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Kousha Navidar: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Kousha Navidar in for Alison Stewart. The first season of the gritty police, procedural Blue Lights received rave reviews and a number of TV award nominations across the pond. Set in Northern Ireland, specifically Belfast, the series follows three rookie officers in training, along with their mentors as they encounter tough situations surrounding the fictional Blackthorn Police Department.

There's Grace Ellis, played by Siân Brooke, who left a career as a social worker at the age of 40 to become a police officer. She's joined by Annie Conlon, played by Katherine Devlin, and Tommy Foster, played by Nathan Braniff. In Season One, all three officers are pretty naive. They face a harsh learning curve on the path to becoming full-time officers. This is all played out in an unforgiving city with a pass that still casts a shadow on the present.

While the BBC aired a new Season Two back in April, fans in the United States can watch this season starting June 13th, thanks to BritBox, the British television streaming service. Subscriptions are available through BritBox, and you can also get it through Apple TV, and Amazon Prime Video. I'm lucky to be here right in the studio with the series creators, Declan Lawn and Adam Patterson. Declan, Adam, welcome to All Of It.

Declan Lawn: Thanks, Koushar. It's good to be here.

Adam Patterson: Yes, thanks, man. Thanks for having us on.

Kousha Navidar: Absolutely. It's been such a pleasure getting to learn about and watch this season and the previous season coming up to this interview. I didn't want to spoil anything about Season One going into Season Two. Instead, I'm going to give you that job. Declan, let's start with you, can you give us a brief catch-up about where we're meeting our characters in Season Two?

Declan Lawn: Yes. It's a year after the events of Season One. As you've alluded to, there's something big and tragic happens at the end of Season One. Our characters are dealing with the fallout of that emotionally and professionally as well. They've also kind of, I think, grown as police officers. Season One is about what it takes to do the job, and Season Two is, I guess, about what the job takes from you, what it costs.

They've all had to grow up, they've all had to sacrifice things in their lives. The job has become all consuming, that transition from civilian to working cop. It's been a joy to write Season Two. When we wrote Season One, obviously we didn't know who was playing the characters, we didn't know what they looked like, how they held themselves, what they sounded like. Coming back this time as we write scenes, it's been a lot easier, I think, hasn't it?

Adam Patterson: Yes. I think you know the characters, but more importantly what the people, the audience love about the characters, and you can lean into that a bit. Then you can think like, "What new characters can we bring in to antagonize them and bring more out of them?" It's a totally different thing from writing the first season of a show, but one obviously that we relished.

Kousha Navidar: What do you think Season One got really right, Adam?

Adam Patterson: I think it's very authentic to the place of Belfast. A place that sadly is often not looked at favorably in the media. We've got a pretty dark past but we feel it's a very optimistic and a beautiful place. I think the characters that we drew upon bring people into that world, but they're very relatable. We've all been someone who starts a new job. We've all had fear and loss and love in our lives and different measures. I think Declan and I, our approach always is through character, and if you can do that well, then you can teach people about the wider societal topics through that.

Kousha Navidar: Yes. Declan, I loved the way that phrase that you used about maybe Season One being about what it took to do the job, and then Season Two being about what the job took from you. Can you dive into that a little bit? I'm thinking what are the themes? What are the different avenues that you wanted to explore when you sat down to start Season Two?

Declan Lawn: We do a lot of research for this show. We were journalists for like 16 years, investigative journalists. We're from Belfast, it's our hometown. Obviously, we're very familiar with the place and the issues, but we still go out. I think for Season One, we spoke to about, I think about 30, 35 police officers and downloaded their experiences. The police in Northern Ireland have cooperated with us, they take us on ride-alongs. A thing that really resonated with me was, I was on a ride along with the same officer a year apart, a young woman.

When I first met her, she was two weeks into the job and she was wide-eyed, quite naive, a little nervous. When I met her again for the research for Season Two, she was a different person. She was actually a different person. She was tougher, she was more alert. I'm hesitant to use the word cynical, but she definitely had to harden up a little. That was really our inspiration for Season Two.

