Original Coverage & Source Attribution: www.televisual.com
Adultery launches on ITVX this weekend. It stars Dominic Cooper and Romola Garai as the adulterers who share an immediate, intense connection.
Produced by Poison Pen Studios (part of ITV Studios), the drama’s writer and creator Danny Brocklehurst writes here about his inspiration, his approach to the story and considers how the show might ignite conversations.
When I wrote the first draft of the pilot episode of Adultery, it was under the title ‘Play With Fire’, as that’s exactly what the characters were doing and one of the themes of the show is whether you’re willing to ‘burn it all down’ in pursuit of something exciting and new.
I liked it as a title, but there is something so bold, so visceral about the word adultery – a biblical commandment, no less – that I decided to rename the series.
Adultery is one of the great enduring themes of literature, from Shakespeare to Madame Bovary, from Pinter to Picoult.
It creates a narrative conflict between personal desire and social obligation.The secrecy, guilt and betrayal inject tension, but more usefully, it can hold up a mirror to society and allow the story to be a trojan horse for other issues and themes.
In my ITV six part drama, the affair allows me to open a door to guilt, class, the effects of social media. Also, the way compassion fatigue can drain away love and the way our parents’ marriage can affect the way we ourselves behave in wedlock. It is a rich canvas.
The unique entry point to this story is the pure first love of two 16-year-olds: Ollie and Jess. They have been dating for months, but their respective sets of parents have yet to meet. So when Ollie’s mum Beth (Romola Garai) collides with Jessica’s dad, Tom (Dominic Cooper) on his bike, they meet in awkward circumstances, but their attraction is immediate. Neither were looking to start an affair, but as we peel away the layers of their lives and the lives of their partners, we try to understand the reasons behind their decision, and what they are putting at risk.
TV drama most commonly uses murder as a story engine because of the obvious jeopardy and the simplicity of it’s morality. With Adultery, I wanted to write a grown up drama where we didn’t play good guys and bad guys, where everything was a grey area. Where we tried to examine motivations and feelings and desires. Ask tough questions about whether putting your personal happiness first, even if that damages others, is ever acceptable.
Viewers will bring that own baggage to Adultery. It is a highly contentious subject. Some will instantly hate our adulterers. Others may be sympathetic, hopefully all will stay for the journey and possibly change their perspective as they head through through the series.
As I have been working on this drama, many people have asked me why I wanted to write it, as if I had some personal story I was burning to unload from my conscience. But the idea really came from what I see around me. Midlife crisis is nothing new, but in recent years, with social media fueling a culture of wellness, personal enhancement and individual happiness as the ultimate goal, there has become a mid life dissatisfaction in which more people than ever are looking at their lives, and asking ‘is this it?’ ‘Am I happy?’ ‘Is this enough?’
I wanted to examine adult lives in a propulsive drama, but without the need for a crime, a police detective or a thriller high concept.
It somehow feels like a rare beast. Six hours of character drama. Six hours to examine the complexity of long term marriage, and what it means when we step outside of ‘acceptable’.
The show will divide people, and I’m fine with that. That’s what drama should do. It might provoke conversation, it might make couples ask questions of each other. Adultery will always be a controversial subject. It’s consequences, are heartbreaking. It can ruin families, derailed childhoods and cause untold mess, but this is ultimately a story about families, about what happens to love and how, sometimes, without us looking, relationships drift to a place we never imagined they would go.
