Script secrets
How are writers currently navigating the troubled British drama industry, and what were the unique storytelling methods used in making Baby Reindeer, One Day and Industry? The BAFTA-nominated writers of these shows take DQ inside their acclaimed works and explain why it’s still worth taking risks.
At a time of turbulence in the television industry, the Writer: Fiction nominees at this year’s BAFTA Television Craft Awards are proof that bold and daring storytelling can still find its way to the screen.
There’s no doubt “the gold rush” of the streamer-fuelled Peak TV is over, says writer Nicole Taylor, who is nominated for her Netflix series One Day, an adaptation of David Nicholls’ novel that follows the relationship between Emma and Dexter over a number of years. After they first meet, each subsequent episode picks up their story 12 months on from the last.
Despite the current difficulties financing high-end UK drama, amid flat licence fees and rising costs, Taylor believes “it’s beyond dispute that British audiences want, need and deserve homegrown content that speaks to us and our lives without also having to qualify as of interest globally.”
“So much has been said and can be said about how rough it is out there. People like [Sister founder and Chernobyl exec producer] Jane Featherstone are doing incredible work fighting for the survival of our industry,” Taylor continues. “The gold rush is over, that’s for sure, but I also think there’s a fatigue among audiences too because we’ve been gorging on telly in this slightly weird rapacious way for so long now. I feel a reset is coming in our tastes as well as the market. And maybe that’s exciting and going to lead to exciting work if we can weather what’s going on now.”
Fellow nominee Richard Gadd – the creator, writer and star of fellow Netflix breakout hit Baby Reindeer – agrees.
“I have been fortunate to have two shows commissioned back to back,” he says, noting his upcoming BBC and HBO series Half Man, “but I am very aware of how tough it is out there. Everyone is feeling the pinch, and one of the biggest consequences is the caution broadcasters are showing. Riskier, artistic projects often get passed over in favour of safer, more bankable ideas.
“Because of that, I see many writers creating things that do not feel authentic to them, which is stifling their imagination and their ability to tell unique, personal stories. I feel this is a real shame.”
Baby Reindeer is certainly a personal story for Gadd, who based the show on his one-man Edinburgh Fringe play about events from his own life. It centres on struggling comedian Donny Dunn (Gadd)’s warped relationship with his stalker (Jessica Gunning), and the impact it has on him as he faces up to a long-buried trauma.
The series began life as a live show Gadd wrote called Monkey See Monkey Do, which was his first attempt at a biographical piece of work and covered a lot of the material in episode four, where Donny confronts his trauma. “I found real catharsis in tackling personal issues through art,” he says.
“A few years later, I followed it up with Baby Reindeer because I wanted to explore the theme of stalking – something I felt had never really been depicted accurately on screen or stage before. I wanted to add more nuance to the conversation – acknowledging the empathy that can arise when the person stalking you is unwell – and to confront the mistakes I made in handling the situation.”
The project gained traction through word of mouth – just as the series went on to do when it debuted on Netflix last April – and sparked a bidding war between “several major broadcasters,” Gadd remembers. “I chose Netflix and began developing the series from scratch. Turning a 60-minute stage monologue into eight episodes of television was a monumental challenge. I worked day and night, writing and rewriting. Some episode drafts reached thousands of drafts – this is no exaggeration.”
Gadd describes writing the series as a “relentless process,” where he was rewriting the scripts “almost to the point of madness.”
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Us and them
Bafta-winning screenwriter David Nicholls recalls how Us, his novel about a man seeking to repair his marriage during a family holiday around Europe, made the journey to the small screen.
“I worked impossibly long hours, grinding it out day and night, including weekends. It probably was not healthy in hindsight, but I felt a deep responsibility to make it good – because I was exposing so much of myself,” he says. “If I was going to put this raw, honest version of my life into the world, I could not bear the idea of it falling flat. So I gave it everything I had, for better or worse.”
Gadd was then across every single aspect of making Baby Reindeer alongside its “incredible” production team at Clerkenwell Films.
“For me, storytelling is not just scribbling words onto a page, it is making sure those words are correctly brought to life as well,” he says. “I do not understand writers who just hand a script off and let others run with it. If a story comes from such a deep, personal place, then it should stay close to the person it came from. I do believe that is what is best for a project – keeping a strong authorial voice throughout. Without a singular voice, things can fall apart or get lost in compromise. That being said, I always welcome ideas that elevate the project, and so many brilliant contributions made it into the show.”
Everything about making Baby Reindeer was “hard,” he remarks. “It is already a huge job to write, produce, act and showrun a television series. But when you are also reenacting your most painful, traumatic moments? It becomes something else entirely,” he says. “Balancing all those responsibilities while meeting deadlines, learning lines and staying emotionally grounded felt borderline impossible at times. I do not think I sat still for four years.”
On One Day, Taylor worked closely with lead director Molly Manners, sharing thousands of text messages as they discussed the show’s 14 half-hour episodes – “So many episodes! So much rewriting!” – and contemplated its “very tricky” post-production process.
“I’m not a great one for being on set all the time, as I’m always writing and rewriting, but I had a wonderful script exec there every day, Chloe Beeson, who would call through anything to me so I could approve line changes and stuff, and that worked really well,” she says.
