The new Forsyte Saga is not a straight adaptation of "male-centric novels", says Poldark creator

“I think it was Damien who first mentioned The Forsyte Saga,” says Horsfield. “I mean, I’m all for anything with ‘saga’ in the title.”

Horsfield and Timmer were of course familiar with the previous dramatisations of John Galworthy’s novels, from 1967 and 2002. The former was a sprawling 26 parts from the BBC and is widely regarded as a TV classic. “It’s spoken about with hushed reverence,” Timmer notes. “And then there’s the Granada version for ITV at the turn of this century.”

As Tuppence Middleton, who plays Frances Forsyte, says, “It hasn’t been done as often as some of the other big classics, but there’s still a reputation to live up to.”

What Timmer intended to do was to “make a version for now. In our ever more divided society, there is a real parallel with that late Victorian era. We wanted to take a magnifying glass to this extremely wealthy family who are the one per cent.”

Prior to Poldark, adapted from Winston Graham’s novels, Horsfield was known for big, messy family dramas like Making Out, The Riff Raff Element and Cutting It. “I’m from a big family and family dynamics have always fascinated me. I’ve written a lot about inter-generational conflict, and I don’t necessarily mean in a grim, serious way, but only ever my own original ideas, all contemporary and pretty much all set in Manchester, where I’m from. Then Poldark came along and it was very much new territory.”

New to adaptation, Horsfield says, “Initially, I was nervous about taking on someone else’s characters, but I quickly realised I had to imagine they were my characters, to get inside their heads and understand what made them tick. So I did that and Poldark seemed to go OK.”

Clearly, Horsfield has an aptitude for adaptation. “She’s so good at distilling a saga, keeping lots of different characters in play and knowing what each character’s story is,” says Timmer. “Which are exactly the skills you need to wrangle Galsworthy’s stories about the rich, troubled and often awful Forsytes.”

From the shrewd, ruthless and controlling Soames and his oppressed but defiant wife Irene, to the bohemian Young Jolyon (who, despite being the first-born male heir, has little interest in the family firm and prefers making art to making money), the Forsytes are A Lot.

“We’re synthesising Galsworthy, a bit of The Age of Innocence and a lot of Dallas,” Timmer says. “I want Oil Barons’ Ball vibes going on.” And that’s not even the half of it.

“If you go back to the books,” he says, “a lot of the real meaty drama is actually hidden and the female characters aren’t well drawn at all. Irene, for example, is a shadowy figure who is really difficult to engage with because you never really understand her motivations.”

To excavate the hidden drama from the novels and to illuminate their female characters would take Horsfield and Timmer another two years of walks on the Heath, he explains, “thinking about the timeline and talking about the family – who was and wasn’t there”.

“We were clear from the word go that we weren’t going to do a straight adaptation of these male-centric novels,” says Horsfield. “What we wanted to do was redress the balance by fleshing out the women – but not at the expense of the men.”

With their vision clear and Horsfield’s teeth well and truly stuck in – not to mention source material that was out of copyright so there was no need to buy the rights – Timmer had to find someone to commission it and foot the bill. He eschewed UK broadcasters “because we didn’t think they’d have a huge amount of interest”. Besides, “PBS really wanted it.”

The American Public Broadcasting Service has had a long relationship with British costume drama, usually topping up budgets in return for the rights to show dramas such as Pride and Prejudice as part of its Masterpiece strand in the US. “It became clear early on that if they wanted it, they’d have to pay much more than they are used to,” says Timmer. “But they did want it, so they stepped up.”

Timmer won’t be drawn on the The Forsytes’ budget, beyond saying that “it is substantially higher than our previous shows for PBS – Poldark, Victoria and Endeavour – and ten years ago, would have seemed eye-wateringly expensive.

But drama costs have gone up a lot and now we’re competing with Apple and Netflix shows, there’s this kind of arms race inflation.”

So is The Forsytes made for an American audience? “We’re making it with a sense of what we thought would work for a kind of broad audience around the world who enjoy a British costume drama,” he says, carefully. “And we’re making it for ourselves.”

Horsfield has been true to her word. The 2025 version of The Forsyte Saga – just called The Forsytes as Timmer thought “saga” felt “a bit fusty” – is definitely not a straight adaptation. Moving the rival families of brothers James and Jolyon Senior into houses next door to each other and creating a family stockbroking business qualify as minor changes to Galsworthy’s world, given that with this first series Horsfield has, in effect, written a prequel to his novels – one in which Young Jolyon’s first wife Frances is not yet dead and, in fact, finds herself in a love triangle with her husband and a woman with whom he was in love prior to marrying her. (In the novels, Young Jolyon has had an affair with the nanny.)

