characters

Created by Joshua Zetumer, who adapts Patrick Radden Keefe‘s multiple award-winning 2018 nonfiction book, subtitled “A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland,” it focuses instead on a handful of characters, their activities and relationships.

There is some violence onscreen, or just offscreen, perpetrated by or against the characters — you feel it in either case.

For example, when China banned TV shows depicting same-sex kissing or hand-holding in 2016, producers found they could use shots of eye contact between characters to communicate intimacy.

Like a nonfiction novel, Keefe’s book traces five decades of thorny history from the perspective of real-life characters, including the notorious Price sisters, Marian and Dolours, I.R.A. militants whose prison hunger strikes made front-page news in the 1970s, and Gerry Adams, the political leader who helped bring peace to Northern Ireland but has been accused of participating in atrocities committed during the height of the conflict.

“We really tried to ground it in the emotional perspective of the characters at every moment,” Zetumer said.