Hello friends. I hope you find this show entertaining. I spent three long years developing it from Sarah’s wonderful book. I get asked a lot by my screenwriting students how we develop shows in the UK, so I’ll try and give you a rundown.
Development was, as always, a lengthy, thankless & exhausting process. Creating and writing a show is a pretty solitary occupation in the UK. Even so, no one likes development. It’s the worst part: you are underpaid and overworked and not sure if all the hard (mainly uncompensated) work is going to pay off. Once we sell a show in the US, it becomes more collaborative and more writers get involved. Not so in London. It’s just you and a 6am zoom with producers, aside from a few office days, also with producers. That’s pretty much how it goes for three years.
When I pitched for the job, it was at the tail end of the pandemic. I was a broke single mom, working multiple shit jobs, writing and home schooling. I wrote the pitch, the treatment, the Bible and the pilot in 2021/2. I then wrote the second episode, ran the writer’s room, rewrote 1&2 multiple times, wrote episode 3 and 4 back to back, rewrote these four scripts a bunch, and then stepped in to write first drafts of the final two episodes over Christmas 2023/24.
I was insistent from day one that I wanted to develop the book into six episodes, and not, as everyone expected, half the amount. I believed the challenge of bringing the story to life was ensuring our audience were invested in Jess and Liz, and had enough screen time with them to empathize with them both. 4x1 would have had a different impact to 6x45. Better or not - who knows?! I just know that six episodes employed a lot more people, and as a union girl, sometimes that’s enough justification.
We had a very small writers room for a couple of weeks in a baking hot June 2023 to generate character and plot beats. I was lucky enough to work with some very talented female writers there, as well as a fantastic writers assistant, the smart and talented Izzy who was with this show from day 1. The show was really championed by Marianna, one of the producers, who was relentless about getting it out to the wider world after she optioned the book.
I worked really hard to honour and stay faithful to Sarah’s writing. I wanted Sarah to recognize her dialogue and characters, and feel like the show was building on, expanding and deepening the book, not reinventing it. I am inordinately sad I could not rescue the stag scene which was one of my favorite scenes from the book. No one, I was told, would have a trained stag and they could not justify the VFX budget.
I had this idea of Jess’s house becoming her own personal house of horrors: the domestic taking on a significance that was eerie and frightening. Kudos to ‘The Crown’s’ Meriel Sheibani Clare for some completely banging ideas in the writers room to inspire this. To balance the terror of Jess’s mind which was an incredibly dark place to inhabit, we needed some comedy from Charlotte, Mel and the lovely Andrew.
The trailer features the first scene I ever wrote about Jess. Surrounded by family chaos, looking beautiful and perfect, but staring directly at us. Her eyes are the only opaque window into what lies beneath the surface.
Episodes 1-4, from what I can tell from the scripts, have remained pretty much the same with some dialogue changes and a couple of new scenes I did not write. 5, but more so, 6 have very little resemblance to the drafts I sketched out in a tiny room in Mexico over Christmas 2023, trying to keep my son entertained in between marathon writing sessions. After I left the project eight weeks before principal photography, Mel’s partner, Rob, took a very different direction which will be interesting to watch.
Most of my lifelong work aims to examine and destigmatize issues such as power, mental illness, systemic inequality - and the ways in which women are disproportionately punished, pathologized and vilified for behavior which is, conversely, rewarded in men. This show follows that theme, in more ways than one.
There is very little feminism in our industry. We need more of it.
I was not involved with the production in any way, so have no knowledge of how my three years of work, and the two months I was not involved, translated to the screen. The images in the trailer look dreamy and the opening scene is just how I imagined when I wrote it way back in 2021. As I’m in the US, you will watch this before me! I’ll be interested to hear your thoughts.
I wish my Dad was still alive to see this. He probably would have hated it. He spent most of 2021 telling me how the incredible Maxine Peake was a “bloody socialist”. My Dad was the ultimate Hate Watcher. He lived for a good moan. I miss the stubborn old git everyday.
Much love from a dark editing bay somewhere in LA,
Ruth x
I’d like to thank The Royal Literary Fund for supporting me throughout 2024. The work they do is crucial, important, and often lifesaving.