Where previous adaptations have focused on Soames and Irene’s toxic marriage, they’ve only just met in the first episode of Horsfield’s version. In doing what Stephen Moyer, who plays Jolyon Senior, calls “rewinding so we can see the origins of the stories that will propel the drama for three or four or five seasons”, Horsfield has broadened The Forsytes’ horizons by extending their timeline beyond the three novels and two interludes that constitute The Forsyte Saga in print. The result is an original, compelling and thoroughly modern period drama.

Jack Davenport, who plays James Forsyte, was especially struck by Horsfield’s exploration of who wields power. “Because power isn’t handed to women on a plate in the way that it is for the men, the women have a self-awareness that the men absolutely do not. The men are powerful but clueless, and that makes for a fantastic tension.”

With the financing in place and Horsfield thinking of the characters as her own – some of them were her own, after all – it was soon time to put faces to them all.

“I love casting an ensemble,” says Timmer. “It is such fun and terrifying because you’re never quite sure how it’s going to work. It was easier with the older characters because we generally got our first choice – and it’s not like that all the time”. The challenge came in casting the leading men Young Jolyon and Soames. “We saw what felt like 300 actors for Soames and Jolyon. Every British actor with a pulse under 30 who was vaguely handsome, and about 80 Australian actors.” Among the throng were Danny Griffin and Joshua Orpin.

“I initially auditioned for Young Jolyon,” says Orpin, who plays Soames. “That classic romantic leading man character is, more often than not, the sort of part I’m given to audition for. After that, I was asked to read for Soames and immediately I thought, ‘Wow!’ Morally ambiguous and darker than Jolyon, I’d much rather play him.”

Griffin, who also auditioned for both roles, couldn’t be happier playing Young Jolyon – not least because he gets lots of scenes with Tuppence Middleton as his wife Frances. Hot from the success of The Motive and the Cue, the National Theatre play by Jack Thorne and directed by Sam Mendes, Middleton was Timmer and Horsfield’s first choice for Frances.

“She is another level, so professional and her acting is just really… still,” Griffin says. “And if I decide to take a line one way and try it that way, Tuppence always follows so she’ll never do the same scene the exact same way. I love that!”

With the female characters moved centre-stage, Irene is imbued with actual character by Horsfield, where previously she was remembered for something done to her. Audiences in 1967 were shocked by the rape of Irene (Nyree Dawn Porter) by her husband Soames (Eric Porter) – to demonstrate that she is his property – though you have to wonder if it was the brutality itself that shocked or the fact that it was being depicted on television. Marital rape wasn’t criminalised in Scotland until 1989 and 1991 in England so would have been part of many viewers lived experience, even as discussing it remained taboo. (That scene will take place in the second series of The Forsytes.)

Doctor Who and Coronation Street alumna Millie Gibson takes on the mantle of Irene and is grateful for the opportunity, despite the gruelling nature of the part. “I don’t think a lot of casting directors see me as a heroine yet so it was nice to step into those shoes,” she says. Not that she thought she’d got the part. “I auditioned on Zoom and it was really hard. I had no sense of how I was coming across and afterwards I thought, ‘Well, that was awful.’ Literally a week later, I got a call asking if I’d be Irene.”

For the key role of Louisa, the seamstress who has history – and perhaps a future – with Young Jolyon, Horsfield knew they’d need someone who would bring “nuance and vulnerability but also humour and strength”. The writer says, “It’s very different to the character she played previously for me, but I knew she’d be brilliant.” Step forward, Poldark’s Demelza herself, Eleanor Tomlinson.

“I got a call from Damien asking me to lunch and thought, ‘Oh hello!’ ” says Tomlinson. “They sent me the scripts and I immediately started getting excitement flutters. We spoke about the character and who she was and what her journey was. And that was it. I was hooked.”

The first series of The Forsytes was filmed last summer and the cast have just finished filming the second. There is at least a third to come. Fired and inspired by Galsworthy’s novels, Horsfield’s imagination could run to several more series. The books conclude with the next generation of the family (who are a long way off being born yet) reaching adulthood. And even that needn’t be the end of the story – though they might have to reattach the “Saga” to the title.

After all, Horsfield’s The Forsytes is about intergenerational conflict, the weight of expectation passed down through families, and just how present the past is. The future, meanwhile, is full of possibility. Just as long journeys start with single steps, paths are made by walking them.

The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here.

The Forsytes will launch on 5 on Monday 20th October at 9pm.

Check out more of our Drama coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more TV recommendations and reviews, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.