Turk of the town

From teen drama Skins to new show The Turkish Detective, Ben Schiffer has risen from aspiring screenwriter to head writer. He speaks about building his TV career and blending British drama sensibilities with the hustle and bustle of modern-day Istanbul in his first original series.

Ever since breaking into television with the now iconic youth drama Skins in 2007, Ben Schiffer has been trying to get his own show on the air. Skins was his first job out of university, and the intervening years have seen him write for Stan Lee’s Lucky Man, Ransom, Young Wallander and Intergalactic.

But during that time, he has also been writing original material and receiving a string of “brutal” rejections.

“The thing Skins has always given me is a legitimacy, especially soon after it finished when I had all these opportunities that, truthfully, I probably wasn’t quite ready for as a writer,” Schiffer tells DQ. “I had to learn the job while doing it. It’s been an incredible privilege, but also really difficult.

“I’ve worked on so many things that I thought were great and should have gone [ahead] and they haven’t. Maybe some of them weren’t actually that good. But then a lot of it is luck. It’s been really difficult, but I’m so privileged to have been able to live a creative life, and that’s also fun. I’m never bored.”

Then when he was finally given the opportunity to lead a series for the first time, as is the wont of the television business, it all happened incredibly quickly. Offered the chance to adapt Barbara Nadel’s Inspector Ikmen novels for TV in spring 2021, Schiffer jumped at the proposal, and shooting on The Turkish Detective began less than a year after he received that first email.

“They sent me one of the books and I thought it was great, and I thought the central character was super compelling. The idea of setting a police procedure in Istanbul was fascinating,” he says.

When commissioning broadcaster Paramount+ pulled out of the project, the future of the series initially looked bleak, with distributor Paramount Global Content Distribution consequently left to sell the show territory-by-territory. However, the BBC picked it up for UK audiences, debuting it last month, and the series has also been picked up by Turkcell in Turkey, Cosmote TV in Greece and SVT in Sweden.

“Now it’s come out on the BBC and it’s done really well, it’s hard to see how it could have gone better,” Schiffer says. “Actually, my favourite thing that’s happened is a man texted his son and said, ‘Oh, I’ve got a recommendation for you. There’s this show, The Turkish Detective.’ It just so happened his son went to university with the script editor of the show, there was a screenshot of that [message] and it was sent to me, and that feeling of people organically enjoying it and recommending it to each other, that’s really exciting, isn’t it? Lots of people say nice things to me about it, but often it’s my mum, who’s slightly biased, so it’s nice to hear people just randomly praising it to each other.”

Set in modern-day Istanbul, The Turkish Detective follows the adventures of Inspector Çetin Ikmen (Haluk Bilginer), his new British partner Detective Mehmet Süleyman (Ethan Kai) and Detective Ayşe Farsakoğlu (Yasemin Kay Allen) as they solve a series of crimes rooted in the culture, history and everyday life of the Turkish capital.

Directed by Niels Arden Oplev (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) and produced by Turkey’s Ay Yapim, the series sees Süleyman arrive in Turkey to join the homicide unit led by the eccentric and unconventional Ikmen. But while he is thrown into a series of murder mysteries, the new arrival is also investigating a case of his own involving his former girlfriend, investigative journalist Lelya (Dilan Gwynn).

With Nadel’s novels set in the time they were written – more than 20 books have been published since 1999 – Schiffer immediately knew the series had to be brought forward in time while also keeping Inspector Ikmen, and his idiosyncratic spirit, as the show’s focal point.

“He’s a detective that has a family life and isn’t completely ground down by a life spent chasing criminals like a lot of TV detectives,” the writer explains. “They’re quite bleak characters, and what I really loved about the books was that he wasn’t. That felt oddly fresh to me, and that was the thing that was really important to preserve.”

Changing the time period of the novels, and transferring them to a different medium, meant many of the stories in the books didn’t make the jump from page to screen. But one of the biggest challenges of the adaptation was working out a reason for the characters in the series to predominantly speak English.

Schiffer then created the dramatic device of Süleyman arriving in Istanbul, “and that would let you suspend your disbelief that these people would speak in English,” he says. “As a British person who, before I started writing, had never been to Istanbul, how could I write that honestly? The only way to do that is through the eyes of a character who’s going through the same thing. That British fish-out-of-water character became a way of telling the story that was honest, which is not the case in the books, because Barbara didn’t face the same challenge.”