The transition from civilian to police officer in Northern Ireland, or I guess anywhere is a really fundamental one. It's more than a job, it's a vocation, and you start to see the world differently. It's just super interesting for us to explore that.

Adam Patterson: Yes. We kind of like, what happens? You go through a training course and everything's fabricated, but how do you then transition into somebody really screaming in your face or threatening you? How do you actually turn that on, and how can you predict as a person that you'd be able to deal with that okay? I think Season One hits that really hard because you live through these characters as they go through those doors into the grid unknown, and they face the darkness, literally. Yes, I think it's-- Go ahead.

Declan Lawn: The things you're exposed to, I think as a police officer, you're exposed to the worst that society has to offer. Most of us go around in a bubble and we're not faced with constant physical violence or threat or fear for our lives. It's accentuated in Northern Ireland because simply by virtue of doing the job, there are people who want to hurt you for political reasons.

There are still active terrorist groups who target police officers, and that has happened over the last, say, 12 years, a few times. You can't leave the job in the locker room when you hang up your vest at the end of the day. You go home, you're checking under your car for bombs every morning. You've got cameras outside your house. You don't tell your family or your extended family, what you do, you don't tell your friends.

Adam Patterson: It's actually remarkable in many ways that people actually do this job.

Declan Lawn: It is.

Adam Patterson: Yet society can't exist unless people commit to doing vocations like this. In Season One, it's also about the idealism that people have because they think doing this job they can in some way change the world or change a small part of it. What's interesting about Season Two is earlier on, as Declan says, that crashes up against the pragmatic nature of policing and can they retain those elements of idealism?

Kousha Navidar: Yes. Diving away from the precinct of Blackthorn and looking at the personal lives, diving into that.

Declan Lawn: Yes. We've got a lot more personal stuff in Season Two for sure. There's a few romantic storylines, and we see them at home a little bit more, and how the job contaminates their personal life. I think I said this earlier, it's a joy to write because policing is a conduit for us as writers to explore our society. It's like a litmus test. Everything that's gone wrong, all of the havoc that has been wreaked by certain economic policies. We can say whatever we want and it's so liberating. It's counterintuitive, right? We were journalists in this place for 16 years, and we can say more things, more truthfully, as dramatists than we did as journalists.

Adam Patterson: We actually talk about using the police force as a Trojan horse to say the things that we really want to say about the place.

Kousha Navidar: Storytelling is often just a conduit for-- I think that's the definition of allegory, right there.

Declan Lawn: Yes, absolutely.

Kousha Navidar: It's funny you mentioned that it's a joy at a screening. Last night you mentioned that your relationship with Adam, you, Declan, mentioned that it's one of the best relationships in your life besides with your spouse. Why do you guys work so well together?

Adam Patterson: I pay him money to say things like these.

Declan Lawn: Yes. He gives me 500 bucks every time I say something nice. It's a very organic symbiotic relationship that we have. We have a little office in Belfast and we spend a lot of time there talking about storylines and ideas and characters. I think what happens is we bring more out of each other than we would get to just by ourselves. Adam will say something that sparks an idea in me and vice versa. We do the whole thing, we write the show, we directed on Season Two.

Adam Patterson: I think as a partnership there's two things to me that are really important, we have a very similar outlook in the world. Declan's one of the most generous people I've ever met in many different ways. You can't feign things like that. I think if you're going to bind yourselves together to talk about big societal topics or to go on this journey together for many years, it's important that you have a similar outlook on the world. I think the other thing is that we like each other and that's important too.

Declan Lawn: Yes. Most of the time.

[laughter]

Kousha Navidar: Except when the 500 bucks is late, right?

Declan Lawn: Yes, exactly. Yes. I have to give him 500 now because he said I was generous.

