Episode 212 - Nicola Shindler | TellyCast podcast

Justin Crosby interviews Nicola Shindler, CEO of Quay Street Productions, and one of the UK’s most renowned TV producers.
Nicola shares insights into her critically acclaimed dramas, including Happy Valley, The Guest, After the Flood, and Dead Hot. She discusses crafting compelling narratives, balancing multiple productions, and her vision for the future of television drama. 

Transcript

Welcome to TellyCast, the podcast for content industry professionals. I'm Justin Crosby and today I'm thrilled to be joined by one of the most influential figures in British television, Nicola Schindler. Nicola is founder and CEO of the of Quay Street Productions, a company known for delivering compelling, high quality drama that resonates with audiences both in the UK and around the world.

Throughout her remarkable career, Nicola has been at the helm of some of the most critically acclaimed series, including Happy Valley, Happy Valley. Last Tango in Halifax, and recently, After the Flood and The Guest. With a reputation for developing bold, thought provoking narratives, Nicola has built Key Street Productions into a powerhouse for exceptional storytelling.

I spoke to Nicola a little bit earlier. Well, hi Nicola, great to see you again. Last time we spoke was Edinburgh TV Festival. How are things with you? 

Oh, good. Thank you. Nice to see you again. 

You too. You too. And I know you've been incredibly busy. We're going to be talking about that and lots of projects that not only you've got in the works, but also have come to fruition recently and, and also in the future.

But let's, why don't we start with the guest? And the guest is described as a fast paced, Thriller with themes of class and social mobility. Tell us a little bit about this project, first of all. 

So it's set in Wales and we're filming in Cardiff right now. Matthew Barry has written it. He's a great writer who I've worked with before as an actor and a writer.

And he came to us with an idea to do a A really enticing thriller like those ones from the 90s American films like Fatal Attraction and Hand That Rocked The Cradle. All those ones where you don't know who to trust. You, you have a group of people that you're telling a story with and you never quite know where to settle.

And he had this great idea today. to do something about contemporary Wales. So the class element and the social mobility element is very much based in reality. Ria is a cleaner and Fran is her boss, but the relationship between these two women becomes really intertwined and close. And like I say, you don't know which one of them is telling the truth all the way through.

So it's just, it felt like such an engaging idea. 

Yeah, absolutely. And these sort of themes as well, this is something that is common in a few of your dramas, isn't it? The social mobility and these intense relationships. 

Yeah, I guess it depends on what the writer wants to write about, really. But when we started talking to the BBC about this one, they really wanted to do a thriller that had another meaning, you know, a deeper meaning.

Something to say about contemporary Wales, specifically. So it just felt like it was the right message at the right time. 

So there's obviously, it's a hugely competitive market when you're talking about thrillers and the current landscape, there's obviously a huge demand for it. What do you think really makes the guests stand out amongst the competition?

I 

think because these two characters are fantastic, both Ria and Fran are really extraordinarily well written and feel very real and grounded. And at the same time as being involved in such an exceptional high energy story. So it's that combination really. I think it feels very like it could happen to you.

It isn't at all extreme or out there or heightened in any way. 

It's relatable. 

Yeah. 

Okay. And tell us a bit about the casting and how the casting developed. 

Well, there's such an abundance of brilliant actors in Wales. So we were spoiled for choice, but so lucky with the two women that we've got. Eve Miles, who obviously has been in a lot of shows there and in Torchwood and is well known to a TV audience.

And she's just extraordinary in this. She is confident. She is in control. She's a little bit vulnerable. She's very strong in her performance. And then Gabrielle Creavy was someone who I'd admired. So much in Under My Skin. I think she's just a brilliant actress who's about to become huge. I think she's on Amadeus, the Sky show.

She's also very funny, as In My Skin showed, and really clever at playing an unsettling kind of confidence. It's just that between the two of them, and they've got on very well, and they work really well together. They complement each other. They're very different as actresses, but they complement each other really well.

Right, and you say you're currently in production. Can you give us an estimate of when we might expect to see this on screens? 

You'd have to ask the BBC, but I'm hoping next year. It should be 2025, definitely. 

Okay, and this will 24 

hours, so we can finish it quite quickly. 

Right, okay. And this is also distributed by ITV Studios.

It is, yes. 

