liz where there’s just a professional understanding and it’s like, ‘Well, of course that’s what you have to do.’ She doesn’t trust Jess and that’s an interesting thing that’s really apparent in the script, but not really spoken about.
“There’s a whole thing about loyalty to female understanding, and that’s a huge question for Charlotte. It’s like, ‘Hang on, where do you land on all of this? And are your judgements of somebody else, or are they of yourself?’ It’s really interesting.”
Directed by Eva Sigurðardóttir, the emotional, six-part psychological thriller is written Ruth Fowler and Amanda Duke. It is produced by Roughcut Television and distributed internationally by Fremantle.
Based on the novel of the same name by Sarah Vaughan (Anatomy of a Scandal), the storytelling is elevated by flashbacks that reveal glimpses into the four women’s friendship before Liz’s fateful decision, while narration from Liz and to-camera testimonies from her, Mel and Charlotte, as if they’re giving evidence to a court, offer a sense of their own take on events as they unfold.
Joyner had read Vaughan’s novel and knew the series would similarly dramatise events from different perspectives. “I love that about the pieces to camera. They are ultimately the interviews that we would have had with social services, but they also add to that feeling like everyone’s watching you when you’re a mother,” the actor says. “It adds to that paranoia as well as giving another perspective on the characters, because they’re free to talk in an interview setting and it’s confidential. They’re not having to skirt around anything. They can just say, ‘It was a shitshow,’ or whatever they want to say.”
Below is an exclusive clip from episode three of Little Disasters, as the drama and the fallout of Liz’s impossible decision continues.
Having featured in such series as The Wives, For Her Sins and Stay Close, Joyner quips that she’s enjoyed a “thrilling” last five years. When she read the first draft of the Little Disasters scripts, she was initially drawn to an opening scene featuring the antenatal class where all the expectant mums were discussing their individual birth plans. “That hooked me straight away,” she says, with the scene not only introducing the group but also revealing something of their personalities through the types of births they are hoping to have.
“There was one saying, ‘I just want to do it as natural as possible with some 80s music,’ one going, ‘I want all the drugs, I’ll have everything, thanks,’ and another saying, ‘I’ll just fit it in with work, so I’m having a planned caesarean.’ I remember thinking, ‘What a brilliant way to define characters,’” she explains.
“Immediately, we get a concept and an idea of each of these women, what they value and who they are, and what we think we might know about them. Some of those things will be wrong, some of them will be right, but there was such a lovely difference. That was the thing that mainly drew me in initially, rather than the thriller aspect. It was the more human aspects to the story that I really relished.”
The character aspects of the story similarly “hit” Conn, who felt like she understood Charlotte as soon as she began reading her lines. “I would say I’m pretty opposite ends in terms of my parenting styles from Charlotte’s but, equally, I felt like I could see her so clearly and I felt like I knew who she was. It was so well defined, but there still felt like there was a lot of exploration to be had between the friendships between the women and where the story was going.”
Meanwhile, Mel “is such a great character,” says Taaffe. “It’s so fun to play the person who’s going to come in with the comments that everybody’s thinking but not everybody will say.”
Through the series, Mel’s confident exterior is broken down to reveal the challenges she faces in her life and relationships, “and that was a real treat for me,” the actor says. “I remember when I read it, I was like, ‘Oh, everyone I know will want to watch this.’ I have a feeling that all the mums at the school gates will be watching this, and all the dads too, because you explore how parenthood changes your relationship with your partner as well as the relationships between the women, and how that develops as your children grow.”
Building those relationships on screen started with the scripts and identifying the threads that will come to define each character’s story arc. That process was then amplified once the cast – which also includes Ben Bailey-Smith, Patrick Baladi and Stephen Campbell Moore – came together on set.
“My favourite thing about acting is the dynamic between the people you’re working with,” says Conn. “You can do all the prep you want, and you should. I believe in that. But there’s something irreplaceable when you’re eye to eye with somebody in a scene and just discovering in the moment what a scene means between two people. For me, acting is where you get to explore and delve and dive and discover, but then there’s just the excitement of being present with somebody in a scene and what they can offer you and how you can then meet them on that. That is what this whole story is about, in a way. It’s about the creation of relationships.”
The magic of working with actors “of this calibre across the ensemble” is that unexpected things happen on set in the moment, says Taaffe. This, she adds, helps to create something that feels authentic to the story and the characters’ emotions.
“You can never play a genre,” she continues. “All you can do is play the character as it’s written and hope that you’re giving a truthful rendition of a person. But that’s really where the relationships you build with the other actors come in, because you have to create that in the moment. We were incredibly lucky as a group; there are all these little moments that just happen and that create a well-rounded world.”
“We were all up for it, weren’t we?” adds Conn. “I feel like we all really enjoyed working on script with each other off the set. We would try to figure things out. We’d go off into pairs or groups and work on things. But also, if improvs came up or if little moments would be added in situ, I love the fact that actually a lot of those made the cut.
“Sometimes on any set, it’s easy to feel like we’re in this pretend world, so it was lovely to feel things like things were picked up on and used. It just added to the reality, the relationships and the dynamics we were discovering as part of the piece.”
Like that? Watch this! Suggested by AI, selected by DQ
Big Little Lies: A starry cast featuring Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman leads this HBO series. The show is based on Liane Moriarty’s novel about a group of mothers living in a wealthy community whose friendships are tested by secrets, traumas and a mysterious incident.
The Undoing: Nicole Kidman stars alongside Hugh Grant in this HBO psychological drama about a successful therapist whose life unravels after a violent death and a series of shocking revelations.
Sharp Objects: Another HBO show, this adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s novel stars Amy Adams as a journalist returning to her hometown to report on a series of murders.
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tagged in: Emily Taaffe, Fremantle, Jo Joyner, Little Disasters, Paramount, Roughcut Television, Shelley Conn