Two Cities’ Michael Jackson On ‘Army Of Shadows’ & ‘The Yank’

EXCLUSIVE: One might not think of a niche indie movie about the French resistance as the basis for a show to take your drama company up a notch, but Two Cities Television boss Michael Jackson has other ideas.

In a world where a Reddit forum can lay the foundation for one of the biggest box office hits of the year, Jackson explained to Deadline why he has always had a nagging feeling that Jean Pierre Melville’s 1969 film Army of Shadows can become the next big TV hit, with a little reimagining of course.

“I had loved the movie for years,” said Jackson, who is based out of Two Cities’ New York office. “We started developing it as a period drama about the French resistance and to be honest it wasn’t hugely surprising when people didn’t want to make it. Stephen [Wright, Two Cities Television Co-CEO] had the idea one day to make it a contemporary story about Americans invited to Britain by a populist government, and, hey presto, a British resistance forms.”

This retooling of old IP secured a greenlight from Channel 4 and Canal+, and Jackson and Wright enlisted Ronan Bennett, the award-winning adapter of The Day of the Jackal, to oversee proceedings.

“Michael [Jackson] has an encyclopaedic knowledge of TV and film, which is incredibly helpful in terms of shaping conversations or ideas,” explained Wright of the show’s inception. “He came into the office one day and said, ‘Have you seen this film Army of Shadows?’ I watched it and said, ‘Ronan Bennett is the person to adapt this’.”

Filming is well underway and while Two Cities is keeping schtum on cast, the execs tell us it’s going to be a big one. Using the underlying works of the original Army of Shadows, the show sees a former British Army officer build a covert resistance cell from scratch — navigating betrayal, moral compromise and the tension between patience and action — as young recruits fight to reclaim their country and their futures.

Jackson is one of a rare breed that has experience in senior roles on both sides of the pond, having run BBC One and Channel 4 in the UK and USA Entertainment – where he was responsible for the USA and Syfy networks – in the States. For Army of Shadows, he and Wright have a British and French co-producer plus access to deficit financing from distributor Studiocanal. With the politics of the show in mind, they are happy at this point to play the waiting game for an American sale, coming a few weeks after Russell T. Davies told us it would have been “hard to raise American money” for his new show Tip Toe due to its “clear condemnation of Trump,” although the finished tape just sold to Starz.

“Politics moves so quickly and by the time you finish and deliver a show the room can change,” added Wright. “The market can change just as quickly.”

Army of Shadows doesn’t have a TX but the team will be keen to get it out quickly in order to tap into a local and global feeling of political discontent. A few weeks after Deadline chatted with Two Cities, the populist Reform UK party won hundreds of seats at the local elections, proving a catalyst for the resignation of Britain’s sixth Prime Minister in 10 years and coming amid rioting in the streets following the death of the teenager Henry Nowak at the hands of the police.

“There’s something out there, something in the zeitgeist,” said Wright. “We live in a very febrile political atmosphere and we live in an atmosphere particularly in England where violence on the street can happen very quickly. I’d hope that’s why it resonates. People are feeling frustrated and not heard.”

That “febrile” feeling has made its way into Two Cities’ long-running BBC Northern Ireland police drama Blue Lights, which features an episode about rioting in its upcoming fourth season that was filmed just before real-life rioting took place in Belfast following a knife attack for which a Sudanese man was charged with attempted murder. “It’s disheartening,” said Wright. “There’s been a problem with racism in Ireland for some time.”

Army of Shadows and Blue Lights are perfect examples of what Two Cities, which is about to turn 10, is trying to achieve, as the STV Studios-backed company looks to combine limited series based on interesting IP with lower-budget returners. Other credits that fall into the first camp include Sky’s Amadeus and the award-winning Patrick Melrose for the same network starring Benedict Cumberbatch.

“One helps keep the operation going and gives you the run room to develop the other,” said Jackson. “It occupies different parts of your brain as a producer to think about something that’s very finely honed in the way that say Patrick Melrose or Amadeus were compared with something ripped from the headlines that has a yearly release like Blue Lights.”

IP is of course the name of the game and the success of the likes of Backrooms, which emerged from a Reddit forum and is now A24’s top grossing movie of all time, has enthused Jackson and Wright. As is the case with Army of Shadows, they are keen to treat IP smartly.

“Its heartening to see the success of Backrooms and the failure of The Mandalorian and Grogu,” added Jackson. “There are really obscure plots that you can kind of pillage and work with as starting points. It’s a cliché but there are no new stories, just contemporary equivalents of those stories.”

Landing ‘Star Trek’ icon for next show

Two Cities’ other big upcoming show is The Yank starring Star Trek icon Kate Mulgrew, another original story that has a distinctly old IP feel to it.

Mulgrew stars opposite Colm Meaney as a seasoned NYPD detective taking a career break following a traumatic event and moving to her family home on the West Coast of Ireland. Expecting a change of pace, she is instead unexpectedly pulled into a murder investigation involving a female climate activist.

The Yank is writer Eithne Verling’s debut drama and was created specifically for Mulgrew after the pair had a chance meeting in Galway while the actor was on holiday. “Eithne threw in her job, wrote all six episodes and pushed through the whole madness of production,” said Wright. “So we’re not just launching a show, we’re launching a new writing career, and Kate’s experience and years in the industry give Eithne that support.”

Jackson said The Yank, which is an original for Irish broadcaster RTÉ and has deficit financing from distributor ITV Studios, is another example of Two Cities “taking a bit more control of our own destiny” by making a lower-budget show for which they have almost total editorial control. “We’re assembling lower cost pieces, giving us more wherewithal to make our own decisions as opposed to just constantly relying on the big order from somebody.”

As Two Cities turns 10, the success of Army of Shadows and The Yank, neither of which have American buyers as of yet, could set the tone for its future. Also upcoming is a proof-of-concept short film with James Nesbitt and Industry star Conor Macneill about terminal illness titled So You’re Going to Die, which the team is continuing to develop.

The highly-experienced Jackson is reflective in our interview about an industry that sometimes feels as though “everything and nothing changes,” as he harks back to setting up Two Cities last decade with Alex Graham.

“You imagine that you open up shop and the next day the mailman brings in a whole bunch of scripts and ideas, you sift through them, and you think, ‘That’s a good one, let’s package and sell it’,” he added. “But no, the mailman delivers circulars and nothing else. You have to go out and create your own luck, and that is about finding IP, but also about having ideas.”