Chris Chibnall on his most controversial Broadchurch decision – and whether the show could ever return

Chris Chibnall, the writer behind new Agatha Christie series Seven Dials and the former showrunner of Doctor Who, is also known for creating the smash hit crime-drama Broadchurch, which aired on ITV1 between 2013 and 2017.

The first run was very self-contained, so viewers were somewhat surprised when the show returned for a second and third season. However, Chibnall has always stressed that envisioned the series as a three-part story from the off.

Now, speaking with us exclusively for our video interview series The Radio Times Writers' Room, in which we get to know what makes screenwriters tick, Chibnall re-affirmed this, but said that he never actually thought "we'd get past episode 2".

When asked whether his plans ever change due to the success of season 1, Chibnall said they didn't at all, and that he had always planned for season 2 to follow the court case of the murderer from season 1, Joe Miller – a decision which turned out to be controversial with viewers.

Chibnall said: "I think there was such an interesting response in the UK – it didn't happen anywhere else, but in the UK – to season 2, when people realised it wasn't another dead body under the cliffs."

He continued: "I always pitched it as that it wasn't a place where lots of murders happened, but mainly also, I wanted to tell - because there'd been a lot of cases in the world that were sort of similar, and the thing I'd observed from reading a lot about it was that the trial process re-traumatised the victims, and that the sense of truth in the justice system was not the most important thing.

"And so I wanted to look at that and go, ‘What is that? Can you keep tracking that experience of that family and also those detectives through the process of having to put the killer on trial?’ So I think that was a definite shock to people, and very controversial at the time, but it didn't change.

"I was like, ‘That's the story’. And the conversation I had with ITV was very much, ‘There's not another dead body that is going to turn up, and it's not going to be that show. If we want to keep telling the story, then that's the next chapter of the story’.

"And I knew then that also the third season would be about sexual assault, because there's a lot of that, and we work very closely with the Dorset sexual assault referral centre. And that was the shape of it in in my mind, so that it didn't just become, lots of bodies on the beach."

When asked whether this meant that he never considered returning to the show for a fourth season, Chibnall confirmed that to be the case, although he added: "Sometimes you think, occasionally, over the years, you go, ‘Yeah, is there another story there?’"

"But I think you also have to accept when you've caught that lightning in a bottle," he continued. "And I think we really did with Broadchurch, especially now, when you look back at the cast for any of those seasons, and the incredible people we had in it, it's like, you're never going to replicate that.

"So it's such a privilege and an honour when a show lands, particularly in that way. But even, I still feel that about Born and Bred, it just landed, and it was a Sunday night fixture for four series. And you have to be careful not to then try and over juice it, or think that you know how the audience receives it, or what they want next, all that kind of stuff.

"You're always serving at the grace of the audience, and that changes. And so to just do the thing you've done isn't a guarantee of future success. So sometimes it's just like, ‘It was brilliant that we did that, and we don't need to try and replicate it, you know, five years down the line.'"

During his conversation for The Radio Times Writers' Room, Chibnall also spoke about his upcoming series Agatha Christie's Seven Dials, as well as his previous projects including Born and Bred, Life on Mars, Doctor Who and Torchwood.

Chris Chibnall's interview for The Radio Times Writers' Room will be available to watch in full on Thursday 15th January.

All three seasons of Broadchurch are available to watch now on ITVX and Netflix. Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials will launch on Netflix on 15th January 2026. Sign up for Netflix from £5.99 a month. Netflix is also available on Sky Glass and Virgin Media Stream.

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