Writer's blog,season 2, episode 5
By Rachel Lang
Okay, we can now reveal the Big Thing that we couldn't reveal
before. If you watched episode five (enormous spoiler alert)
you will now know that Amy, much to the shock and sorrow of her
friends, has found her Prince and gone...
She's gone? Yes, she has. At least for now...
To dial it back a year or so, we were also pretty sad when found
Anna wasn't going to be available for all of season two. We
were well into writing and planning series two at the time,
and up until this point, we had been feeling rather smug about how
far ahead we were with our storylines and scripts. This was
our first mistake, since fate was bound to slap us
down.
We are very, very fond of Amy and also Anna, so for two minutes we
were all in shock. But now, duly fate-slapped, we had to imagine
life without Amy, and pull the series apart for the Big
Rewrite.
We also had the added curly element, which was that because of
Anna's window of availability, the series would need to be shot out
of order - with episodes 4,6,7 and 8 shot before 1, 2, 3 and
5. Cue severe brain strain, and also some
swearing.
But even though we were pretty sad about losing Amy, this wasn't
the first time this kind of thing has happened to us. Kate, Gav and
I all toiled for years at various points on Shortland Street where
actors are regularly written in and out for various reasons, like
holidays/other gigs/broken limbs/going mad. So we'd had a bit
of practice. And on that Other Show Which Remains Nameless
because it's on The Other Network we had a cast member who was
rather unavailable on a lot of the seasons on account of being
Australian and expensive, so we weren't unfamiliar with the puzzle
of 'how do you make a jigsaw when you don't have all the
pieces'.
And here's the terrible admission. Even though we writers
might be genuinely sad, we are such nerds that very quickly we get
absorbed in the challenge of the puzzle and what could happen
next.
In this way, we are Total Story Sluts: in love with our characters
one minute, but after two minutes of grieving, we start to fall in
love with the new possibilities. (This is the cruel, fickle
and heartless side to writers which actors should probably be more
aware of.)
So there we were losing Amy. We thought of all kinds of ways
of writing her out, but in the end we thought we'd stick to our
knitting and give our Princess a romantic fairy tale
ending. We did even think of writing her out with Brad - but
this would have meant losing a fantastic actor and a great
character, so bless Gavin for suggesting that this should Not
Happen, as there was such a lot of potential in Brad being among
the wounded and fallen...
The network were also sad to lose Amy, and it's no disrespect to
them, or the actor to say that part of the reason is that as well
as being talented, Anna is blonde and also very pretty.
But Amy is a lot more than her hair colour. And you can't just
replace a character with a copy of a character, because life's not
like that, and neither is a series, especially one about
long-established friendships.
So we didn't try to pretend that Olivia was going to gain instant
admittance to the inner sanctum - she is going to have to work for
this if she's ever to achieve it. And we didn't make her
blonde. Actually, we didn't have a lot of choice about this
because Esther had henna'ed her hair red before she got the role,
which made it really hard to change the colour to anything except
dark. (Another note to actors: don't henna your hair. It
might be natural, but it limits your options.)
Fortunately, we did have a blonde already in the cast - Angelina,
and also a new guest we'd already added, Kirby. You'll see
more of them next week - and not just because they're blonde.
Episode five was a bit of a big one really and the tears at
the end were pretty much genuine from our lovely cast, because they
are all so close, and having Anna back was a blast. When Anna
went, we are all sad all over again - though we still hope she
might come and play with us for some of season three, if there is
one.
But grief and loss are great for story and also comedy (see,
heartless sluts) and so there's lots of fun to be had with that
next week. For Kevin of course it's particularly hard to lose
Amy, but there's also the fresh horror of how his nemesis came to
be his flatmate...