Taylor’s other key creative partnership was with One Day novelist Nicholls, which blossomed after she was approached to adapt the book by Roanna Benn at producer Drama Republic. With a week-old baby at home, Taylor wasn’t looking for a new project at the time but remembered how she felt when she first read the story and thought she should double-check that saying no was the right answer.
“I got it off the shelf, hoping it couldn’t possibly be as wonderful as I remember; it surely wouldn’t have stood the test of time. I re-read the whole thing that night and it was even better than I remembered,” she says. “I absolutely had to do it, and Roanna and Jude [Liknaitzky] at Drama Republic were willing to wait until I was able to start it.
“It’s worth saying that this attitude is reflective of Drama Republic’s approach generally. So many of the women working on One Day had very young kids – Molly, director Kate Hewitt and myself, among others – and that was always more than accommodated throughout the three years it took to bring One Day to screen.”
Previously a best miniseries BAFTA winner for 2017 factual drama Three Girls, Taylor says writing One Day “was the same as my usual process,” which is to write and rewrite until the script “declares itself.”
But after deciding to have one episode per year in the story, the challenge with One Day was choosing how to make a compelling drama out of a story without a traditional plot.
“I knew I wanted each episode to be entirely set on that day, without any flashbacks, so that meant losing a lot of lovely stuff from the book. But I just wanted to drop the audience into each episode and leave it to them to catch up with what they’d missed in the intervening year,” she says. “That’s where the tension came from, and gave us the dramatic question of each episode: where are these two people at in relation to each other? Every episode asked that question.”
More than anything, Taylor was interested in how to reflect the characters’ interiority on screen, turning Emma and Dexter inside out to make sure she – and the audience – could track their emotional movements at every turn.
She held Zoom writers rooms with fellow scribes Anna Jordan, Vinay Patel and Bijan Sheibani before they wrote their individual episodes. Sheibani took a one-line reference to a boyfriend Emma has at university and built that into a character who is introduced in episode two.
“I also worked really closely with David, who had some brilliant new lines and ideas as well as writing episode 13,” Taylor says. “He was such a running mate and ally – lots of support, zero pressure.”
But something she did differently on One Day from her other projects was hiring a young comedy writer at the end of the process, to add some ADR to the first couple of episodes. “I just knew that we needed a couple more funny lines and, just from reading her tweets ages ago, I was aware of a writer called Mollie Goodfellow. She came in, she nailed it and I think it made a huge positive difference and helped set up the tone.”
In the running for the Writer: Fiction prize at this Sunday’s BAFTA TV Craft Awards alongside Taylor and Gadd are Gwyneth Hughes for ITV’s political agenda-setting Mr Bates vs The Post Office and Mickey Down and Konrad Kay for the third season of their BBC and HBO drama Industry.
Taking viewers into the unfiltered world of high finance, Industry follows a group of young bankers working within the extreme pressure-cooker environment and sex-and drug-fuelled blitz of international bank Pierpoint & Co’s London office. The show was previously nominated for a handful of BAFTA Cymru awards (being produced by Cardiff-based Bad Wolf), while star Marisa Abela is also nominated this year in the leading actress category.
Down and Kay both worked in finance after finishing university and were excited to take an “Inside Baseball” approach to the world and lives of a group of aspiring stock market brokers. They were in development with HBO from 2016, before the show debuted in 2020.
Arguably a sleeper hit when it first debuted, Industry blew up – much like its characters – in the third season as Down and Kay expanded the world of the show beyond the trading floor to make it a more topical series about capitalism, money and class.
“As the seasons have worn on, our ambition for the show and the canvas we’ve painted on has got wider — and become more societal,” they say.
Industry marks their first “proper” experience of being in and running a writers room. For each season, they open a 10-week room where they break down each episode with “excellent contributors” while taking on the bulk of the script work themselves and mapping out the arcs for protagonists Yasmin (Abela), Harper (Myha’la), Robert (Harry Lawtey) and the rest of the ensemble cast.
As showrunners, they are then “very involved” through production. “We produce, write and direct, and believe that production at a high level is really a balance of collaboration and micromanagement,” they say. “We like to empower our heads of department but we also like to oversee even the most minute decisions about what ends up on screen so that we hit a consistently high bar of detail and verisimilitude.”
Making the show brings “hundreds” of challenges. “Production is really a high-volume problem-solving exercise undertaken at high speed, under pressure. Often, challenges provide elegant solutions and you end up with something you prefer more.”
But at a difficult time for the industry, “we feel very lucky to have been in constant production through the whole thing,” they say, with a fourth season of Industry in the works. “We’ve been insulated, comparatively. Hopefully the cycle corrects, but there are a number of existential threats the business is going to have to contend with in the next 10 years.”
Gadd hopes the success of Baby Reindeer – and its fellow nominees – is proof that riskier, artistic projects are worth making, at a time when caution can be preferred in the search for sure-fire hits.
“I hope Baby Reindeer has helped buck that trend, somewhat,” he says. “I hope it has opened doors for bolder, weirder, riskier work. My advice to writers is always to stay true to yourself and what you want to write; to make art that comes from a truthful, exciting place. I do believe if you follow that formula, things will come to pass.”
tagged in: Baby Reindeer, Bafta, Bafta Television Craft Awards, Gwyneth Hughe, Industry, Konrad Kay, Mickey Down, Mr Bates vs the Post Office, Nicole Taylor, One Day, Richard Gadd