Kousha Navidar: We're talking about Blue Lights Season Two. It's a police drama. It is starting its second season for viewers in the US on June 13th. Streaming anywhere you get BritBox that includes Apple TV and Amazon Prime Video. We're talking with Declan Lawn and Adam Patterson, who are the series creators. I want to be sure that we talk about Belfast specifically because we've talked around it a little bit, but Belfast is as much a character in this as the characters. Tell us a little bit for viewers or listeners who aren't familiar with Belfast, Declan.

Declan Lawn: Belfast is a post-conflict society. There was a civil conflict. there that lasted 30 years from 1968, '69 through to '98. There is a huge reservoir of trauma, transgenerational trauma there. 3,500 people were killed. Many tens of thousands were injured in bombings and shootings. This is a place where the past looms heavy. Blue Lights is, I think it's a show about ghosts. Our personal ghosts and our societal ghosts. If you were to come to Belfast, which you should do someday, you would have a great time.

Great people, lovely bars, lovely restaurants, a vibrant young, dynamic city. When you go outside that city center, division still exists. We have a thing, for example, called a Peace Wall in a particular part of Belfast, ironically named. It's like a 50-foot high fence dividing Catholics from Protestants. It's still there. They can't take it down. It's a place that is getting better and there's room for a lot of optimism in how far we've come. It's still mired in the past and dealing with the past and how we admit the truth of what happened. It's fraught with all sorts of difficult issues that are interesting for people us to excavate.

Kousha Navidar: While we were researching this segment, we found so many reviews that would compare this series to The Wire.

Declan Lawn: We'll take that.

Kousha Navidar: I was wondering, for listeners who aren't familiar The Wire is an American drama about police and life in Baltimore, Maryland. Adam, what do you make of that comparison?

Adam Patterson: Your comment has done a lot for my ego. No, listen, unashamedly, we would say that The Wire with Hill Street Blues are the two TV shows that we not only love, I mean not only love on a personal level but also professionally. We derived a lot of ideas from them. David Simon was a journalist before he became a drama writer. The characters that were formed in The Wire, that seminal show set in Baltimore. If I close my eyes, I can still see them walking around the streets. That's a testament to just amazing character writing.

Of course, Baltimore also like Belfast is post-industrial, has its own fair share of issues. There's a lot of comparisons that we could derive for Belfast. We leaned into that in the writing, didn't we?

Declan Lawn: Yes. We put David Simon on a huge pedestal. That's one of our favorite shows ever. I think he's the Charles Dickens of our age. That show is like a huge Victorian novel about a city and a particular moment in time, politically and economically. Whilst we will gratefully accept the comparison, we're also very humbled by it when people mention our show in the same breath as his, because we think that show and the shows he's done subsequently are pretty much genius.

Adam Patterson: The one thing I would just add to that is, when it came to writing in particular, the dialogue we just made no compromises. We just said, we're just going to write it the way people speak.

Declan Lawn: Hyperlocal.

Adam Patterson: Hyperlocal. We're not going to compromise on the vernacular because A, if we do, we'll have to leave town because people will never forgive us. It's the only way that you can really get people to buy into your show is that if you do it in the most authentic way possible.

Declan Lawn: We assume a lot of knowledge. There'll be things that American viewers and even English viewers don't understand, but that's the price of authenticity. People don't speak in an expositional way. We make no apologies for that. I think there are universal things about it. I think the characters and the situations they find themselves in are universal. It's about finding purpose in the world and trying to do some modicum of good if you can. It's got a little bit of optimism in it.

Adam Patterson: I think more than a little bit, I think like Dec and I worked as journalists for many years, and our takeaway from that time traveling the world, making documentaries, is that people are mostly good, but also they're not binary. When we draw characters, our bad guys, at times when you see them and you understand how they've got to where they are, you think, "Oh, I get it a wee bit about you." I'm not saying you'll forgive them, but you'll want to understand them more. The good people also can make terrible mistakes.

Declan Lawn: Yes. Our cops are constantly making mistakes and poor decisions that have terrible ramifications. This show operates in a moral gray area, which is, I think where we all live in real life.

