INTERVIEW: On eve of series 4 finale, Chris Lang shares insights on his ‘Unforgotten’ journey
Photo: Sanjeev Bhaskar and Nicola Walker star in Unforgotten, a show created by Chris Lang. Photo courtesy of Courtesy of Mainstreet Pictures LTD / Provided by press site with permission.
Unforgotten, the much-heralded British show that is currently running on PBS, stars Nicola Walker as DCI Cassie Stuart and Sanjeev Bhaskar as DI Sunny Khan. Together they set out to solve cold cases in the United Kingdom, striving to connect the dots, find the truth and provide some form of closure to the victims’ families. It’s a dark show about family, memory, partnership, police and society, and it has become a bonafide hit in the UK and on the Masterpiece program on PBS in the United States.
Series 4 — what Americans would call season 4 — wraps up Sunday, Aug. 15 at 9 p.m. For Chris Lang, the show’s creator and writer, there has not been much of a break between series 4 and his work on series 5, which has already begun. However, some personal circumstances have recently sidelined him, and it’s a personal circumstance millions of people around the world can identify with.
“I came out of an edit, which was quite a fraught one, and my mind was worrying of the edit,” Lang said in a recent Zoom interview. “But also my mind was a bit foggy, and now I know. The next day I tested positive for coronavirus. … It’s like having a really unpleasant cold, but it’s been quite inconvenient in many, many, many ways. I’ve just canceled a holiday today.”
As Lang makes a full recovery, he has a lot that can distract him. He said he is currently working on the scripts for series 5 of Unforgotten, and no doubt he is delighted to hear of the continued high ratings and critical praise for series 4. The fan reactions to the show has catapulted the murder mystery to great heights, and luckily, Lang has met that fervent applause with new and creative ideas each time the cameras start rolling again.
“I have to wait until I know I have another story to tell, and that doesn’t always suggest itself automatically,” Lang said about his process. “I knew that I had a fifth series. I can’t remember if I knew I had a fourth series, but there comes this moment where you suddenly go, ah, I know what it is. And it could be halfway through shooting the previous show, or two or three ideas come at one moment. So it’s a mixed bag of emotions when you get the green light. You certainly feel very excited, but it’s a huge amount of trepidation as well because miraculously we seem to have outdone ourselves each series and upped the ante. Obviously you don’t want to go backward and start making something that feels in any way overly formulaic or repetitive, so yeah it’s a mixed feeling, mixed emotions.”
When he created Unforgotten, the concept came first. He was interested in exploring the gap between a horrible crime and a cold-case investigation many years later. At its heart, the show is an examination of lives lived and the dismantling of nefarious acts — all achieved via tough, painstaking police work.
“So that was where I thought the interesting, dramatic territory lay because you had 20, 30, 40 years sometimes of edifice built by the antagonists dismantled, which is really interesting dramatic territory, and then you think who’s going to navigate through that investigation,” he said. “I knew the lead was always going to be a woman, and I knew, or I hoped, it was going to be Nicola Walker because I worked with her twice before. … I just love her as an actress, so I started writing it with her in mind and then approached her. Luckily she said yes, and Sanj was very early on in my mind when I was writing [for] the character of Sunny. Again you just pray and hope that when you offer it to them, they’re as excited by it as you are. They were.”
Those initial scripts have blossomed into a television journey of more than seven years, along with two actors at the helm who have grown into their characters and taken on a handful of impactful cases. Lang has been impressed by how Walker and Bhaskar have carved out their respective characters, and he is amazed that sometimes the actors know more about the roles than even he does.
“Sanj is an actor who loves to engage,” Lang said. “He’s a writer as well. He loves to engage in that process, so we often have discussions when he reads the first drafts. He’ll have thoughts and questions, and they’re always useful and helpful because he has an insight into the character and playing him that is slightly different to mine. That’s really healthy, and I love that part of the process.”
Also helping with the construction of the stories is a police adviser, who is on call just about 24 hours per day. Until recently, this adviser had been a homicide detective in the British police force, and he also served in this advisory role for the show Line of Duty. Lang relies on the adviser’s expertise to fill in the blanks and help with the details.
“He’s brilliant, and I’m constantly at all hours of the day firing him the most absurd questions,” Lang said. “Lucky his wife is a pathologist, so she should not be dismayed or upset by any of the emails that he gets from me, asking sometimes the most gruesome questions. She quite often chips in and answers them for me, so yeah I think Unforgotten is very procedurally accurate, not to the point of pedantry or boredom. But I like to know that the process is correct because I think it’s interesting to an audience. I think seeing how something is done for real in a police investigation like this is interesting to the audience, and that’s borne out by the reaction. I also get a lot of communication from police officers on social media who’ve worked in murder squads who very frequently say that this is about as accurate as it gets. It’s the the methodical, slow nature of an investigation and the endless dead ends and the leads that don’t go anywhere. That kind of shoe leather, that just constantly churning over the material, going over it, they said that’s what it feels like. It has pace, but it’s not a fast-moving show. It’s much more about the slow, dogged pursuits of justice.”
