Inside BritBox’s Big Gambit: Crowning ‘The Bletchley Circle: San Francisco’ As Its First Original

A streaming service’s very first original is a declaration of intent. It’s a move that demands attention and speaks of confidence.
As streaming services go, BritBox is one of the younger ones. It launched last March as a collaboration between dueling British broadcasters BBC and ITV, and has already accomplished a lot in its first 15 months. The service has not only cut through the indomitable red tape of overseas streaming rights, but last week, BritBox launched its very first original commission, a North American-based spin-off of the popular ITV series The Bletchley Circle called The Bletchley Circle: San Francisco. So why was now the right time for this move into original programming?
BritBox President Soumya Sriraman explained her theory to Decider last week in the hours following the service’s second-ever presentation at TCA. Sriraman said, “If you’re going to pay for a service, you don’t want to believe that you’re paying for it because of its catalogue. Most people think in their heads that catalogue is not worth paying the money for. So I think that’s the reason to make sure that everyone knows we do have quality originals.”
BritBox had a strategic need for its own original programming, but how did The Bletchley Circle: San Francisco wind up being their very first one? More importantly, how did The Bletchley Circle get a sequel in the first place?

Why The Bletchley Circle Needed A Sequel

The original Bletchley Circle ran from 2012-2014 on ITV and found a loyal audience in America via runs on PBS and Netflix. The series followed four friends from Bletchley Park coping with life after the end of World War II. It wasn’t just that Susan, Lucy, Millie, and Jean had to return to the monotony of everyday life, but the important code-breaking work they did during the war had to be kept top secret. The group’s de facto leader, Susan Grey (Anna Maxwell Martin), reunites the gang to put their code-breaking savvy to good use solving crimes. Though the show was celebrated on both sides of the pond, ITV declined to pick it up for a third season.

The show’s original producer Jake Lushington (now producing its sequel through World Productions), said, “We were disappointed. We had other stories [to tell].” Fortune smiled upon the production when a development exec at Omni in Canada, Laura Goode — who Lushington pointed out eventually went on to work as a writer on The Bletchley Circle: San Francisco — had an idea to import the concept to the United States. Lushington said, “She went to her boss, Brian Hamilton, and said, ‘I think there should be more Bletchley and we can do something with code breakers on the west coast that we could key them into.'” 

Lushington said the concept appealed to everyone: “I think immediately the way it could open it out in terms of a different location, in terms of embracing another secret female history in another country, and I think in terms of making it more expansive and diverse in a different landscape than sort of post-war Britain.”
The new Bletchley would be a collaboration between Omni and World Productions, BritBox, ITV, and even Netflix (which gave funding to the endeavor in exchange for foreign streaming rights). Sriraman said, “Everyone wanted the show to come back and live in different ways.” She added that this partnership was “right” because everyone believed in the project. “It suddenly felt like this is it. This is the right partnership because they have the right idea about it. They’re going to keep it authentic and it’s going to feel right.”
Lushington called the collaboration with BritBox “incredibly encouraging.” He said, “They just wanted the show to kind of embody all those best features of taking the old and making something really new. I think editorially they just gave [new showrunner] Michael [MacLannen] really free rein to make the show and just work very, very collaboratively with what ITV were doing. As partners it’s been a really easy process.”

Rounding Up The Bletchley Circle Cast

Only two of The Bletchley Circle‘s original cast wound up making the trans-Atlantic trip to San Francisco: Rachael Stirling’s flirty and confident Millie and Julie Graham’s stoic and loyal Jean. In this new series, they’re joined by American counterparts Iris (Crystal Balint) and Hailey (Chanelle Peloso), but they leave their former friends Susan and Lucy behind.
Lushington said it was a creative choice to bring Mille and Jean back. Susan had left the show towards the end of the second season and Lucy’s storyline — one of overcoming an abusive marriage — had reached a satisfactory conclusion. “So there was only those two, those were the people left,” Lushington said of Millie and Jean. “Also, I thought there was a great chemistry they have.”
The Bletchley Circle: San Francisco‘s showrunner Michael MacLennan jumped in at this point. “They come from completely different backgrounds, but you can imagine them having such commonality. They are not living their lives defined by men,” he said.