All right, fantastic. Well, I'm sure, I'm sure they'll be, uh, busy selling that to, uh, broadcasters around the world in the coming weeks and months. So let's talk about After the Flood as well, because that was obviously a big hit recently, particularly in the UK. And you've just had season two commission.

So congratulations on that. 

Thank you. Yeah, really excited about it. I love this project. 

Tell us about the new mysteries and challenges that were the key character and, and I uh, I gather there's a secret investigation into corruption involved in this. 

Well, we obviously left the last series with Revealing the extent of corruption within the police force that Jo works in.

Our main character played by Sophie Rundle. Her and her husband Pat, who is implicated, have decided to accept what's on the surface, everything that's going on, but secretly investigate. and try and bring down what they see as a horrible, corrupt organisation. Not the whole police force, just the people who are in it, in their local area, who are operating for their own good.

So at the same time as there being a new murder investigation and loads of stories for all the ensemble, they are, Pat and Jo, are investigating Mackie, who is the lead policeman played by Nick Cleaves, investigating what he's done. And how they can bring that to people's attention without implicating themselves, which is their key problem.

Well, one thing I've always wondered is that, when you've had such a real success on the first season of a series, when you come back to the second season, how do you recreate the magic that you've developed over that very specific period of time? How do you carry that over and pick up as you left off for season two?

It's hard and you have to make sure that you've got a stronger story as you had for series one. So that we were absolutely rigorous in how we approached our series story to make sure the new murders are as engaging as the body that was found. Um, in series one and to make sure the complexities and the surprises and the twists and turns are as strong.

But I mean, it is easier in some respects because we've got this extraordinary cast, which we assembled in series one. And they bring that magic together. They bring this beautiful ensemble. They bring a feeling of absolute. The reality, I think, you believe that they all live in this town. You believe that they're all interconnected the way they do.

They're all very clever actors. They are funny as well as being very dramatic. I mean, as in good at drama. So we've already got that atmosphere because we cast it well last time. 

You obviously had a great deal of experience with dramas running to multiple seasons. Do you tend to find when you get the right cast that actors can grow into these characters and actually really go above and beyond in subsequent series?

I mean, is that something that, that, that actors tend to really take hold of the character and almost take it forward over and above what the script is, is, is telling them? 

Well, I think what we have to do is make sure the scripts Serves their talents. So what the reason they get richer and better these series I think is because as writers and developers, we know what they can do really well.

We know what an auditors love seeing from them. So we can play to those strengths. So it's rather than them, they don't go off in a direction that the script doesn't take them. But we can see how rich their performances are. What they brought to those characters, and then we write for that. So I think it gets better and better as it matures, because we're all working for each other.

Well, look forward to that one, and we've got so many of your dramas that we're gonna talk about. So this is almost a whistle stop tour into Key Street's success over the last few years. Now, Dead Hot, Uh, was, uh, a show that launched back in March, uh, 2024 on Prime Video. Just give us a sense of that project as well and tell us a bit about how that came together.

Well, it's a brilliant, bonkers, fantastic story, which is both a great thriller and a Wonderful comedy about two friends and a fantastic character piece as well. So it's everything. It's written by Charlotte Coburn, who I'd worked with on previous Harlan Coburn shows that we've made for Netflix. So I knew her writing really well.

And she came to me with this as a script that she'd written on spec. And it's so original and her voice is so specific. And I find it very funny. It's incredibly naturally inclusive as well. You know, there's a really diverse cast just because that's the way she writes. So she brought me all those elements and it was just a joy to bring it to life really.

We were really pleased that it's still on Prime. If people haven't, not enough people have watched it, so I want more people to watch it because it's just, it's very, very original. 

Yeah, and also we're going to talk about The Red King as well, which is a mix of police investigation and folk horror. Can you elaborate, tell us a little bit more about how that combination adds that new sort of fresh spin to the crime genre?

This is very much from the mind of Toby Whithouse, who is an extraordinary writer. He wrote Being Human, which kind of did the same thing. I don't know if you remember it from quite a few years ago now. It was a flat share drama. Yeah. That was also about a, three supernatural beings, but who were also just sharing a flat in London, or maybe Bristol.

But it was so funny, and it was so clever, and it was so well plotted. And so when Toby came to us and said he wanted to do a folk horror, which, you know, isn't necessarily the most commercial of ideas, I knew that he would have the ability to make it feel very mainstream, which he does naturally, as in it's really accessible characters.