Beyond the police work, Unforgotten also holds up a mirror to British society and global issues, Lang said. There are themes of compassion and also the lack of compassion. There are discussions on race, discrimination and how they relate to the police force. Of course, conflicted relationships and families take center stage as well.
“That’s part of the reason why it’s succeeded across the globe because the stories are big, and they resonate,” Lang said. “And they absolutely are holding up a mirror to society, and that was absolutely my intention, for the tone to be political, with a small ‘p,’ and I’ll continue to do that even more so in series 5 because it adds muscularity to the themes and to the characters if you can provoke your audience into thinking about how we live. Are we making the steps? Are we going down a dangerous route, which we undoubtedly, clearly across the globe are. It asks those questions. It doesn’t seek to provide answers. That’s for the audience to do, but it definitely asks those questions.”
Amazingly, Unforgotten has been completely consistent with Lang as the writer and Andy Wilson the director of each and every episode. Lang called this a rare privilege in the television business, especially in British television. This consistency has allowed Lang and Wilson to build a solid relationship and develop a shorthand with each other.
“It’s a bit like a marriage,” admitted Lang, who also wrote Innocent, The Hookup Plan and Dark Heart for TV. “It’s interesting to see how it has evolved and how we have grown to trust one another. We started out not really knowing each other, other than meeting in an interview situation. … We had to find our way through that first series with different views and different points, and we clashed a few times. We just began to understand how the other worked, and it’s a really rare privilege because generally it’s the desire in this business to always try something new. All right, Andy did the first series, let’s try a different director and see what they do with it. We thought, you know what, it actually worked. Why don’t we try it again? I don’t think any of us, including Andy, ever thought in seven-eight years time we’d be making the fifth series, and he’d be still directing it. It’s been rather brilliant that it has turned out that way. There’s a shorthand. He gets me. I get him.”
Over the years, as Lang and the company continued on their journey, fans joined them as well — a lot of fans. Unforgotten saw a massive bump in viewership between series 3 and series 4 in the UK. Lang reported that on average 7 million people tuned in for the first three series, while series 4 nudged above 10 million. That’s an impressive number for modern-day television viewing.
“I think sometimes a show just finds its moment,” he said. “It hits its stride at a certain point, and I had a sort of inkling that it might. Because there had been such a large gap between series 3 and 4, of course by the pandemic and delay in filming, and also by availability to write it. It ended up being about two-and-a-half years between 3 and 4. What was interesting is that in that interim, it actually, suddenly started to gain huge traction on Netflix. It went on Amazon Prime, in the States on PBS, and various other channels in Australia and the rest of Europe. It started to gain this whole other audience, and then the pandemic happened. People would sit down and watch TV, and then a whole new audience were finding it. I was seeing this on social media for the whole of 2020 as we were on hiatus. People just started talking about it.”
For American viewers, the show presents a chance to explore different geographical areas of the UK, and it helps that Lang sets each series in different locations — locations that he said are aesthetically beautiful and visually interesting, but still hiding some darkness.
“I think a foreign audience always likes to, by proxy, explore in the same way that I absolutely love watching a show like True Detective or something where you’re seeing a part of America, going into the heartlands and getting a real sense and flavor of what it feels like to live in that part of the world,” he said. “I suspect it’s something like that. We’ve got a huge tradition of detective stories from Agatha Christie and Sherlock Holmes, all the reinventions of those, so we come with a lot of tradition.”
So, how about series 5? Here’s what Lang had to say: “The scripts, I’m a long way down the line with them. I’ve been writing since we finished, since we broadcast series 4, so I’ve been writing five, six months solidly. And we go into pre-production in December, so we’ve got a three, four-month period where we start looking at casting and stuff. Then we actually start shooting in February, so it’ll go out probably September-ish of next year. … We’re a long way down the line.”
He added: “I always think this will be the last one because I haven’t got a good idea for the next one, and then something does crop up. … Truth is, if I keep coming up with good ideas, and I’ve got the energy, then I’ll keep doing it. Neither of those are givens.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Unforgotten, created and written by Chris Lang, continues on Masterpiece on PBS Sunday, Aug. 15 at 9 p.m. Click here for more information.
