THE WHODUNNIT BROTHERS
The siblings behind TV hit The Missing have written two new thrillers — and they’re BOTH being shown at 9pm on Monday . . . one on ITV, the other on BBC. So which will YOU watch?
Wherever you turn on Monday night, another major crime serial from the creators of The Missing is commanding the Tv schedules.
In an unprecedented head-to-head, both ITv and BBC1 are launching new dramas by brothers Jack and harry Williams at 9pm.
On ITv, Joanne Froggatt and Ioan Gruffudd are thrown into life-or-death conflict after a one-night stand spins out of control, in Liar.
And on the BBC, it’s rellik, starring richard Dormer as a detective left scarred inside and out by the toughest investigation of his life. The series traces the crime in reverse, from its conclusion to the very start, uncovering the mesh of motives.
This promises to be a battle royale. The Missing proved one of the Tv phenomena of the decade, with audiences of up to nine million wrestling with the fiendish clues, the details hidden in dialogue and even in the title sequences. Both series featured outstanding casts including James Nesbitt, Keeley hawes and David Morrissey.
‘When we heard our two new drama serials were to be broadcast simultaneously on the same day and at the same time on BBC1 and ITv, we were astounded,’ says harry Williams.
The brothers grew up in Putney, South-West London. Their father is writer Nigel Williams, who had global success with the award-winning 2005 Tv mini- series elizabeth I, starring helen Mirren.
Their mother, Suzan harrison, is a Tv producer who has worked on George Gently and Wild At heart, and their older brother Ned, 40, is a Tv director on Grand Designs.
‘In our house everyone talked about books and stories the whole time,’ says Jack, at 38 two years older than harry. ‘It made the idea of writing feel like it was something anyone could do.’
Jack originally worked at a Tv production company as a script editor. ‘I decided maybe writing Tv would be better than the novels I couldn’t sell,’ he says. ‘When I was 25 I wrote a comedy drama which was turned into a BBC sitcom. It wasn’t good but it’s how I started.’
harry was an actor before turning to comedy. ‘As Jack and I worked on sitcoms separately, we increasingly found ourselves asking each other’s opinion and advice and ended up writing drama together.’
They say being brothers is an advantage when it comes to writing because they understand each other so well — and it’s easier to be blunt about one another’s ideas.
Jack is married to lawyer wife Jenna and they have two children, while harry lives with his girlfriend Antigone.
One of their greatest pleasures is to read all the viewers’ theories as they try to guess the plot.
But which show to watch? here, exclusively, JACK AND hArry WILLIAMS help you decide. Be sure to record the other side, though...
LIAR WHAT’S THE STORY?
TWO single people go on a date. They share dinner and drinks, and end up in bed. In the morning, the woman wakes up quite certain the man sexually assaulted her... but the man insists it was consensual.
As the police investigation gets under way, the facts seem to swing back and forth like a pendulum. We want the audience to feel they can’t be sure, that they don’t know where their sympathies lie.
At first, viewers will want to side with Laura, a teacher who has recently left a long-term relationship. But her date, Andrew, is extremely convincing — and not just because he’s a top surgeon.
It’s all about how our perceptions can change, influenced by nothing more than one new fact or the way somebody phrases a sentence.
We also wanted to explore what happens when two people tell conflicting stories, perhaps because they have genuinely different memories of what happened. JOANNe FrOGGATT plays Laura, and she was absolutely our first choice. She’s fantastic. She played Anna Bates, the lady’s maid in Downton, a character who was the victim of a sexual assault.
Because of her work on Downton, Joanne had already done a lot of research into the psychological effects of these kinds of incidents. She didn’t want to tread over old ground. But we were quickly able to convince her that Liar is a very different narrative: it’s about consent, and how two people can have opposite perspectives.
We were also very lucky to get Ioan Gruffudd, a hollywood star from films such as Fantastic Four, who is ideal for the role because he has the surgeon’s glamour and charisma.
Because the style of Liar is very visual, driven by the way people look and react rather than by dialogue, we had to do a lot of rehearsals.
The cast went through all the scripts before shooting began, so they all knew how the story would end. That was important because it affected the way their characters behaved: they knew exactly when they were lying. That transmits itself to the viewers, and it was interesting to watch how the slightest nuance could shift your opinion as to whether someone was lying.
WHERE IT’S SET
LIAr was filmed along the Kent coast, especially in Deal.
But the recurring image is of the marshland along the Tollesbury estuary in essex. The waterways there fill up in just a few minutes, and as the tide rises they create a complex pathway of islands that, shot from above by a camera drone, looks like the neural network of a human brain.
We sent Laura kayaking through those streamlets, which created a great visual image.
WHY WE’RE EXCITED
ThIS is something new for us — a straightforward linear plot (well, mostly). There is virtually no evidence and viewers will have to decide whether a crime has even been committed.
The clues are just hints. This is about intuition, not DNA and forensics. It’s one person’s word against another’s.
