The Secret Sauce of Your Sitcom

And how to be 'puzzlingly authentic'.

Bluestone 42 – a show I co-created and co-wrote for BBC – has just been declared the 2nd Best Military TV show of all time. By SlashFilm (me neither).

This throws up two questions.

#1 What was the Best?

Okay. Inevitable question. A show called DP. (Again, me neither). SlashFilm writes:

South Korean Netflix drama, which stands for “Deserter Pursuit,” lays bare the base human motivations at the core of our sometimes exalted military structures… morose, cynical, or even melodramatically “grimdark.”… D.P. is a stone-cold bummer.

This is quite a contrast to Bluestone 42:

Take the IED-detecting sequences from The Hurt Locker, one of Kathryn Bigelow’s best films, and cross them with the awkward character-driven comedy of Peep Show, and you’ll find the peculiar cocktail poured by Bluestone 42.

So here’s the second question:

#2 What did we do right on Bluestone 42?

TV is a collaboration. You can’t make a sitcom on your own. Actually, you can now. You couldn’t back in the early 2010s when we started on this journey. But every sitcom is an amalgamation of script, cast, production, research, promotion, music.

We had plenty of luck. We found an exec who believed in Richard Hurst and me, backing our idea to the hilt, even though the sitcom was set in an active war zone. We were given a brilliant producer who worked extremely hard to bring this show to life in a foreign country far away. We found a fantastic cast who inhabited each character and made them their own. The art department created a forward operating base in Afghanistan, along with military vehicles, in a field just outside Stellenbosch in South Africa. We found a director who got the vibe. We had a military advisor who knew exactly what we were trying to do.

But you’re still not sure until you see it played back on a screen. And I can still remember watching a roughly edited assembly of a scene we’d shot. I breathed a huge sigh of relief. We were all making the same show. The show we’d all imagined was the show we were shooting. Thereafter, we had a lot of fun, which helped ease the pain of a huge amount of work.

So what did we do right on Bluestone 42? Got lucky? Great advice. Thanks, James. Click ‘unsubscribe’.

No, no. That’s not the advice. I’m not saying that any sitcom requires luck and some kind of alignment of planets. Great people have made really ordinary sitcoms that have vanished without trace. Steve Coogan, a great comedy actor, made Saxondale. And nobody cared. Paul Mayhew-Archer, who co-wrote The Vicar of Dibley, wrote Office Gossip. And nobody cared. Listen to Dave Cohen and me talk to Steven Moffat about Chalk.

Here’s the one thing we did right: we knew what the show was about.

When we came up with the idea, we were seeing shows on BBC3 like Our War, depicting soldiers as victims. But that’s not how soldiers see it. Most of them want to deploy and put their skills to the test in a hot war situation. Those who don’t want to do that tend not to join up, or make it through the training.

So what is Bluestone 42 really about? We knew the answer to that from the start.

Bluestone 42 is about why soldiers love being soldiers.

It was something that cast, crew and production could get behind and gather around. It made a lot of creative decisions easier. You need that in your sitcom. Ask yourself: what’s this show really about?

That makes sense of the kind words from SlashFilm who say this:

The show is often laugh-out-loud funny, but beyond bleak in what it finds funny. In this way, I find it to be courageous, a piece of satirical bravery that goes deeper and harder into the human condition than many “serious” military shows. By presenting the soldiers warts and all, and then placing them into the most serious situations imaginable, I don’t think it dehumanizes members of the military. I think it honors them in its own puzzlingly authentic way.

“Puzzlingly authentic.” I’ll take that on a T-shirt, thanks.

For UK readers - and anyone outside with a VPN - Bluestone 42 is on iPlayer.

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I’m planning on running some in-person workshops in the autumn: practical experience in working in a room, breaking stories and plotting. It should be a really fun day. It could even be two days! And it’s all the fun without the work of actually having to write the script. Unless you want to, I suppose.

There be at least one in London since all transport leads to London. But open to offers in running it elsewhere. Do get in touch. Reply to this email - or leave a comment below.