This script has been lightly edited for clarity

This interview was recorded in June of 2023.

Jace Lacob: I’m Jace Lacob, and you’re listening to MASTERPIECE Studio.

Things are never quite at ease for either the detectives or suspects in Unforgotten. Time is of the essence in this gripping mystery drama, and as Episode four begins, Lord Anthony Hume’s cancer diagnosis has him up against the clock. Through a phone conversation with his doctor, we learn that the end is near. But he still needs more time… for… something…

CLIP

Hume: You said you’d find things. You said you’d research stuff.

Doctor: I said I’d do some digging and I have. But the reality is that—

Hume: Do you want more money?

Doctor: No, it’s not about the money Tony.

Hume: It’s always about the money.

Doctor: I’m sorry if I’ve given you false hope, but perhaps I should have—

And the clock continues to tick for the investigation as well. But what will it mean if DI Khan and DCI Jessica James can’t find a way to work together, even on the most basic of tasks? 

CLIP

Sunny: DCI James.

Jess: DI Khan. Sorry, hello.

Sunny: What happened? Where were you?

Jess: Where was I?

Sunny: The Zoom calls. About Joseph Bell.

Jess: Dammit. I, um, had some, um… Look, I’m really sorry.

Sunny: Could we just, um, talk in here for a moment?

Jess: Yeah.

And as Sunny and Jess’s professional relationship plunges to its lowest point yet, we’re given reason to believe that this new partnership might just work out after all. 

CLIP

Jess: So yeah, just so you know, this is not remotely who I am or how I work, you know, this last week or so, it’s not. So you know, I’m sorry. And of course we need to talk. So, send me the Zooms please, I really want to see them. And then let’s reset.

This week, creator Chris Lang joins the podcast to discuss how he threaded the needle between loss, grief, and hope in this new season of Unforgotten. 

Jace Lacob: This week we are joined by Unforgotten creator Chris Lang. Welcome.

Chris Lang: Hi how are you?

Jace Lacob: I’m good. How are you doing, Chris?

Chris Lang: Very good, thank you.

Jace Lacob: We are past the halfway point of Unforgotten this series, now, and as usual, the twists are mounting and the connections between the characters are becoming clearer. There’s a lot at play this series in terms of privilege, generational trauma, inequality, the dangers of austerity. What themes were you looking to explore in series five?

Chris Lang: I started with the notion of trying to understand and interrogate the effect that the political decision we call in this country austerity had had on the country, obviously on a generalized level, but then applying it to specific people. And that was my first primary theme.

And then as you say, I wanted to explore how trauma is passed down through the generations. It’s a sort of theme that I’ve touched on before, but never as fully as I did in this series. And Unforgotten is this format that allows you to do that because you just have this canvas, which is big and can accommodate a story that takes place over 60 or 70 years effortlessly. It’s a format that’s constructed almost entirely to allow you to do that. And that’s very liberating really, because the tragedies that happen in Unforgotten, which generally tend to end in murder are born often over a period of many years, sometimes decades before. They are the result of years and years and years of dysfunction.

It’s funny, I was working on another project and someone sent me an Agatha Christie quote. She said this in 1944, “I like a good detective story, but you know, they begin in the wrong place. They begin with the murder, but the murder is the end. The story begins long before that, years before sometimes with all the causes and events that bring certain people to a certain place at a certain time on a certain day, zero hour.” And in a way, that kind of sums up Unforgotten as well. And we have the canvas that is not just several years before, sometimes it’s decades before, that sort of lead up to this tragedy. I wanted to explore generational trauma as set against the backdrop of a very traumatic political decision in this country.

Jace Lacob: Leapfrogging off of that Agatha Christie quote, which is perfectly apropos, Unforgotten always has this fantastic web of suspects, some of whom are deeply involved or compromised, complicit, or connected to the crime, or who are just swept up in the investigation. In terms of breaking these stories, how do you decide who to focus on and when?

