Detective Ember Manning played by Jenna Coleman. Photo / BBC
Detective Ember Manning played by Jenna Coleman. Photo / BBC
BBC’s new series The Jetty will hit screens in New Zealand on July 21. The show’s lead actress, Jenna Coleman, creator Cat Jones, executive producer Elizabeth Kilgarriff, and director Marialy Rivas speak with the Herald as part of a panel discussion, revealing what fans can expect from the production.
Actress Jenna Coleman sits in front of a cinema screen. Her light brown hair is parted perfectly down the middle, soft waves flowing through it. Her chiffon pink dress delicately cradling her baby bump.
But Coleman isn’t here to discuss her effortless beauty nor her soon-to-arrive first child. Coleman - most well-known for her role as Clara Oswald in Doctor Who is here for a much more serious reason, her upcoming show, The Jetty.
Created by Cat Jones, executive produced by Elizabeth Kilgarriff, and directed by Marialy Rivas, all of whom sit beside the actress on the panel, the upcoming mini-series is a coming of age production disguised as an intriguing detective murder mystery.
“It’s complicated,” Coleman chuckles as she tells the Herald of the show which centres on her character, Detective Ember Manning.
“There’s almost so much subtext, there’s so much between the lines, and there’s so many different layers and levels that she’s living that in a way, you can either go in either direction and all of them are right.”
It’s a perfect way to describe the four-episode BBC drama, which includes teenage pregnancies, age gap relationships, murder and a lot of mystery, all of which have you putting on your own detective - or journalist hat - and wanting to point fingers.
But despite the heavy themes and complex story, Jones elaborates on Coleman’s confession, “It’s not a show in which the women are good and the men are bad,” she explains.
With characters ranging from the light-hearted, like Manning’s humorous sidekick, Hitch (Archie Renaux), to Riz Samuel (Weruche Opia), a very serious podcast crime journalist and even the protagonist’s headstrong teenage daughter, Hannah (Ruby Stokes), Jones says her show, unlike other detective mysteries, isn’t intended to lay blame.
“With very few exceptions, I don’t think there are any characters in the show that aren’t redeemable in some way. There are no heroes or villains.”
Detective Ember Manning (Jenna Coleman) and her daughter Hannah (Ruby Stokes). Photo / BBC
In fact, her show is intended to be a mirror of sorts, “Detective dramas, all audiences are fascinated by them because we’re fascinated by ourselves and they’re a great way to explore human behaviours,” she says.
“When I’m watching those shows, and they do it well, I’m sitting there going ‘wow, this behaviour is really extreme and hopefully, I’m not capable of that but maybe I’m capable of a version of it or the impulse behind it and maybe the person sitting next to me on the sofa is too.’”
The first episode sets that exact tone when Manning discovers that the arson case she’s been assigned to solve in her small Lancashire town may be about to unravel everything in her life - including the truths she would rather not confront.
As a viewer, you begin thinking of your own secrets and truths you hide from, but you’re also left with multiple suspicions and theories and even the biggest murder-mystery fanatic may be confused by the answer.
Is the story about the arson case? Is it something else? The answer is as complicated as the case and right at the centre of it is Manning.
“How Emma [Manning] went about solving the case was always gonna be very intertwined with her looking at her own life and her own past,” Jones says. She then pauses, pondering whether or not to share the next detail, “she’s investigating herself,” she teasingly confesses.
As for what exactly that means, it is something the group of women say you need to watch the full four episodes to truly understand, and even then you may be left with questions.
“You want to take the audience sort of on a rollercoaster,” Kingarriff reveals. She continues to explain that with the characters feeling “very real”, it means it will reflect the “very grey spaces” humans exist in, helping viewers connect more easily to the story.
Detective Ember Manning (Jenna Coleman) and her partner, Hitch (Archie Renaux). Photo / BBC
“It does have some heavy themes, and it exists in the grey area, which is where I think good drama sits,” Jones says, adding it’s not for her to “impose” and state what they should take away from the story with but rather to produce something that makes the viewer “ask questions”.
.Jones continues to say she doesn’t necessarily even want people to have the same questions or theories.
“I’d love it if people were watching this and really disagreeing, sitting in their living rooms, really disagreeing about what they see. That would be fantastic,” she chuckles.
The Jetty is available to stream in New Zealand from July 21 on Neon.
Lillie Rohan is a London-based reporter covering lifestyle and entertainment stories who joined the Herald in 2020. She specialises in all things reality TV, films and music.