Again, the world is very inaccessible, even though what happens in it is quite extreme. And he's very, very good at, at, threading through a story, which you don't know who is, has killed this young boy, who was killed a year before the story starts. But a new policeman comes to this island and everyone is not to be, everyone is not what they seem.

And there is a, what you could call a cult at the center of all this, but some people would call it a religion. Some people would just call it a hobby and other people keep telling it it's just for the tourists. And she just explores and finds out how much more is in that. And Toby just kept a masterful control of it.

He wrote all six scripts. And it has a really strong voice. Well, 

we've already talked about a number of, of your projects, and we're going to talk about a number, not more, but it just occurred to me that how do you oversee an, an, uh, uh, such an enormous number of projects now? And obviously they're not in production at the same time, but they're at various different stages of development and production and post, uh, and launching.

How do you keep your focus on each separate project? Because you as a, as an executive, you must be having really detailed conversations about different aspects of different shows all in the same day. How do you maintain your focus? 

Well, I've also got a brilliant team. So it isn't just me. There's brilliant people who work at Key Street and some of those projects have got other execs on, not all of them.

Some of them are just me, but some of them, for example, I did The Red King with Davina Earle, our Head of Development. She execs that as well, and she was very hands on, so she was absolutely keeping her eye on all that detail. I did Fool Me Once and the new Harlan Coburn Missing You with Richard Fee.

Who's an executive producer and head of drama at Key Street. So there are other people who keep their eye on it as well, but that is my job. My job is to make sure that I read every draft of every script that they want me to read, to watch everything daily and then to watch every edit. So it's just, you just learn.

It's actually useful, I think, to switch from one project to another, because you clear your brain each time. 

Right. It's an amazing problem to have, obviously. I know. 

And it was very lucky. I mean, we were filming a lot of those shows together in 2023. And that will, I won't lie and say it was very easy, but it was doable because of everyone else working on it.

Yeah. Well, you mentioned 2023, and Nollie was a big success, obviously, with Helena Bonham Carter, her amazing performance, and Russell T Davies writing. What was it like to revive a forgotten icon in British television history, and how do you balance that nostalgia with modern storytelling? 

It was a privilege.

Because she was an extraordinary woman. She wasn't just an actress in a soap. She was also one of the first female producers on television. She presented news shows. She invented daytime television. This woman was extraordinary. So when Russell said that he wants to write about her, and he gave me her autobiography, which is both hilarious and extraordinary, it just became like a passion project, really, for both of us.

It was, it, it, she's just a really important woman to put on screen, and she was forgotten. And what he, you know, told so brilliantly is she was sacked in the most brutal and unfair way. And that's what the story's about, so, and it also had so much to say about women in the workplace and about treatment of women's hobbies or whatever you want to call it in terms of soaps.

It had a lot to say as ever with Russell because he would never just be there for the entertainment. However, it was also very funny. And then bringing Helena Bonham Carter on board to play her was just such a privilege because Nonny is. Was. So royalty, and it feels like Helena is acting royalty. So the two merged brilliantly.

Yeah. Well, we could, I'm sure we could talk for a whole half hour. And I know we've only got a limited amount of time to talk about Nolly, but moving on to Significant Other, which is yet another project, an unconventional love story. Tell us about that. That was an adaptation of an Israeli series for a UK audience.

How? Do you think that resonates with viewers in the UK specifically? 

I mean, the themes are so universal, I don't think it matters where it originated. The Israeli writer is a brilliant woman, and she just recognised that there's an epidemic of loneliness, and that to write about two neighbours who don't don't seem to have anything in common, don't even seem to like each other, but who, in really unconventional ways, fall in love, was just a gift, really, to us.

It didn't matter that it had been originated in Israel. It felt very natural to set it in Manchester. The two writers who brought it to us just knew straight away that they wanted to, you know, make it happen. Keep as much of the characterization and the stories as they could because it's got a really original voice at the center of it.

It's quite, it holds back emotionally but that makes you feel a lot more at times I think. It's very funny but it's funny in a Right, dark way, as opposed to people falling down the stairs. They also do fall down the stairs, and fall out of windows. So it does have everything, really. It just felt like, just a perfect piece of work that we were lucky to be able to adapt.

And, well, 2024, we're here in November. It's obviously been a, uh, an amazing year for Key Street Productions and Fool Me Once obviously has been one of Netflix's most watched shows of the year. How does it feel to have this sort of success and does it feel to you like your most successful year to date and, and what do you think is the secret sauce that you've obviously perfected?

