
Mrksa stresses, rightly, that a nuts-and-bolts study of the British witness protection system might make a good documentary but that a compelling drama requires something more. Protection weaves in a secondary plot about how Liz Nyles is also coping with a parent with a dementia diagnosis, played by David Hayman. The dad is a former cop whose mental powers are on the wane after a stroke.
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“It’s when two different ideas collide in a useful way for me that I feel like I’ve got something worth pursuing creatively,” says Mrksa. “In this case, my wife and I were at that stage where we were in that sandwich position, with older parents who were needing quite a lot of support and help, and still having kids that were also needing active parenting.
“I mean, it’s not a unique situation, but I’d been thinking of writing about a character in that situation because it’s just where I found myself.”
A third plot strand in Protection comes from the fact that witness protection is a special branch of the police that is firewalled from the other police departments. That’s because even the smallest leak of information could jeopardise witness safety. And so, once again, in Protection, the prospect of police corruption rears its head, as Nyles starts to fear her unit has been compromised. This element, at least, sounds a little like a certain other hit UK police drama …
“Yeah, the shadow of Line of Duty was quite large,” says Mrksa, laughing. “And I certainly didn’t want to be treading into that territory.”
He says he drew on his experience writing Underbelly to try and take his show somewhere different.
“As a writer, one tends to want to humanise and give complexity to all of one’s characters,” he says. “One thing that I do try to remember is when I was doing Underbelly, one of the actors who was depicting a real-life person who had been a dreadful man — a murderer and a drug dealer and all the rest of it — he came to me and said, ‘You know what? You’re making my character too likeable.’”
Since then, Mrksa has wrestled with one of crime drama’s central dilemmas – why do we take so much pleasure watching awful people do awful things? And what should a writer have to say about all that awfulness?
“We do have a moral duty when we write TV,” he says. “I’m not suggesting that I’m trying to give people a moral lesson or something, but I would hate for my shows to be glorifying characters who really did do dreadful things.”
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Mrksa wrote several based-on-a-true-story series before turning his hand to outright fiction, so he understands the glamorisation of crime that has happened courtesy of true crime boom of the last few years.
“That’s a tricky thing with true crime in general,” he says. “Are you just sensationalising and trading on tragedy? It’s something that I take quite seriously.”
It’s something he appears to be getting right, either way. When we speak, Mrksa’s already working on a new crime project for Apple TV+ featuring Colin from Accounts’ Patrick Brammall. It’s called The Dispatcher, a police thriller that is set and is being made in Australia. He could tell us all about it, he says, but then he might need witness protection afterwards. Better to stay safe.