Süleyman’s season-long arc was also brought in, as the writer knew he needed a serialised story to carry audiences through the series. But The Turkish Detective could never be just a serialised story, so a procedural element was introduced, with the homicide solving four two-part mysteries across eight episodes.

“Then it was really tricky because you have your main case, and as soon as you have one of your protagonists go off and investigate something else, you’re inviting the audience to think the main case isn’t as interesting or isn’t as important, and we didn’t want that at all,” Schiffer notes. “So that’s a challenge. Then you’ve also got a challenge where he’s got to do something covert and not be noticed. That’s also difficult.”

Developing the series, Schiffer got a crash course in Turkish life as he sought to pair British screenwriting sensibilities with the language, culture and customs of Istanbul. He worked with a Turkish creative consultant, Binnur Karaevli, during the show’s 12-week writers room to ensure the characters and storylines were as realistic and authentic as possible.

One example comes in episode two, when Inspector Ikmen walks into a house and takes his shoes off to reveal a pair of colourful socks. It might be a small detail, “but I think people appreciate it because that isn’t necessarily a British custom. In a place like Turkey, if you walk into someone’s house, you have to take your shoes off.”

Though the series is made by a Turkish production company, the filming schedule also mirrored that of a British production, rather than the way a Turkish series or one of the country’s hugely popular soap operas – which can record around nine hours of footage a week – might be made.

“That’s so foreign to anything we do. To make nine hours of TV a week is crazy,” Schiffer exclaims. “We had a cast where a lot of them were used to working in that way, so at first they found what we were doing frustratingly slow. They were like, ‘What’s going on?’ And then eventually, our British producer, Matthew Bird, took Haluk aside and said, ‘Just think of it like we’re making a movie.’ He was like, ‘OK, I get it’ because he’s done Hollywood films. But his expectation of television would be like, ‘Just shoot it. Just stick the camera in front of me and we’ll just go.’”

Making The Turkish Detective was a far cry from writing for Skins, the youth drama that debuted on E4 in 2007. Following the highs and lows in the lives of a group of teenagers, its storylines covered subjects including family, mental health, eating disorders, sexuality, drug use and bullying.

Schiffer wrote on the first four seasons and describes working on the series as “one of the greatest experiences of my life.” But back then, he could have had no idea of the impact the show would go on to have.

“It’s just really amazing to suddenly be a part of something that most people remember,” he says. “When I get into a cab and somebody asks me what I do and they say, ‘Have you done anything I would have heard of?’, I just mention that and they have always heard of it.”

Before then, Schiffer had written a play that was performed at the Edinburgh Festival, and a short film that aired on the BBC as part of its Brief Encounters anthology series in 2006.

“Then you’re given this massive responsibility [on Skins] and put through this incredible, difficult process of writing television, and the showrunner of that, Bryan Elsley, was a massive inspiration,” he adds. “He really taught me and loads of other people our craft and was really nurturing. It was a great experience.”

The launch of The Turkish Detective has now proven to be particularly timely as audiences and broadcasters gravitate back towards long-running procedural series that offer a sense of familiarity and comfort after a decade when they fell out of the spotlight in favour of prestige limited dramas.

Schiffer also points to the fact the series airs in English and Turkish as evidence that audiences are much more comfortable with watching non-English-language programmes.

“I was tearing my hair out for about six months about the question of how we were going to deal with the language. We had to get that right and we came up with three or four different ways of doing it,” says the writer, who at one point suggested following in the footsteps of Wallander, the Kenneth Branagh-led remake of the Swedish crime drama, which was filmed in Sweden but with all the dialogue in English.

“We’ve got this amazing, very current advantage where we have something that does in some ways subscribe to the archetypal TV shows people have grown up with and are comfortable with – but it has this exciting and interesting twist. And the thing about Istanbul as a backdrop is it’s like going on holiday with your eyes, and that’s really valuable.

“You have to think about your audience that way, to consider where they are, what they’re doing, and often they’re in their front room and maybe they’re folding their laundry and it’s raining outside and they’ve had a crap day at work,” he adds. “Looking at somewhere beautiful and sunny, that’s nice. That’s appealing. Then it’s about telling good stories and having great characters.”

tagged in: Ay Yapim, BBC, Ben Schiffer, Paramount Global Content Distribution, Skins, The Turkish Detective