Chris Lang: It’s a very evolutionary process, an iterative process. When I’m looking at a theme, I kind of will break it down into areas, sub areas, sub themes, which I want to explore. Then I look at who might be most interesting to inhabit the world that that theme would organically sit within.

So I just start with that—breaking down the theme. For instance, if you’re looking at austerity, then you want to maybe be looking at what areas of British socio-political life might have been most affected by the huge cuts in public services that the country underwent over a period of 10 years. And so that then to a degree, defines what sorts of people you are going to be looking at. And then I obviously had to ally that to the notion of connecting it to a family, a single family.

So it’s a bit of give and take. You think, okay, I’m maybe going to pull focus on this area, maybe mental health and how that has been decimated, the public investment in that, so therefore, what sort of character might I be looking at? Would that be one of the younger generation in this family or one of the older? So that’s how it kind of works and I go back and forth between those two imperatives until I sort of solidify something. And that might take a month or so where I’m just playing around with the ideas and it’s incredibly messy and makes my head hurt.

Jace Lacob: Unforgotten is set in our world. It’s a world in which there’s been an ongoing Covid 19 pandemic.

Chris Lang: Yeah.

Jace Lacob: There are multiple references early on to the pandemic—property developers going bankrupt, a lawyer’s colleague having died from Covid. Why was it important that Unforgotten reference Covid, and how delicately did you work to thread that needle?

Chris Lang: You know, I don’t think there is a massive appetite to really watch a drama that focuses on it primarily. But you can’t write a story which tells anything about what’s happened in the last, obviously in this series in the last 10 years, but really a lot of focus is around the last two or three years, you can’t write something without referencing what happened. Otherwise, it would be really obtuse, I think.

So, you have to keep mentioning it, but hope that it’s not in too much detail because I just don’t think there’s an appetite for it. I think we lived it enough. It’s still so present in all of our lives. It’s still such an important thing. It’s mentioned maybe every other day you say something, oh, do you remember in lockdown when? So I think if you’re trying to tell a story and make it feel real, I think that’s how people talk.

Jace Lacob: I agree with that. And there is this palpable sense of loss running through these episodes.

Chris Lang: Yeah.

Jace Lacob: Part of that is Nicola Walker’s departure and Cassie’s death, which sort of hangs over everything. Coming out of those lockdowns in an era of disconnection, that sense of loss really does feel raw. How challenging were these episodes to write, given that permeation of grief that runs throughout these?

Chris Lang: I didn’t find it challenging, not in a difficult way. I loved what it allowed me to do, which was take the audience on exactly the same journey as the characters. And I thought that was the best way and the right way to help them over the hurdle of losing a person/character that they loved.

And so, it just felt entirely organically right that the characters within the story were going through exactly the same thing as the people watching it were, the audience were. And that helped the audience hugely, I think, because they went, oh, they’re grieving as well, like I am. And they didn’t feel excluded from that then. They thought, oh, it’s okay to say we really miss Cassie. We really miss her and we resent this new person because they clearly, the characters, Sunny and the team, they’re all going through exactly the same thing.

And so it was a real opportunity to explore the depths of grief and how long it lasts and how messy it is, and how there’s no real pattern often to it and how it doesn’t go in those, whatever it is, those seven stages of grief. Those will all appear at one time or another, but they dart around. One day you’re angry and then you’ve accepted it, and then the next day you’re angry again. So it was a really enjoyable challenge to take the characters and then the audience on that journey.

It’s always edifying to watch the audience on Twitter following the show, watching it as it goes out, because I can see whether or not I’ve successfully navigated that journey for them because I can see what they’re saying about the show as it goes out. And a lot of resentment in the first episode, second episode. And then I began to sense some slowly softening towards Sinéad and to Jess the new character and going, oh, well she’s going through some crap herself so that’s why she’s so brittle. And then by the time they got to that scene at the end of episode four they were all in. And it was incredibly satisfying to watch that. That’s exactly what I hoped would happen, and it did.