I never look at each year and say is this most successful. We've done, I've, I've worked, when I was at Red we had years that had more shows on than 2024. So we have, I have done this before with a lot of shows. Obviously, we've never had the amount of viewers that Formula Once had, and that was just extraordinary and fantastic.

And I hope that we repeat it, but it does feel like even if it's once in a lifetime, that's just brilliant to be a part of it. But I think the minute I saw it, sit there and go, this is really successful year is probably the minute I should stop working. Because actually, I just want to keep going and have more success and make more shows and give like broadcasters and buyers what they want.

And at the right time so that I can get more green lights. I don't ever really try and look back too much. 

Now Nicola that more and more amazing writers come to you or do you think you know Are you still actually actively going out and searching for amazing amazing stories? Is that something you you're still enabled to do?

You know, do you have the time to do that or 

oh, yeah No, well again I have a brilliant team here, so it's not just me. We absolutely do both. So we're very lucky that some writers know they want to try and work with us, so they come to us with ideas. But equally, I've got a brilliant development team. And for our size company, a large development team full of very talented script editors, script execs, development execs, who know what we're looking for, who talk to agents all the time, who go to the theatre all the time, go to the cinema all the time.

Watch everything on telly, we talk about it every week. We make sure that everyone, someone, someone is watching everything. Together, we try and cover all ways to find the best new writers and the best writers who want to work with us and writers who've been around for years who want to work with us and to find new voices and to go to places where voices that aren't necessarily represented on screen yet are.

We just, it's our responsibility to go out and find people. And to make sure that when people come to us, we read them quickly enough and we engage with them. And we, if it's something we want to move on, that we work with them in a really collaborative way. 

We've talked about a really wide range of drama that you've produced in the last two, three years.

And I know you've got an incredible slate of projects going forward as well. Is there anything that you've, do you have an ambition, a type of story, or a type of series that you really really desperate to, to produce, but maybe haven't found the right way to do it yet. Is there still an itch that you're looking to scratch when it comes to drama production?

I'd love to find some more returning series because that's what television needs. in order to sustain and in order to keep a track to your audience. I've done them in the past. I think it's much harder now to do something that has a story of the week. I haven't done that since Scott and Bailey really, which was quite a few years ago now.

So to be able to crack that modern, very contemporary feeling returning series that isn't necessarily something like After the Flood, which has an overall serial arc. has individual stories of the week, that'd be really interesting. And I think it's something that television would welcome right now. But other than that, no, cause I don't think my job is to, my job is to respond to writers and to ideas and to make sure that I'm getting their voices on screen and to listen to what the buyers tell me they want to make sure that we then develop in that space.

If, if I have a brilliant idea, then I will talk to people about it. But mostly my job is responding to other people's brilliant ideas. I'm very lucky in that way. 

And then finally, we're coming into 2025. It's been quite a turbulent year for TV in many ways. It seems that you're going from success to success.

What excites you most? most about 2025, and what should we keep our eyes on from Keystone? Well, we've got some series coming 

out, which I'm excited for everyone to watch. We've got Missing You coming out on January the 1st, so very beginning of 2025, which is on Netflix. That's a great new series. We've got Lazarus, which is a new show that we made for Prime Video, which I expect to be out, and it's a ghost.

It's a Harlan Coben, but it's a ghost story. It's really good. Got a show for Disney Plus coming out called The Stolen Girl. So there's a few of our shows. And in terms of what we're looking for moving forward, I just think, I hope that the industry settles down a bit. I think it's been quite tough for a lot of people.

There has been a lot less made and that's been really difficult for a lot of teams. So we do need it to pick up again. It's hard to know whether it will and it's hard to know how we can contribute to that other than just keep looking for really good ideas and trying to make things reasonable about some money, making sure that we don't bankrupt people.

That's really what I'm hoping for the next year. 

Yeah. Well, I wish you all the very best. Um, you don't need it. I don't think you need me to wish you any luck, Nicola. Well, listen, thank you so much for joining us again and, uh, all the best and, uh, I hope to see you in 2025. Thanks so much for joining us.

Thank you. 

Well, that's about it for this week's show. For videos featuring the movers and shakers of the content industry, subscribe to Telecast on YouTube or click the link in the episode description. We'll be back again with another show next week. Until then, stay safe.