‘True Detective’, ‘Extraordinary’ & ‘Faithless’ Scribes Talk Challenges In Writing Returnable TV As Inaugural Screenwriting Fest Storyhouse Kicks Off In Dublin

Diana Lodderhose
·4 min read
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When it comes to keeping the momentum for storytelling, writers from hit shows such as True Detective: Night Country, Irish hit dramedy Faithless and British superhero comedy Extraordinary all have different approaches for making returnable television series.

Speaking at the inaugural screenwriting festival Storyhouse in Dublin, Irish writer-actor and presenter Baz Ashmawy spoke about his debut writing project Faithless, a six-part series for Virgin Media, which follows an Irish-Egyptian dad who is presented with the life-changing responsibility of raising his three young daughters alone.

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“I was more clear on the tone of it because I saw a gap in Irish shows that were either sitcoms pre watershed or crime dramas,” said Ashmawy to a packed theatre at Dublin’s Light House cinema. “I saw there was a hole for dramedy – to make someone laugh one minute and then upset them in the next scene. I’ve always found that playing with the emotion from laughing one moment to receiving poignancy, it loses its ick when it’s mixed with comedy.”

Namsi Khan, a prolific writer who has worked across projects such as the latest series of True Detective, Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror and an earlier iteration of the yet-to-be produced season two of The Night Manager, spoke about her experiences in the writers’ room and working with established material at different stages.

With Black Mirror, Khan said Brooker has “such an incredible mind” and “strong voice” and in the writers’ room they were given pages of ideas that were “loosely put together.”

“Charlie is so prolific, and he generates ideas like a machine and he had like ten or fifteen ideas that he wanted to put through the season,” she said. “He wanted to sit with us and interrogate them and build them and question them. That experience was quite a different animal than compared to, for example, The Night Manager, where we’ve already seen one season done so well and it was based on a book by John LeCarre, which is a very loved book. There’s no part two of the book so there was no real creative sense in having a season two but there was a commercial sense. In that case, we tried for a long time to break season two of that, but we had no literature, and it was trying to find John LeCarre’s voice in a story that he’d finished writing.”

On working with Issa Lopez for True Detective: Night Country, Khan says that HBO gave the writers a lot of freedom to play with the material and, given Lopez’s background in horror with projects such as Tigers Are Not Afraid, they were able to push the boundaries of the True Detective genre.

“Issa is a lover of horror and she wanted to break some of the rules of the thriller genre and make the antagonists potentially be supernatural so it became about how far we could push against what the true parameters of what True Detective is,” said Khan. “When we got there, it was quite a linear process.”

Khan added that the experience was a “interesting intellectual exercise.” “We had the freedom to go big and you come up with these really whacky ideas and you have to kind of rein yourself in.”

Emma Moran, creator and writer of British superhero series Extraordinary, credited her producers at Sid Gentle Films as giving her the room to change and take risks on the script of her series.

“The show moves quite fast it’s quite whimsical, but we’ve always been very grounded to the emotional arcs of the characters, which are really solid through this chaotic process,” said Moran. “I think if you’ve got that grounding, I think you can indulge in a bit of wandering.”

Storyhouse kicked off its two-day event in Dublin on Thursday afternoon to much fanfare from audience members and speakers alike. The event, which is the brainchild of Poor Things production and distribution powerhouse Element Pictures, is aiming to celebrate storytellers and writers in the Irish capital.

“We just thought that having an event that focuses on the art and craft of screenwriting and storytelling and explores talk about it in all forms would be a great idea for us here in Ireland because there is such a rich heritage here,” said Guiney. “There are lots of good projects and developing projects but sometimes they don’t realise that the theoretical – the idea of hearing directly from people about their experiences will probably be inspiring to all of us and will empower and embolden others.”

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