Jace Lacob: I will fully admit Chris, hand on heart, I didn’t know whether you’d be able to pull off a new partner for Sunny because he and Cassie were so perfect together. But Sinéad is so great as Jessie James, and because, as you say, the show doesn’t let the audience off the hook, it doesn’t make it easy, it does feel truly earned when they get to a place where they’re okay.

Chris Lang: Yeah.

Jace Lacob: Is it true that you had a short list of one for Jessie James, that being Sinéad?

Chris Lang: Well, she was at the top of the list, but we could never have only gone into the network with one name. So we went in with three, all of whom we interviewed, but she was always the top of the list and she totally delivered in the audition, as I knew she would. I’d wanted to work with her for years, since I saw her on a show in the UK called Little Boy Blue, which was a true life story. It was the first time I’d really become aware of her work. And I thought, I’ve got to work with that woman one day. As soon as I knew that Nicola was leaving, she just hoved into my mind and I kind of wrote it for her really.

She was reluctant to read for it because I think she felt it was too hard a job to step into those shoes because Nicola’s work on Cassie, and her creation of that character was so loved. And I think she thought that the shoes were really big to fill. And she said “No” to her agent when we approached her about it. And her agent said, just read the script, please. So she read it and then she enjoyed the script and said, okay, well I’ll come in to read, but they won’t want to give it to me. And, yeah, we did.

And she was just brilliant. And she was one of those actors that you know, you can adore an actor and you can know that they’re brilliant, but until you see the first set of rushes you never know whether it’s going to work because it’s an alchemy and lots of things have to come together. As soon as I saw my first set of rushes of her on her first day of shooting, literally, every single ounce of tension went out of me because she was just in it right from the word “go”, and she never left. And I didn’t even have to watch a lot of her rushes. I’d watch them just checking that all the lines were right and everything, but the performance was always, every single take you could have used because she’s so good.

MIDROLL

Jace Lacob: We meet DCI Jessie James in episode one, 54 minutes before she starts her first morning on the job having the worst day of her life. Why was it important to you that we meet Jess at perhaps her worst rather than her best?

Chris Lang: Because structurally, mechanically, I wanted to exacerbate the difficulty of what she was already doing. And I didn’t want to replicate. Again, you’re always looking for different stories to tell and different rhythms. And Cassie and Sunny had had this unusually benign relationship, which was gentle and loving and full of light and laughter and mutual respect. And I didn’t want to do that again. I’d done that for 24 episodes.

So you look around and you think, what would be interesting? What story would be interesting to tell? Well, here’s a woman coming into a room full of grief—four or five police officers still traumatized. What would be the obvious thing to do? Well, she comes in with great sensitivity to it and is gentle and da da da. But that’s the obvious thing to do. So what about she comes in with her own trauma, which she can’t tell anyone about?

So that was exciting to me and that was interesting. And particularly when someone’s got a huge problem that is life changing and they can’t really tell you about it because it’s private and she’s not that sort of person and she doesn’t know any of these people. And she’s even thinking, am I even going to be able to keep this job as my marriage disintegrates? So that is interesting to a writer, just keep piling up the crap and they’ve got to keep trying to hurdle it and keep pushing forward. You write your characters into corners and you then watch them try and get out of them.

Jace Lacob: I like that. As usual, Unforgotten offers an embarrassment of riches when it comes to the supporting characters. You got Haley Mills this year, which is amazing. But I have to say Martina Laird and Rhys Yates are so incredibly stellar, as Ebele and Jay. Did you see these two stealing entire scenes when you cast them?

