Daniel Radcliffe has been so successful at leaving Harry Potter behind nobody was really surprised when it was announced his latest project would be a wry TV comedy set in Tsarist Russia (okay, maybe we were a bit surprised). The chatty star, just back from promoting three films at the Toronto Film festival, tells Hot Press that he was wary of television work being safe and restrictive, and has been pleasantly surprised by the creative freedom afforded to his new series, A Young Doctor’s Notebook, in which he stars alongside Mad Men’s Jon Hamm.

 “Our show is very weird, it’s very dark comedy and not necessarily an easy sell, being a medical comedy set in pre-Revolutionary War Russia! When I first read the script for the first series I thought it was brilliant and now it’s even more daring and dark and imaginative – but I thought they’d at least ask us to cut back on the gore or ask could we just cut one less child’s leg off or something. But after our first read-through, they essentially said ‘Do more!’ They were completely behind us and gave us room to play around and experiment and create something that was really unique.”
For Radcliffe, starring in such a dark show offers him the chance to escape the legacy of his work in Harry Potter, and launch a new, adult career.
 “A few years ago I did a musical in the States called How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, and everything I’ve done since that has deliberately really been different,” Radcliffe admits. “I did a film right after that called Kill Your Darlings and my approach to that was to pretend it like it was my first film, and find a process and find a way of doing my job that I’d never really known before. And definitely in the past two years people have given me the chance to work on really interesting things and get better. So Young Doctor’s Notebook was a huge part of that, getting to work with Jon and work with this kind of material for the first time was hugely freeing and great fun.”
Hot Press is catching up with Radcliffe in London, at a press event for Sky television. With the second series of The Newsroom ending, the final episode of Breaking Bad drawing ever nearer, and a new season of shows like Homeland, Girls, Friday Night Lights and Mad Men lurking on the horizon, conversation has never before been so animated about the possibilities of television. It’s television shows, not films or novels, that now drive water-cooler conversations, and invite PhD levels of analysis and dissection. Recaps, reviews and theories dominate pop culture sites, as audiences lap up the boundary-pushing shows that are wonderfully written, gorgeously shot and powerfully acted.
Until now, these US shows originated form broadcasters like HBO, FX and AMC; cable networks driven not by ratings, but by quality, aiming to attract an intelligent, niche audience. But finally it seems that broadcasters this side of the Atlantic have cottoned on to the increasing demand for binge-worthy shows.
On September 17, Sky’s director of entertainment Stuart Murphy unveiled plans for over one hundred hours of new drama to be shown across Sky 1, Sky Atlantic, Sky Living and Sky Arts. The culmination of two years’ work, the line-up includes new commissions such as Critical, a 13-part high-octane medical drama from Jed Mercurio, and Penny Dreadful, a psychological period horror starring Eva Green, Josh Hartnett, Billie Piper and Timothy Dalton.
These commissions follow a host of original Sky productions coming to the small screen over the coming months, including Moonfleet, a two-part adaptation of John Meade Faulkner’s nautical tale, starring Ray Winstone; Fleming, based on the life of James Bond creator Ian Fleming starring Dominic Cooper; Dracula, a seductive vampire tale starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers; and The Tunnel, a Anglo-French crime thriller based on The Bridge and starring Stephen Dillane and Clemence Posey. And, as already mentioned of course, Daniel Radcliffe and Jon Hamm return for the second series of A Young Doctor’s Notebook.
Teasers show an abundance of sexual tension and heaving bosoms in Dracula, while A Young Doctor’s Notebook seems to have upped their quota for amputated limbs. Overall it’s clear Sky aren’t playing it safe when it comes to violence, sex and unapologetically adult humour.
“I am very happy to leave the po-faced, stick up your backside morose drama to others,” agreed Murphy. “We don’t think there’s a rule that serious drama has to be dry and laugh-free and neither do our viewers. We don’t want to make shows that sit on your Sky box that you think you should watch but you can’t face because they are too depressing.”
Refreshingly, Murphy didn’t seem at all concerned with ratings, saying “We subscribe to the HBO, AMC, FX view of the world – we would rather have one person’s favourite drama than five people’s fifth favourite drama. We believe in focusing our resources on a few key shows. We are not about churning out high volume, low value TV.” He promised “big, bold, creative risks”, and emphasized that the quality of the shows was the most important factor, not audience numbers. Ignoring ratings figures is a brave move for a broadcaster, but one that has paid off in the US. Breaking Bad suffered terrible ratings for its first season, while Fox cancelled low-ratings cult favourite Arrested Development only for audience demand to reignite the show this year. Thanks to box sets, service providers like Netflix and – it must be stated – downloading, ratings aren’t always an accurate indicator of a show’s audience, or how much it’s loved.
“I don’t know why people struggle with this concept,” says Murphy. “If you look at Girls, if we were to just judge TV shows by their immediate ratings, Girls wouldn’t exist. And that feels like a pretty depressing creative space to be.”
For actors, television is also offering some of the most exciting parts available. Breaking Bad star Bryan Cranston has cheerfully accepted that his role as Walter White will be the first job mentioned in his obituary, while Jon Hamm was a relative unknown before his portrayal of Don Draper made him a household name.
Ray Winstone, who will star in Sky’s Moonfleet, said television drama had now eclipsed film.
“The best scripts are coming through TV now. There’s a lot of crap on in films,” said Winstone. He even took the opportunity to poke fun at one of his own less impressive cinematic offerings. “Especially at the moment, they want to make a lot of these crap car chase movies – like The Sweeney!”
The outspoken actor also hit out at current programming, which prioritises brain-dead shows that appeal to mass audiences.
“I turn on the telly now and all you see is cookery programmes and Big Brother and all that kind of crap. There’s room for that but more and more from the BBC, and from Sky and HBO, we are getting better drama and we need more of it. I know as an actor that’s selfish for me because I want to be in it, but as a viewer I also want to see that. I don’t want to see a geezer making a boiled egg. I want to see something that is going to make me think, that is relevant today or takes me away somewhere to another planet.”
For Jamie Bamber, who stars in fire-fighting drama The Smoke, the hope is that the new standard of television will draw focus away from the onslaught of awful “scripted reality” shows.
“We’re actors, we like people who create stories that – even when based on reality – are crafted, not edited,” he asserts. “And you see people who do those shows and who aren’t in control of their own situation, who are often young and naïve, to find themselves on TV and in the hands of manipulative editors. I like to see stories in the hands of great storytellers and directors, actors, artists, who create something really beautiful with structure, other than the mess of reality.”