Kousha Navidar: In fact, I don't want to spoil anything from Season One, but a character who was the moral center of the show in many ways, can't do that anymore. I am wondering for you all how you reckon with that gap? How do you look at the moral?

Declan Lawn: It's a really good question. The character you're referring to, who we lose in a very tragic and climactic event in Season One is indeed was the moral heart of the show. I mentioned earlier that the show is about ghosts. That was a very deliberate decision. We wanted to lose him and explore the idea of grief and growing through grief in Season Two. He is a big loss. We made that sacrifice for very good reasons.

Adam Patterson: His loss is also a metaphor for all the loss that our country has suffered.

Declan Lawn: Yes, it is.

Adam Patterson: If we were going to tell a really honest story is that sometimes the great ones don't make it. Going forward, obviously, we do miss him, but he's remembered. He's talked about often.

Declan Lawn: You can't tell an authentic story about Northern Ireland without exploring the idea of loss because we're all dealing with it. That's why we did that.

Kousha Navidar: You see this through the three main characters in different ways. I want to talk about each of them a little bit as far as we can. There's Annie who's had a tough first year but really came into her own by the end of the first season. Where is she in her life and career? Declan, we can start with you.

Declan Lawn: Annie is, like most of the main characters, lost. The sacrifice Annie has made to take this job is that she's had to divorce herself from her community. She's from a very small, nationalist, Catholic community. She tries to stay there and still be a police officer. There's a threat against her, and she doesn't know where it's from, so she has to leave that. In Season Two, we made her a year on, and she has been away from her family and her community now for a year.

She's failing. She's flailing and she is an impulsive person who sometimes makes bad decisions. She's trying to work out who she is without the community that made her. Dramatically for us, it's a really interesting thing to explore. Also, it's common. There are still to this day, Catholic police officers from certain parts of Northern Ireland who can't really go home. I say that because I've sat with them in my office and we've talked about it for hours.

We still have a long way to go. This is Annie's dilemma. She's lost, she's flailing. She's lost who she is. On the altar, she's sacrificed her identity on the altar of being--

Adam Patterson: She does get distracted by a new colleague in Season Two.

Declan Lawn: She does have a love interest. Yes.

Kousha Navidar: What did you say? There's--

Declan Lawn: We can't be too nasty to her. We have to give her a love interests.

Kousha Navidar: There is tragedy and there's hope. I think you were saying, Adam.

Adam Patterson: Very good. Yes. There's the optimism.

Kousha Navidar: Another central character is Grace, played by Siân Brooke, who's a single mom and a former social worker. Adam, what are you excited about Grace's journey this season?

Adam Patterson: In Season One, she was the one that maybe carried the most idealism, with a background in social work, she really felt that she could change the world. Her counterpart Stevie was the pragmatic wall that she would-- I think both of them, by the end, learned that each other's way actually had some merit. In Season Two, she's dealing with her son not be there. As Declan says, they all have some form of loss. For her, her son was a massive part of her life.

Her relationship with Stevie two people who deeply care about each other, but are very wary of opening their hearts too much because of things that have happened in the past, that certainly develops in some ways. You'll have to watch to find out.

Kousha Navidar: There's also Tommy, of course, played by Nathan Braniff, who is another constable who was a rookie last year and was struggling, nearly failed his exams, and was really forced to step up. Where do we find him in Season Two, Declan?

Declan Lawn: Tommy has lost his mentor, the man who saved his job, he got him through. He wants to be him, he wants to be a version of Gerry, but he's a very different person. Tommy is blessed with a very particular intellectual talent for spotting patterns in things and anticipating things through looking at crime statistics. What he's trying to be is a brilliant response cop in a car out on the streets doing the business. What he is, is something else. This is really his storyline is about him coming to terms with the fact that he's never going to be Gerry. He's meant for something else.

Adam Patterson: Season Two, he gets seduced into that world. Somebody else spots that he has that talent and says, here's the door. He's conflicted. Does he listen to the old voice of the old mentor, or does he go his own way?

