Mickey Down

Well, I mean, we actually had a few different permutations of the main character.

And, you know, all the characters that surround Harper are kind of analogues of people we know.

They're people who went to university, were at school.

They're people we worked with.

But Harper felt like... Composites.

Yeah, composites.

But, like...

Firstly, we realized we were writing for an American audience, even though the show is sort of UK based.

So we wanted to kind of lend America lens into it.

And then we thought, if we're doing a show about people with least amount of power trying to accrue it, let's just like actually kind of figure out the person who has the least amount of power and is the most marginalized.

And that's not necessarily to say that we're going to write her towards that.

And she's going to be, you know, she's going to make excuses because she's marginalized, but we're going to create a character who would feel like the whole world against her in this world.

That's the aspirational cruelty.

That's the sort of thing that if you went away for five minutes and could write down your feelings that you might say to someone that you want to hurt.

That's not something you'd probably say in the moment.

We had to do that as well because, you know, we were a lot of... We'd have the budget for car chases.

Exactly.

We ride a lot of dense two-handers.

We have to make them feel like they're electric.

Mad Men has always been influential to the show, but like Peep Show, Girls, obviously in the first season, we wanted to write a show about ambitious people who are really, you know, quite hard to like sometimes.