“Also you knew the least about them!” said one of the show’s directors, Alexandra La Roche. “I was a big fan of the first series and you explored the home lives of many of the other characters, saw the abusive relationships, saw Susan and her husband and her kids, but you didn’t know anything about Jean and Millie.”

“To our surprise, Millie didn’t even have a last name!” MacLennan said. “So we were like, ‘Well, let’s give her one!'” (Note: Millie has been finally been named “Millie Harcourt.”)

While actress Rachael Stirling told reporters during the show’s TCA panel that she initially thought the idea of coming back was “odd,” she told Decider afterwards, “I didn’t really need much convincing. The idea of us going to meet our counterparts, people who broke code on the other side of the Atlantic, who we had no knowledge of, of meeting collaborators actually, in effect, and of transporting Jean and Millie out of gray old London and into bright breezy California, was enticing.”
Julie Graham concurred. “To me, it made total sense because I think if it had been the other way around, if they had said, ‘We want to bring The Bletchley Circle back in the same format,’ I would have been more apprehensive about that,” she said.

While MacLennan said he took pains to collaborate with the actresses to ensure he was nailing the characters, both Stirling and Graham were concerned about being too reverential to the sometimes grim source material.
“Jules and I said before we started, to Michael, we’re not doing this if it’s just about women being tied up in basements. It’s got to be more original, and it is, actually,” said Stirling.
“Absolutely,” said Graham, “and taking it from that drab 1950s post war Britain — it was austere and there was a lot of poverty and a lot of austerity — to take it to a kind of new world and then to see the world through the eyes of these characters…it just gives them so many other places to go.”
Stirling said that the only stumbling block for her was when the new production leaned too much on what had come before. She recounted a hilarious encounter when someone brought out her costumes from the original series — “some of which still smelled of four years ago” — and said it was sometimes a struggle to get notes. “It took me and Jules to say to people on the whole, ‘Please say what you’re thinking because we’re really happy to oblige,'” Stirling said. “You don’t need to treat us like returning queens, you can just say, ‘That’s a bit shit, can you do it again?'”

“We’re not doing this if it’s just about women being tied up in basements.”

Still, it was that very reverence that Graham said also gave them “confidence.” She said, “They were fans of the show and they were very protective of these characters. They were very clear that this is what they wanted to do and I have had many conversations with them. I completely and utterly trusted that it was all in good hands.”

What’s At Stake For The Bletchley Circle: San Francisco

BritBox President Soumya Sriraman knows that The Bletchley Circle: San Francisco is kind of a gambit for the fledgling service. She purposely launched it in the middle of the summer as a way to fight back against everything internal data was telling her.

“You look at traffic and you look at behavior and you know the summer lull’s going to hit us. Do you then go out with something or do you not? And this is the one thing we do control,” Sriraman said, noting that all their other releases have to be timed according to their British partner channel’s wishes. “This was ours to control.”

Since BritBox eased off the controls when it came to the creative side of things, showrunner Michael MacLennan feels additional pressure to deliver a hit. “It’s the flip side of the freedom that they afforded us. I think they were very concerned about the conceptual elements of the show, wanting to make sure it fit with their audience as they understand it,” he said, “but at a certain point it was really us figuring out the best story to tell and the best way to do it. So if it doesn’t do well, it’s on me, because we can’t say that they killed it with a thousand notes or anything like that.”
The Bletchley Circle: San Francisco is currently airing in weekly installments on BritBox in the United States and Canada, and on ITV in the UK. After its initial debut, The Guardian gave it a rough review, though American publications have already been kinder. Stirling had even expressed concern that British die-hard fans of the original wouldn’t come along for the new adventure.
“But it’s an odd thing isn’t it? I think especially British audiences are particularly resistant to something that isn’t entirely one genre,” she said, “but I hope that the show has charm enough to beguile people in the end.”

Where to Stream The Bletchley Circle: San Francisco