Chris Lang: I suspected they might. I mean, obviously Martina has been around so it was less of a surprise because I’ve watched her work over 30 years and knew she was good. But Rhys, when we auditioned him, I then went and watched a few tapes of his and I thought, oh my God, this guy’s good. But I was blown away by him. I think it’s one of the best performances across any of the five seasons so far. I thought he was so in control of his craft. And it’s one of the most moving, powerful, performances I’ve seen on telly. I thought he was brilliant. And he’s not a name, he is not particularly known. I mean, he’s known in the business, but my God, he is such a talent, isn’t he?

Jace Lacob: I think he will be known now.

Chris Lang: Yeah.

Jace Lacob: In particular, I think this episode, his transformation in this episode is incredible.

Chris Lang: Yeah.

Jace Lacob: There’s this spark of something else within Jay. He’s a survivor through and through. He punches Lord Hume, he boots Cheryl’s new boyfriend from the flat. What are we seeing here? Is this Jay becoming who he was meant to be or who he’s hidden away?

Chris Lang: It’s a story about the judgments we make and are encouraged to make by the media, largely by papers, who would like us to condemn, in an uncomplicated way, people like him.

And I’m very interested in people who do bad things but aren’t necessarily bad people, almost always aren’t bad people. Or if they’re behaving in an antisocial way, it’s almost always because of the damage. And we don’t ever really get to talk about or see the damage in our media. They are presented as monsters. And I very rarely think that the people that the press tell us to hate, I very rarely think they are what they tell us they are. There’s always a story, and it generally is to do with childhood trauma.

So I wanted to show a story about someone who in the very first scene, you just see him doing something absolutely awful; mugging a woman. And when I wrote the script, my co exec said, really? Do you think we can engage with a character who does that after the first scene? And I said, well, let’s just go on that journey with them and see how many layers we can peel back to understand why someone might end up doing that.

So I wanted to show a character that was still capable of redemption, hadn’t gone too far, but was an incredibly antisocial character. And I wanted to watch that journey unfold. And I think Rhys just caught that beautifully.

Jace Lacob: Jessie finally breaks down this week after learning that Steve was cheating on her with her sister.

CLIP

Jess: You know what, Debbie? If you weren’t such a weak person, if you had even an ounce of backbone you wouldn’t have told me. You would’ve kept your shame to yourself.

Jace Lacob: It’s a rare moment of vulnerability for Jess, one that perhaps she needed. Is this a moment of catharsis for her where she can finally let go of her “gorgeous hubby”? And I’m using air quotes here.

Chris Lang: Yeah. I got a bit sick for that, “my gorgeous hubby”. It was meant to be ironic. Well, she’s very, very conflicted I think. Hers is a story about being confronted with very, very painful truths and sometimes finding it easier to accept what to others might seem obvious lies because accepting painful truths is so traumatic sometimes.

This story is based on an amalgam of various friends of mine who’ve been through some things that are quite similar. And I think we all know people who have relationships that are deeply imperfect, but they accept it because the alternative to them anyway, they believe is worse—divorce, kids only seen by one or other of the parents at weekends, loneliness, the notion at the age of 40, 45 of having to go out and find another partner.

All of these are so difficult to process, particularly if they come at you out of nowhere, as it does with her. But I think we often convince ourselves that the lies told by partners to try and protect the relationship, we can convince ourselves that they’re true because it’s easier. So, you know, there’s a lot of that going on in her story.

Jace Lacob: Sunny and Jess finally have it out, marking a major turning point for them.

CLIP

Sunny: I can’t work like this, next to you but not with you. I sat in this room earlier and listened to various people talking about Joseph Bell. And it was illuminating, and heartbreaking, and it gave me all sorts of insights and new ideas, and you missed it all.

I’ve recorded it and I’ll send you the links, but it’s not the same thing, is it? Because we need to be in the room together. We need to talk, in your office, in the canteen, the pub. We need to come up with a thousand stupid theories, laugh at them and come up with better ones. Because it’s only by doing that, surely, that we get to understand the people that are sitting opposite us.

Jess: I can’t be her, DI Khan

Sunny: I’m not asking you to be.

