"Reading Broadchurch" - Media Magazine article

Reading Broadchurch

Downton Abbey and now Broadchurch... That's two big heavyweight dramas which have consolidated ITV's status as the channel for drama and 'event TV'. Broadchurch was a murder mystery that kept nearly 10 million viewers guessing who killed 11-year-old Danny Latimer. It was a tense and beautifully shot series which unravelled slowly over two months. ITV claims it was the most tweeted TV drama ever. So, Jane Milton asks, how did ITV create the 'TV' event of the year?

If I think of 'event TV', I might consider the final of Britain's Got Talent, The X-Factor or the London Olympics 'Super Saturday' gold medal events last year - but ITV has just pulled off another success. This time it was the slow-burning series Broadchurch. ITV claims it was their most popular midweek drama hit for nearly a decade. Unusually, the one-murder narrative ran over eight weeks on a Monday night from 9pm to 10pm on ITV1. The finale, like most big events, kept the whole family glued to the TV box in the corner to find out who was the killer. Everybody was talking about the series, including many of my A2 students who are more used to the niche audience appeal of YouTube. So, it was an event, a 'watercooler' moment of 2013 that managed to seep into our consciousness and attract a mass audience.

Character driven

The talented scriptwriter behind the series was Chris Chibnall who first had the idea of Broadchurch ten years ago. He has a solid pedigree with writing credits for Law and Order UK, Torchwood and Doctor Who. But it was only after working unhappily in the US that he came back to the UK to resurrect it. He pitched his idea to the independent production house, Kudos (Life on Mars, Spooks, Hustle) who then took it to ITV. His idea for a project was

very cinematic, very image driven, in which it wouldn't just be about the dialogue.

Broadchurch would be character-driven, and each character would be affected following the murder. So Chibnall was keen to get a cast as good as Downton Abbey. Former Doctor Who star David Tennant and recent BAFTA-winner Olivia Coleman were signed up to play the mismatched cops hunting the child killer of Danny Latimer. Their central performances were excellent and ITV would have invested a lot of money to lure them on board. But it was not just the central characters who were good. The supporting cast was also impressive. In the first episode, Danny is found strangled on the beach. The Latimer family are devastated but immediately suspicion falls on the dead boy's father. However, over the next seven episodes, virtually every key character was feeling the pressure including a psychic phone engineer and a recovering alcoholic vicar (remember Rory from Doctor Who?...he's back again with a dog collar!).

Analysis

The idea that everyone in the community becomes a suspect is foregrounded through the opening tracking shot from Episode 1. The murdered boy's father walks along the street unaware that his son is dead; he has a friendly wave or subtle nod to most people he meets. The long shot lasts for about two minutes, and introduces us to the key characters. Chibnall noted:

The germ of it was a piece about a community... and a piece about a town - in fact, the town where I live in Dorset. But within that, I used the engine of a whodunit to take you through the people's lives.

Tracking shots are used again to great effect in Episode 1, when Danny's mother (Jodie Whittaker) realises that the police sirens could be linked to her son's failure to return. We see her running along the road, but she's captured in slow motion with horror etched over her face. Great drama puts us in her shoes. We start to imagine... what if?

Slow motion and high key lighting were regularly used to help produce compelling images of the location, a sleepy seaside town. The Jurassic Dorset coastline was the backdrop for the key characters as well as the shots for the opening and final credits. The landscapes were spectacular and breathtaking. The writer wanted to show that Danny's death had a devastating impact not only on his family but on the town as well. We usually associate the seaside with fun but here the focus was sadness and sorrow. This was also helped by the haunting music of the series which was the perfect complement to the stunning imagery.

Wanting more...

Event TV also means a great story which sustains and develops a loyal following and, of course, the writer also managed to create the perfect cliffhangers. Chibnall called it a 'gasp moment'. So why do we need them? The nature of commercial television means that he had to make viewers want to return after the advertising breaks, that is roughly every 11 to 12 minutes. Andrew Collins, the 'Telly Addict' TV critic at The Guardian described it similarly, as being 'aggressively plotted'; no mean feat for a Monday night!

Where was the BBC?

On the opening night of Broadchurch, BBC1 had started a similarly themed crime thriller called Mayday (made by the same production company, Kudos). Once again, a strong cast, mesmerising camerawork, clever marketing but the drama was stripped across a single week and despite the aggressive scheduling, the BBC drama failed to hit the peaks of Broadchurch. Perhaps this successful surge in ITV's drama output is down to their director of television, Peter Fincham, who arrived at the channel five years ago from the BBC. He has overseen the likes of Appropriate Adult (based on the Fred and Rosemary West murder case) and Mr Selfridge and believes that ITV1 must not be bland. He told The Guardian,

If you really want to broaden your audience then going for something in the middle won't do. You have got to be bold, go out on a limb, and people will come with you.

Marketing heaven

So, why else did we get hooked on Broadchurch? There's no doubt that ITV invested heavily in the marketing and promoting of this gripping drama. For the first time, I watched a Broadchurch trailer at the cinema. In fact, I saw it on three or four separate occasions. Such synergy was impressive. We also had the obligatory magazine, billboards, TV trailers, newspaper previews; and Tennant and Coleman were not just on the inside pages but on the front covers. This was a hard-hitting expensive campaign across all platforms and as the weeks went on, other characters from the drama appeared on the magazines; since it was so carefully plotted, it was impossible to be sure which of the principal characters were guilty before the final episode was shown. In fact, ITV refused to send out preview copies of the last episode to the press. The killer of Danny Latimer was being kept under wraps: only 29 people - cast and crew and some executives - knew the identity of the murderer before the final programme. No wonder thousands of people took to Twitter and other online forums to speculate, prompting a massive surge of interest in the show.

What's next?

That led to more than nine million viewers watching the final episode, and it didn't disappoint. The culprit was not hastily revealed five minutes before the end; no, it was a 'considered' finale with flashbacks used to show how the killer manipulated Danny and the town. At the end of the episode, Twitter and Facebook fans were offered the chance to see an exclusive scene and, ultimately, we were promised another series next year. But will it feature the same cast? We will have to wait and see. The writer Chris Chibnall has said it will be a very different story. What we do know is that with broadcasters increasingly turning to drama as a key part of their channel's identity, the importance of a hit such as Broadchurch cannot be overestimated. It will have generated millions in advertising revenue for the institution, more in DVD sales, is likely to sweep the board at awards time and may well be a global hit. The audience is beginning to see ITV not for just populist TV, but a brand for bold, artistic and distinctive home grown drama. It's not going to be an isolated 'event'.

Article Written By: Jane Milton

My thoughts

I found this to be an interesting article; it's interesting that the writer of the show intended it to be 'very cinematic and image-driven' which, indeed, is what the show is. The ideas about keeping the audience gripped through a series of cliff-hangers is also very interesting and relevant to my coursework.