After The Party screenwriter Dianne Taylor 'blown away' by BAFTA nomination
Dianne Taylor - who actor Robyn Malcom describes as the “voice” of After the Party - reflects on the Kiwi drama’s international appeal.
While Robyn Malcolm enjoys chatting with strangers about After The Party, the hit show's writer Dianne Taylor is happy to stay behind the scenes - until the BAFTAS ceremony on 28 April, that is.
“Robin's visible, I'm invisible, which is really great. I can sit here in Gisborne and nobody knows who I am,” she tells Saturday Morning.
In After the Party, Robyn Malcolm stars as Penny Wilding - a 50-something woman who loses everything when she accuses her husband of a sex crime against her daughter's teenage friend.
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Robyn Malcolm told RNZ she was “gobsmacked” when After The Party received a BAFTA nomination for Best International Show this week.
Taylor feels the same way, and she now has to figure out what to wear to the London awards ceremony.
Malcolm’s suggestion that she check out what people wore last year turned out to be "the worst advice ever", the screenwriter says, as glimpsing the glamorous garb at the 2024 BAFTAs left her "totally freaked out".
Taylor, who made her first-ever foray into television writing with After The Party, says a lack of experience meant that she didn’t bring any preconceived formulas to the show, which came out of she and Malcolm’s shared frustration at the lack of decent acting roles for middle-aged women.
“We just sort of went, ‘Well, let's not worry too much about that. We'll just try and make it interesting’.”
Actors Peter Mullan and Robyn Malcolm play exes in After The Party.
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The many hours she and Malcolm spent creating the well-meaning and often thwarted lead character Penny Wilding - “we just sat at each other's dining room tables and talked and talked” - was a big factor in After The Party’s international appeal, Taylor suspects.
The second element that really pulled in and held viewers, she thinks, was the “really primal need” people have to find out whether, in accusing her ex-husband of sexual harm, Penny is right or wrong.
For successfully holding that tension all the way through the series, she credits the show’s “wonderful” director Peter Salmon and the other writers, including script advisor Brita McVeigh.
For Taylor, whose previous credits include the 2017 film Beyond The Known World,it’s really gratifying that After The Party has won over not only women but also men and young people.
Educators and parents give the show particular credit for a scene where Penny talks about the distortions of pornography to a classroom of teen boys.
“Teachers have said, Oh, God, this should be compulsory viewing for kids of this age.”
After The Party has been praised for a scene where Penny gives a classroom of teen boys a talking-to about the artificiality of porn.
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Highlighting this scene was a decision made in the editing process, Taylor says.
“I'm so glad we did [that] because it seems like it sort of set the tone for what people were to expect with the show.”
After The Party’s warning about the potential harms of the internet for young people connects the Kiwi show to Netflix’s drama of the moment - Adolescence.
While the British show is a hard watch it’s also an important one, Taylor says, and the success of both shows confirms viewers have an appetite for raw realism that might seem “too heavy” on the page.
“I think people are actually craving something that's just not so formulaic, that's not procedural, that's not another version of something that we've already seen.”
While audiences especially love the scenes where Penny rides her bike around the streets of Wellington, Taylor says After The Party was originally set in Dunedin.
In the summer of 2022/2023 when the show was filmed, Wellington really “turned on the weather” for their nine-week shoot.
“I'd written all this wind and rain into it [but] it was just the most divine summer. It was Wellington at its best.”
