Fun & Famous
THE DRAMA BEHIND FLIGHT HS13
by Marion Pauw
Are you following Flight HS13 yet? You know, that new series with Katja Schuurman that almost a million people watched last week. To refresh your memory: Liv (so Katja) takes her husband Simon (Daniël Boissevain) to the airport. Then she hears that his plane has crashed. And then… she finds out that he was never on board. Haven't seen anything yet? Then you still have just enough time this afternoon to watch the first double episode on Uitzending Gemist. Tonight at 8:25 PM, you can cozy up on NPO3 to see how it continues.
When you watch a series, it is especially not the intention that you think about how the series was made. On the contrary, as soon as you start thinking that something is impossible or that it seems like an actor is ‘reading’ their lines, you tune out. A good series pulls you in and makes you forget everything around you, especially the fact that someone once had to come up with all this. It is certainly not the intention that you think about how hard such a creator has had it to provide you with all this entertainment. And yet I want to talk about that now. Because that creator, that's me.
And because you are all my best friends now, I am going to tell you the true story behind HS13
Together with Elle van Rijn, I was tasked last summer with adapting the Turkish series Son (which means: ‘the end’) for the Dutch market. And that turned out to be a hell of a job. And because you are all my best friends now, I am going to tell you the true story behind HS13. The drama behind the drama, so to speak (like this article if you think this is such a brilliant pun, hehehe).
Complication number one: to begin with, the original scripts turned out to be hardly usable. Turks apparently love a soap-like approach with hundreds of storylines and The Bold and the Beautiful-style staring into the distance. The consequence of this was that we immediately started with a backlog. Instead of doing a bit of editing and cutting and pasting, we now had to come up with entirely new storylines. And of course, we hadn't accounted for this in our planning. Fortunately, there are a lot of hours in a week when you really have no other choice. I seriously think I worked 60 hours a week for months.
Complication factor number 2: we had to make 10 episodes of 50 minutes each. That's an incredible amount. Say about 5 feature films glued together. In some series, you have so-called stand-alone episodes: each episode is a complete story. This was not the case with Flight HS13. We were dealing with one incredibly long plotline. This made it very difficult to maintain the tension and dose the information. Although it also made the task very challenging.
So. Now that you've read this, you will never look at a television series the same way again.
Complication factor 2b, arising from 2: because we were dealing with 500 minutes of drama, we also had a lot of storylines. Those also had to all make sense. So if you let character A say something in episode 2, it still has to match what he says in episode 9. Do you have any idea how much brain capacity that takes up?
Then complication factor number 3: everything and anything was changed all the time. After we first implemented all the changes from the producer and the broadcasting boss, the director came in and wanted all sorts of other changes. That is of course the director's right, he has to shoot it after all, but it doesn't make the writer's job any easier. And here too, complication factor 2b played a role again. Because changing something in episode 4 meant big problems in episodes 2, 7, and 8. And we had to solve those again, and sometimes it was too late, and then everything fell apart, and we had to change everything again.
So. Now that you've read this, you will never look at a television series the same way again. And that's not the intention either. Shall we therefore agree that you forget this post as soon as possible?