Declan Lawn: There's a real commonality here I think with all of these characters. It's about how do we put one foot in front of the other because most of us live life with blinkers on. We don't see our environment for what it is. We see it through our own eyes. Personally, I'm making it up as I go along with life.

Adam Patterson: Aren't we all?

Declan Lawn: Aren't we all? Aren't we, right?

Kousha Navidar: Yes.

Declan Lawn: This is three characters who we see on the screen trying to find their purpose and who they are, and making a lot of mistakes along the way.

Adam Patterson: This is where the medium of TV in this age is brilliant because you have the hours, you've got the time to spend that with them. You see you can have those nuances of people sitting for three or four minutes in a car sharing some baked goods. That can tell you as much about someone as opposed to when they're facing real inherent danger.

Declan Lawn: Those are our favorite scenes. People sharing some delicacies at a lunchbox and talking about music, and they're interspersed with a lot of big action scenes and tension and so on. Dude, I love writing those scenes. I love it.

Adam Patterson: Is that they're real.

Kousha Navidar: You've been greenlit for at least two more seasons, which by the way, big congratulations on that.

Declan Lawn: Thanks. Thank you.

Kousha Navidar: As storytellers, I wonder, where do you start when you have to design a new season, understanding that there is another one right around the corner? At the very beginning, you mentioned character, is that where you start? Adam, go ahead.

Adam Patterson: Yes. For Dec and I, everything's character.

Declan Lawn: It's all character.

Adam Patterson: We always believe that the plot flows around it. We're in a really nice position now because we've got two seasons behind us, and with the double commission, we can think almost more in an American model, like 12 hours ahead of us. We know how things end for these characters then before. Now the exciting bit is plotting all the ways to get them there in the way that's the most enticing for the audience.

Declan Lawn: Yes. It's like, I don't know, being an artist and having a small canvas and then someone saying, "No, here, you can use the whole wall to paint on." We've got 12 hours of television now to play with. We just sit in our little office for hours going, "Okay, where do we want them to be at the end of this journey, and then how do we get them there?"

Kousha Navidar: You start at the end and you work your way backwards?

Declan Lawn: A little bit. Yes.

Kousha Navidar: Tell me more about what it's like. We have about a minute left here, but what are things that you're trying to preserve in the writer's room as the project gets bigger for yourselves?

Adam Patterson: For me, it's really important that we just preserve authenticity. We just always have to-- going to sensationalized is always there, bubbling, trying to tease you, but we just need to keep it real. That's the most important thing for us.

Declan Lawn: Keep it grounded in character, don't get lost in the plot. If you get character out, plot will take care of itself. In an ideal world, with a fair wind, we'd love people to look back on this show in 5 or 10 years and say, "Wow, that stands the test of time." We've never forgotten those parts.

Adam Patterson: Also maybe make people come and visit Belfast too.

Declan Lawn: Yes. Come visit Belfast. It's much nicer than we portray it.

[laughter]

Kousha Navidar: I'm sure it is. There is joy, there is hope, there are characters that you can relate to and there is so much else. Shout out to Belfast. If you want to watch it, you can check out Blue Lights Season Two. It starts the second season, for American viewers, on June 13th. It's streaming anywhere you get BritBox, that includes Apple TV and Amazon Prime. We've been talking to Declan Lawn and Adam Patterson, the series creators. Thank you all so much and just congratulations on the work

Declan Lawn: Thanks so much for having us. It's been a pleasure.

Adam Patterson: Yes, thanks, man. Thanks so much.

Kousha Navidar: Absolutely. All right, that's All Of It for today. Coming up on tomorrow's show, we've got Director Ron Howard. There's this new documentary that he's made about Jim Henson, and it's now streaming on Disney Plus. Then we've also got jazz saxophonist, Alan Braufman, who's going to come on to share some new music. He's going to join us for a listening party. Thank you all so much for hanging out today. It was such a pleasure to hear about your hangover cures, to hear about the movies that have influenced you. Thank you so much for your messages. You can keep talking to us online at All Of It, WNYC. Thanks again and we'll see you tomorrow.

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