Kings Cross Season 1 Interview
Kings Cross airs its debut season September 2011, so JT Vaughn decided to sit down with creator Adam Scott (“Walker”, MZPtv’s “Sherlock Holmes” trilogy) for a quick chat.
Tell us a little bit about what Kings Cross is about.
On Monday morning, 46 people vanish off a train in broad daylight as it arrives at Kings Cross station. Then, half an hour later, five of them reappear out of nowhere with no memory of what happened in the meantime. The series follows what happens next as we follow the investigation into the disappearance, as well as the lives of the people affected by this.
What about the main characters; who are they and why are they so fun to write?
We have six regulars, and every one of them is fun to write but for very different reasons. Detective Inspector David Wyatt is our lead; he’s a London copper originally from Glasgow who forces his way into the investigation when his daughter, Kerry Ackroyd, gets mixed up in the event. The fun with these two centres around the relationship between the two of them, because you’ve got a father and a daughter trying to reconnect after having spent very little time together, which would be complicated enough without the sci-fi elements getting in the way.
Then there’s Malcolm King, who’s a barrister; his family vanished in the event and Malcolm was one of the initial five survivors. He unwittingly becomes the leader and spokesperson for the survivors – with Malcolm the fun comes from writing a man who’s lost everything but still has to hold it together and present a strong front for the public, when the reality is he’s holding on by his fingernails.
Then we’ve got Nicholas Woodward, who’s a scumbag reporter for a fictional red-top newspaper who ends up being landed with a large clue to the mystery – with him it’s the fun of writing a guy who’s interests are purely selfish, or they are initially.
And then we have Sarah Isley and Commander John Buchannan, who represent the official investigation; Sarah comes off as a bit of a cold fish initially but it turns out she’s hiding something massive that links her to the investigation, while with Buchannan it’s dealing with a guy who under normal circumstances would be the boss from hell, but is exactly the type of guy you need to be a bulldozer and lead the investigation to wherever it might take. I never get tired writing any of these guys, and they’re the focus of every single episode.
How did the genesis of the idea come about?
Out of a desire to do something totally different. I wanted to write a new pilot – serving on the pilot season panel has been hugely invaluable and taught me a lot about writing so I wanted to out those lessons into practise, stuff like focusing on your main characters without worrying about anyone else and telling a coherant story right now as opposed to just dropping vague hints about what might happen later. I wanted to take these lessons and write something with them. The idea for this was spawned by me thinking about the legend of the Marie Celeste, possibly the most famous ghost ship in history, and wondering what would be the modern equivalent. The whole story, beginning to end, fell into my head while buying a pint of milk, and I knew I had something worth doing here.
What was it about this story that made you desperate to tell it to the world?
It represented something totally different in my writing, something I’ve never quite done before and I don’t think has really been done on MZP before – a show very much about modern Britain and set firmly in the real world, with the added bonus of the long dramatic arc for the characters. I’d originally planned this as a mini-series but I realised I just had far too much plot to do in six episodes; sometimes the stories just take on a life of their own, and that’s thrilling to me as a writer.
A lot of your previous work involves the supernatural (Walker, Dominion, The Heretic), but has a decidedly more sci-fi flavour. Was that a conscious decision, or just a natural evolution?
It was very much a conscious decision. I wanted to try something different and test myself, because this is a genre I’d never written in before. Besides, I don’t want to get pigeon-holed as ‘dark supernatural guy’, so I very deliberately wanted to show a different side to my writing here. Before I had a story for this pilot what I fundamentally knew was what I didn’t want to write, which was anything supernatural. That was my starting point.
How do you approach the balance between telling big mythology stories and small character stories?
By telling the big mythology stories through the eyes of real people. Ultimately I’m not a writer who differentiates between plot and character too much – story is character, on a fundamental level, and I can get away with that here because a lot of my work tends to be situational anyway. What I like to do is create a situation (“What if a bunch of people vanished off a train…”) and then shove a bunch of characters into it and see what happens. This is on some levels a very plot-driven show, every episode will advance the arc of the story, so a key decision that I made upfront was that everything had to come out of the character of our regulars. We learn about them by seeing them in action.
Which do you think is more important, the show without these characters, or these character without the show?
See my previous answer. The characters, for me, are the fun part – none of these guys are trained for anything like this, they haven’t got a clue what they’re supposed to do, so the fun part is watching them to see how they’ll extricate themselves from the situation. For me the plot was what got me intrigued, but it’s the characters that make me want to keep telling it.
Do you think the show will go through big structural changes in each season (for example, “Lost” shifting from deep character study to genre-bending mythology-filled insanity), or is there a consistency in the story? If consistent, do you still foresee a big widening of the show’s universe and scope?
I’m hoping to keep things pretty consistent; like I said earlier, this show is very much grounded in the real world and I think the show you see in episode 1 will bear only minimal differences from the show that will end in the final episode.
Do you see Kings Cross as a 5 season show, or more of a short run?
I have a very definite end in mind for the show; we’ll see how long it takes us to get there. But what I won’t do is drag it out unnecessarily – when it feels right to end it, I’ll end it. I’d rather tell the story properly and have it end when it needs to.
Sell the show to your potential audience in a Tweet-sized portion (140 characters or less).
Mystery, action, intrigue, real characters, real emotions, some good gags and plenty of nasty things happening to keep you coming back for more.
