'Blue Lights' Creators On Viewing The Troubles from All Sides & Season 3 Ideas
In its second season, the engrossing cop shop/found family drama Blue Lights has continued to delve deeply and sensitively into daily life among the officers of a Belfast police precinct. This season’s overarching plot directly addresses the continuing echoes of The Troubles, the sectarian civil war that tore through Northern Ireland for decades before the 1998 Good Friday Agreement formally brought peace to the region.
In advance of the second season’s final episodes arriving on BritBox, Blue Lights co-creators and writers Declan Lawn and Adam Patterson sat down with Telly Visions to talk about how their work as investigative journalists provided a natural pivot point to working in scripted drama, the freedom fiction provides to think through real-world issues, and what the direction of Seasons 3 and 4 may take.
Lawn and Patterson met in 1999 through their work on the London-based news program Panorama for the BBC, Patterson behind the camera and Lawn on screen. Before working on Panorama, Patterson’s background was in still photography, “Looking at social justice in the UK, Ireland, and traveling the world.” Like Lawn, he draws on a deep well of personal and national history to plumb the experiences of humans living and working in extreme environments, concluding that “at some stage, if you’re going to tell an honest story about where you’re from, you need to start looking at” historical trauma and its personal ramifications.