But it’s not an issue-led drama. It’s a psychological thriller, and the drama comes from the fact that both Laura and Andrew are ‘alpha’ personalities, stuck in this battle. right from the opening scene, we see she’s a driven character. She gets up at 5am to go kayaking alone — and when a man speaks to her in a patronising way, she immediately takes him up on it.
Andrew, too, has a high-status job and he’s an achiever. After he was widowed, he brought up his son alone, and it’s obvious he has a great relationship with the boy. All this and he’s a surgeon, too.
So both of them are passionate, determined people with complete confidence in their own viewpoint and memories. Neither is about to back down and apologise: instead, the repercussions spiral higher.
RELLIK WHAT’S THE STORY?
reLLIK is Killer, spelt backwards. And that’s the clue to decoding this show — everything is in reverse, including the sequence of events.
This is the story of a man whose life was ripped apart by the hunt for
WHO ARE THE STARS?
a serial killer. What Rellik asks is: how did he get to this point?
As it begins, we can hear the sound of a 24-hour news channel — all the talk is of a man shot dead by police. It’s the middle of the night and the whole scene is heavy with foreboding.
Before the camera even focuses properly, viewers will know something is very wrong.
Then the film starts to flow backwards, leaping ten- and- a- half hours to the previous afternoon. There’s a man walking his dog in the park, and another guy who seems extremely agitated. That’s when things start to unravel.
In the meantime, we have glimpsed the face of the hero — and it is painfully scarred. His name is Gabriel Markham, a detective chief inspector, the victim of a recent acid attack. He is trying to find the person who did this to him and it quickly becomes likely that it was the serial killer.
In the first episode there are four or five rewinds, which take us from the morning of the arrest back to the discovery of the most recent body. As the series continues, we go further back, exploring everything that happened and why. In a key scene, Gabriel (Richard Dormer) explains that nothing in life makes sense until you know the motives for what people do.
This isn’t really a whodunnit, it’s a whydunnit. In going back in time we aim to find the motive — the things that shaped the events to come, and get to the heart of the mystery. RIcHARD DoRMeR was our preferred choice for the part of detective Gabriel Markham.
Markham is a complex, intense person. He’s a loner, though there are aspects of his private life that will surprise people. And his injuries have left him uncomfortable in society as people openly stare at or recoil from him.
We see him early on in moments of pain —he hides it from the world, but alone in front of a mirror all his vulnerabilities are laid bare.
To portray all that was going to take a special kind of actor. We wanted to use someone who isn’t known only for one particular role — a character actor, in other words. And Richard is the essence of a character actor, because he completely inhabits a role. He was Sheriff Dan Anderssen in Fortitude, and Beric Dondarrion, the warrior with the flaming sword, in Game of Thrones.
our director, Sam Miller, had worked with him on Fortitude and, like us, was very keen to hire him. At first Richard said he was too tired to do it, and it’s true this would be an exhausting challenge for any actor: when we meet DcI Markham he is badly traumatised, and we trace that damage back to its origins. That’s daunting.
opposite him we cast Jodi Balfour as DI elaine Shepard. She’s known for her role in the series Quarry, as the wife of a Vietnam vet, and will soon be Jackie Kennedy in the new series of The crown on Netflix. Her character is embroiled with Markham but it’s hard to tell at first what their relationship is.
The other characters include Paterson Joseph as a creepy psychologist who can’t sit down without wiping the chair with disinfectant first, and Michael Shaeffer as a family man who is wanted by police for murder. THe show is set on the eastern outskirts of London and the backdrop feels industrial: garages, train depots, concrete spaces, high-rise flats and neon-lit corridors. It’s a man-made environment that feels claustrophobic and stressful.
Richard Dormer plays the role with his native Northern Irish accent, which subtly plays into his role as outsider.
WHO ARE THE STARS? WHERE IT’S SET WHY WE’RE EXCITED
We cAMe up with the idea for Rellik — of tracing a crime from the end to the beginning — when we were working on the first series of The Missing in 2014.
It took a long time to figure out how to tell a story in this way, but eventually we found a way to make it work. We haven’t been working on it feverishly for three whole years: we’d write a bit, put it away and come back to it.
Because it’s a story that’s told backwards, it dispenses with all the usual requirements, such as consequences. People don’t learn from their actions because we keep going back in time. But that doesn’t mean we don’t learn about our characters as the show unfolds — or that there aren’t plenty of twists and turns along the way.
WHAT’S NEXT
We’Re shooting an eight-part drama early next year in South Africa, set in the Democratic Republic of congo. It’s the first time we’ve worked in Africa.
Although there are no plans for a third series of The Missing, we really do want to return to the character of Julien Baptiste. The last time we saw him, he was about to undergo life-or-death surgery.
We love working with Tcheky Karyo (Baptiste) and we’ve got a few ideas. Now all we have to do is turn them into a TV script — and persuade them to make it.
Liar, on ITV, and Rellik, on BBC One, are both at 9pm on Monday.