Crossfire writer explains Keeley Hawes thriller’s multiple timelines
The BBC drama swaps back and forth between timelines.
New BBC drama Crossfire follows a woman named Jo who finds her world turned upside down when gunmen attack the hotel where she and her family are staying on holiday with friends.
The three-part series is a tense thriller, but the episodes punctuate the attack with scenes from different moments in time, skipping backwards and forwards.
The show's creator Louise Doughty spoke to RadioTimes.com and other press about this decision and explained why the format worked particularly well for this story.
She said: "Chris [Carey, executive producer] and I, one of our many standard jokes, was that I was discovering my inner Christopher Nolan. I just love a fractured timescale, I like an intense story, and I try and do it in the novels as well; an intense story that's going on in the present but then with flashbacks and flash forwards and kind of shards of information that come in."
Doughty continued: "And it just so happened that that particular methodology works very well for the Crossfire story, because the attack takes place in real time, in less than an hour, but we have a three hour show to show the different things that are happening to different characters at the same time, and then to go backwards and forwards."
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Doughty went on to explain that it also worked thematically, as it helped to express the way victims of these attacks often perceive their experiences.
She explained: "It worked well with the idea that trying to show people who go through these extraordinary experiences, that it's a kind of hinge of existence. You know, it can feel as though everything that happened before led up to that moment, and everything that happens after leads away.
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"And it feeds very much into Jo's guilt, because what she's feeling is, 'This all happened because I had a New Year's Eve party, because that's the point at which I had the idea,' and, 'Was that the point where this whole hideous event began? I had a few drinks at New Year's Eve, I had this idea, that's how come we all ended up there.'
"That awful feeling of responsibility, 'If I'd made one other small decision, we wouldn't have ended up there,' that works well with the fractured timeframe."
Additional reporting by Abby Robinson.
Crossfire starts on Tuesday 20th September 2022 at 9pm on BBC One and BBC iPlayer. Check out more of our Drama coverage or visit our TV Guide to see what's on tonight.
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