Editor’s word: Deadline’s It Begins on the Web page (Restricted) options 10 standout restricted or anthology sequence scripts in 2025 Emmy competition.
Say Nothing, FX’s restricted sequence about The Troubles in Northern Eire, took 5 years to make – a very long time in tv phrases however nothing in comparison with how lengthy the peace course of took.
The sequence is predicated on Patrick Radden Keefe’s 2018 e book Say Nothing: A True Story of Homicide and Reminiscence in Northern Eire, which advised the story of the kidnapping and homicide of Jean McConville, a mom of 10 who was wrongly accused by the IRA of being a British Military informant. It explores the lives of a bunch of individuals rising up in Belfast between the Seventies and Nineties, together with members of the Provisional Irish Republican Military (IRA), who killed McConville, and likewise bombed the Previous Bailey in London.
The present has already began its awards-season run; it was nominated for Greatest Drama on the Irish Movie and Tv Awards, which additionally nominated creator-showrunner Joshua Zetumer for Greatest Script. Zetumer additionally picked up a writing award on the USC Scripter Awards, and the present was nominated for a Restricted Sequence WGA Award earlier this 12 months.
Say Nothing is advised by way of the eyes of Dolours Worth and Marian Worth. Zetumer says the present follows the sisters on a “thirty-year journey from idealism to disillusionment.”
The younger girls turned symbols of radical politics and the sequence explores the way in which this deeply divided society tipped over into armed battle and highlights the lengthy shadow of radical violence, and the emotional and psychological prices of a code of silence.
One of many important automobiles for the story is the Belfast Mission, a sequence of interviews organized by Boston School that may function a useful resource for historians with the promise that the interviews would solely be launched after the topic’s demise.
In episode 9, “The Folks within the Dust,” as the main points of McConville’s demise turn into clearer, the emotional toll of the wrestle additionally comes into focus. Dolours claims that she and Marian solely drove McConville to her execution however, later, it seems that Marian was the one who pulled the set off. Marian denies this and Gerry Adams, who’s portrayed as a senior IRA commander, additionally denies being concerned, in addition to being a member of the IRA.
In his intro to the script for the finale, Zetumer speaks of the problem of adapting Radden Keefe’s “complicated” and “thorny” e book with out letting the venture “collapse below its personal weight” and educating himself as an American to put in writing Belfast dialogue with out talking in a Belfast accent.
Joshua Zetumer
Getty Photographs
Say Nothing tells the story of two Catholic sisters, Dolours and Marian Worth, who develop up amid the chaos roiling Belfast within the late Nineteen Sixties. They start as keen younger activists making an attempt to vary the world, however after being injured throughout a peace march, the sisters take up arms and be a part of the
Irish Republican Military. Dolours and Marian nonetheless need to change the world, however quickly imagine that violence is the one strategy to do it. Over the course of 9 episodes, the sequence examines the fallout of that call, following the sisters on a thirty-year journey from idealism to disillusionment.On this episode — the finale, entitled “The Folks within the Dust” — we find the Worth sisters nearing the tip of that lengthy journey. By now they’ve spent their youth fighting for a united Eire and paid a heavy worth for his or her beliefs. They’ve watched buddies die, they’ve planted bombs, they’ve practically died themselves on starvation strike. All of it in service of 1 purpose: to drive the British out of Northern Eire. The sisters are horrified when their childhood good friend, Gerry Adams, helps architect a peace deal that permits the British to remain. Now in middle-age, Dolours is thrown right into a tailspin. If the British aren’t leaving, then what was all of it for??
With the Peace Course of years behind her, Dolours now spends lengthy nights self-medicating with alcohol and burning with an anger that she will be able to scarcely management. Most of all, she needs to speak, to course of her trauma by breaking the IRA’s code of silence and confessing to all she’s accomplished in service of her beliefs. Within the first scene of the finale, we find Dolours prepared to return clear about her function in some of the notorious crimes within the Troubles: the kidnapping and homicide of widowed mother-of-10, Jean McConville.
I spent five years making Say Nothing, and there wasn’t a month that glided by after I didn’t suppose it was all going to collapse. The sequence is predicated on an excellent e book by Patrick Radden Keefe, which must be required studying for anybody inquisitive about the price of political violence. However the e book can also be so complicated, so thorny — and my very own ambitions for the sequence had been so huge — that I assumed certainly the entire endeavor would sometime collapse below its personal weight. Now, six months after premiering, I feel I’m nonetheless in shock that we had been in a position to convey this complicated, highly effective story to the display screen.
Writing Say Nothing felt like strolling on a tightrope. Firstly, I needed the present to be accessible to audiences who’d by no means heard of the Troubles. On the similar time, I needed the sequence to be genuine right down to the little granular particulars. As an American, the first factor I needed to do was educate myself to put in writing Belfast dialogue with out talking in a Belfast accent myself. Over the course of writing, I held interviews with ex-IRA members, travelled to Belfast, learn each e book in regards to the Troubles that I might get my arms on. I had in depth conversations with our forged from Northern Eire in addition to our director Michael Lennox (Derry Women). At one level, I used to be conducting a lot on-line analysis that Google’s algorithms truly thought I used to be in Belfast and commenced giving me restaurant suggestions on the Falls Street.
Even with an obsessive showrunner on the helm, this sequence would’ve gone nowhere with out the outsized skills of our writers’ room. So lastly, a large THANK YOU to Clare Barron, Joe Murtagh, Kirsten Sheridan, and to our author’s assistant, Andrew Lewis. With out you, we’d’ve been misplaced.
Joshua Zetumer
Learn the script under.