Jace Lacob: Was this as heartbreaking to write as it is to actually watch this scene, because it killed me.

Chris Lang: Oh yeah. Yeah it was. But it was again, that expression of a character expressing what the audience were probably thinking, why can’t you be more like Nicola Walker? Why can’t you be more like Cassie? And both the actor, the writer, and the character saying, I’m me and you’ve got to accept me for who I am, and at the point when I think they were ready to, and when they understood her better. People have come up to me and talked to me about it and said, I just didn’t like her for the first three, four episodes and then that scene, and then I kind of got her.

But it had to be that process. It had to take four episodes and it needed that moment to prick that tension and for her to be able to say, I can only be me. And with all the tension that had led up to that scene, I think he finally realizes that as well. That’s the moment that it all hinges on and they begin to build a relationship from that point onwards.

It’s a powerful moment of respect and sharing from both of them. And it was a scene I was really pleased with both in the writing and particularly in the playing off.

Jace Lacob: In the performance, what I love most about that scene is you can read on each of their faces this sort of inner debate that they’re each having of whether to come clean or not, whether to make themselves vulnerable in front of the other and what that actually says if they lay themselves bare. But that they both choose the path of honesty, I think points towards that reset that’s promised, those two little words, let’s reset. Is there hope then, for Sunny and Jess’s partnership moving forward after this moment of, whether it’s emotional catharsis or just honesty?

Chris Lang: Yeah, there is hope. But again, it would be glib to suggest that it’s all plain sailing. She’s not Cassie. And it takes 15, 20 years to build a relationship like Sunny and Cassie had. I think it was probably easier for Sunny in that scene to admit his vulnerability. And it’s interesting that it’s him who says it first, and I think he’s more confident in his own skin at that point particularly, and she is prompted too by his openness.

But that’s not who she is. She’s not a woman who comes in and tells you all the problems she was having at home the night before. She’s just not that person. And there are moments when he attempts to ask her how things are going and she basically says, I don’t really want to talk about it. And again, it’s that trying to, I’m just interested in different characters who have different dynamics with people and operate on a different level because lots of people are private about their personal life. When they’re at work, they don’t really talk about it. They don’t open up. Cassie and Sunny did, and she did in that scene. But I don’t think that we should think that that’s who she is, and that that relationship suddenly becomes this sort of incredibly open relationship that’s really easy and they really understand each other psychologically at all points. It’s different.

Jace Lacob: They’re not going to just start braiding each other’s hair.

Chris Lang: No. Although that’s a good idea for season seven.

Jace Lacob: Episode four ends with two revelations that the striations on the bullet that killed Precious Falade matched those of a bullet fired in a 2015 robbery by a known associate of Joseph Bell and that Lord Hume is dying.

What can you say about where the story is going in these final two episodes?

Chris Lang: Well, it’s going as always, I hope, to surprising places. I really wanted in episode six to get to a very classically Rashomon type place. And I think in episode six of season five, it’s most clearly demonstrated. We literally have all four characters in the police station, each telling their story from a different point of view. And I think that’s the first time I’ve done that in such a schematic way. The whole episode is taken up with that—four different accounts of exactly the same event from different perspectives, and the audience has to work out who is telling the truth.

Jace Lacob: Chris Lang for that Akira Kurosawa reference alone, thank you so very much.

Chris Lang: Thank you.

In two weeks, DCI James and DI Khan zero in on the final details of the investigation.

CLIP

Jess: So, we need to speak to the letting agency and get a list of everyone who’s lived here over the last 10 years.

Sunny: Boss.

Jess: And Anthony Hume, what have we not yet done to place him at the scene of Precious’s murder?

Sunny: If he was there.

Jess: He was there. All suggestions gratefully received.

Sunny: I’ll message the team.

Unforgotten creator Chris Lang and series lead Sanjeev Bhaskar return Sunday, October 8th for a wrap up conversation on the season finale of Unforgotten.