BBC One's Better: Leila Farzad and Andrew Buchan on complexity of characters in Leeds-based crime drama

When Lou’s son Owen (Zak Ford-Williams) has a life-threatening health scare, she begins to question her morality and considers how she can extricate herself from corruption.

But far from a ‘goodies and baddies’ procedral police drama, writers and creators Jonathan Brackley and Sam Vincent aimed to develop a piece which more deeply questioned our understanding of morality.

"Everything’s polarised,” says Brackley, talking to The Yorkshire Post at the show’s premiere at the Everyman cinema in Leeds on Wednesday. “There’s nowhere to explore in those places – absolute goods and absolute bads – the juice is in the middle.”

Vincent adds: “It’s an idea that’s been chewing at us for many years actually. The idea of a redemption story where redemption isn't a lightning strike moment, but it's a kind of long, painful struggle.”

As the character tries to untangle herself from corruption, it “flowers into multiple other interesting complications and questions about what is doing good or being bad. What do these things really mean? And how complicated our lives are when we try and do something good and it might have a bad effect that we never intended. I we do something bad it might have a good effect that we never intended.

"The grey areas are where all the interesting stuff is, nothing interesting happens in the extreme black or the extreme white. I don’t know particularly why we're so compelled by stories that have really great moral complexity – maybe we need to discuss it with our therapists - but that is what we wanted to explore.”

Lou Slack slips effortlessly from the doting mother role to cold underworld corruption.

Farzad says: “I think that kind of dichotomy lives in all of us and I feel the writers were very clever to paint a true portrait of a woman who can be both callous and cold, and nurturing and loving, because I think a lot of women are capable of that but it’s not often shown on television, so you are either a loving mum or a hard-nosed cop.”

Asked why, she adds: “I think that dates back to like ‘young beauty’ and ‘old hag’. It's a really hackneyed idea of what women should be and now we're breaking through all of that and we’re seeing women as these complicated, complex creatures, as men are as well. But I think youth and beauty, that kind of thing messed us up for a while and we're now breaking beyond.”

Col, too, has a storied history, growing up in Northern Ireland as part of a big crime family with a branch in Leeds.

The characters’ complexity was one of the show’s biggest “pulls and challenges,” says Buchan.

Speaking about the script, he says: “It wasn’t like anything I’d read before. It’s not a whodunit, and it’s not your typical ‘dot dot dot’.”

Buchan has previously shot in West Yorkshire with John Malkovich – a “salt of the earth actor’s actor” – and Rupert Grint for the ABC Murders.

Farzad, who was nominated for Best Supporting Actress at the 2021 BAFTA awards for her role in I Hate Suzie, loved filming in Leeds. Much of the crew were local, so talking to them helped the Londoner to portray an authentically Leeds character.

“I didn’t want to paint a veneer of what someone from Leeds was like. I made a couple of trips before we started filming and met the crew and connected with them and went out for cups of tea with them, and just tried to learn them. Because it’s not just the accent, it’s the whole ethos and culture and way of being. And then all the architecture and history of the place. I loved the process of it.”

She and co-stars Samuel Edward-Cook (who is from York and plays Lou’s husband Ceri) and Ford-Williams went for ‘family’ meals at Bill’s and Pizza Express to create a proper bond.

Locations featured in the show include the old Weetwood Police Station, which was the production base where a number of scenes were shot and sets were built; The Queens Hotel bar; the Sheesh Mahal restaurant in Kirkstall Road; Aire Valley Marina; Otley Sailing Club; and Sir Fred Hoyle Way in Bingley. Scenes were also shot around Harrogate.

Executive producer Jane Featherstone has connections to Leeds and suggested its use in the show – and the writers took it to heart. Vincent, of Tunbridge Wells, says that because they are not from Leeds, they wanted to “get out the way and bring as many people as possible” who knew about it to get its depiction right on screen.

"We wanted to set it in a real place,” says Brackley, of London. “There's a lot of TV drama that is sort of ‘Anywheresville, UK’, where it's sort of obfuscated or glossed over actually where it is.”

He adds: “(Leeds) is such an interesting, cosmopolitan, vibrant city and there's so many different spaces within a short short distance from each other. You've got the cosmopolitan city centre and then the drive out to the Dales, you can drive to all sorts of exciting, interesting places, and we were lucky enough to be able to capture a lot of those places on film.”

Better starts on Monday at 9pm on BBC One and will also be available on BBC iPlayer.