When Declan Lawn and Adam Patterson were first approached about making a cop show set in Belfast, they were — to put it mildly — apprehensive. Both writers grew up in Northern Ireland, live in Belfast and are deeply familiar with the bloody history of the region. Yet they worried that a series about the city’s police force, which was once overwhelmingly Protestant and viewed with suspicion by the Catholic community, would be too inherently polarizing.
Even today, more than 25 years after the Good Friday Agreement, which brought peace to the country after decades of conflict, “There are some areas where the police can’t go,” Patterson said during a recent visit to New York. “The biggest fear was that the politics of it all would just swallow up anything that we would try to say and become the story. That’s often the case in Northern Ireland.
” “It’s a big privilege to tell a story about your own place, your own time, in your own voice,” added Lawn. “But it’s also a massive — I would say, at times oppressive — responsibility.” But the duo, former broadcast journalists who worked together on the BBC current affairs series “Panorama,” reconsidered after meeting with real Belfast police officers.
“These are just ordinary people, and they’re doing a crazy job for not very much money,” Patterson said. “We thought we could tell a brilliant story about family, using the police as a Trojan horse.” This idea evolved into “Blue Lights,” .