Today Piers Wenger, Controller of BBC Drama, has announced that Nicole Taylor, Michaela Coel and Sally Rooney will author three brand new drama series for BBC One, BBC Two and BBC Three.
Nicole Taylor pens emotional thriller The Nest for BBC One, while Michaela Coel is writing a landmark drama for BBC Two Jan 22nd (working title) and Sally Rooney will be adapting her forthcoming novel Normal People for BBC Three.
The Nest
BBC One
This emotional thriller is written by BAFTA award-winning writer Nicole Taylor (Three Girls).
The Nest is a six-part fictional drama that explores the consequences of a pact between a wealthy couple and a teenage girl that changes all of their lives forever.
Dan and Emily are crazy about each other. They live in a huge house in the nicest part of Glasgow and want for nothing. All that’s missing is a baby – and they’ve been trying for years. Through a chance encounter they meet Kaya, an 18 year old from the other side of the city, whose life is as precarious at theirs is comfortable. When Kaya agrees to carry their baby, it feels like they were meant to meet but was it really by chance?
Who is Kaya and what has brought her to this couple? Can the dreams of Kaya, Emily and Dan be fulfilled or have all three embarked on a relationship of mutually assured destruction?
The Nest is an emotional thriller about love and money, and the price of being able to buy whatever you want.
Jan 22nd
BBC Two
A brand new drama series created by, written by and starring Michaela Coel.
This fearless, frank and provocative series explores the question of sexual consent in contemporary life and how, in the new landscape of dating and relationships, we make the distinction between liberation and exploitation.
Set in London, where gratification is only an app away, the story centres on Arabella (Coel) whose raw and personal experience of consent sits at the heart of the story. Through Arabella we meet a group of fictional friends and colleagues whose sexual adventures frequently collide with a world in which new codes of sexual practice are emerging...
Creator Michaela Coel says “I feel weirdly overwhelmed and honoured to be making something again, something I’m making myself, with a great team.”
Normal People
BBC Three
An adaptation of Sally Rooney’s highly-anticipated forthcoming novel Normal People which will be directed by Oscar-nominated Irish film Director Lenny Abrahamson.
Just 18 months after Sally Rooney’s critically acclaimed debut novel Conversations with Friends, BBC Drama has announced an adaptation of her forthcoming novel Normal People, adapted by Sally Rooney herself.
The series will be directed by Lenny Abrahamson (Room, Frank) and produced by Element Pictures (Room, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, The Lobster).
Normal People is an exquisite, modern love story about how one person can unexpectedly change another person's life and about how complicated intimacy can be. Over several years, we follow Marianne and Connell - both from a small west of Ireland town, but from very different backgrounds – as they embark on an on-off romance that starts at school and continues through college, as they test their relationship, experiment with other partners and explore different versions of themselves.
The book is full of all the awkwardness, humour and confusion that accompanies love and sex and offers the opportunity to make a television show about being young that is frank, smart and intoxicating.