ZDF Boards BBC Drama Shy & Lola Starring Hayley Squires and Bel Powley
Germany's ZDF has joined the BBC's upcoming drama Shy & Lola, with its channel ZDFneo attached in association, Deadline reported on 18 September. The arrangement is a co-production, meaning the broadcasters share costs and airing rights in their own territories. It sits outside the BBC and ZDF's existing high-end drama pact.
The series stars Hayley Squires and Bel Powley as the titular pair, Shy and Lola. Clerkenwell Films and Amanda Coe are behind the drama. Squires is familiar to many viewers from The Night Manager and I, Daniel Blake.
Squires plays Shy, a cleaner dreaming of a new life in Portugal. Powley plays Lola, an ex-model turned grifter who arrives in town with trouble at her heels. The pairing is the point. One wants out while the other brings risk with her.
The show is billed as a darkly comic drama, a crime story told with humour. It is set in Shy's small coastal town in the north of England. A murder forces two very different women to become allies and pulls them into the criminal underworld, according to the BBC Media Centre.
The series is based on a French series. The BBC first announced it in February as part of a slate of three new dramas. It will be filmed in Hull and Leeds, the BBC has said. That shoot keeps the production in the north of England, close to its fictional setting.
BBC Studios, the BBC's commercial sales arm, will handle international sales. It will offer Shy & Lola to buyers at MIPCOM, the annual television market in Cannes where distributors present new programmes to broadcasters and streamers. The company will position the drama as one of its key titles at the market. The market brings together buyers from around the world.
Such early partnerships are now routine in scripted television. Two broadcasters commit and each holds rights at home. The producer and distributor then seek further sales abroad.
For viewers, this means a British coastal crime story already has two homes. It will air on the BBC in the United Kingdom and on ZDFneo in Germany. A transmission date has not yet been announced.
