Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic \u201cIn my Doctor Who and Sherlock days, I was continuously [called] a misogynist, a sexist, a homophobe, a racist. Those accusations are very hard to rebuff definitively. How can you prove you\u2019re not?\u201dAs the showrunner of two behemoths of British television, Steven Moffat became very familiar with threats of cancellation. Although never accused of any misconduct, he was frequently lambasted on social media and in online forums for his choice of storylines, characters and dialogue. \u201cCancel culture\u201d had not yet entered the popular lexicon in 2017, but he sensed something in the air ripe for comedy-drama and began work on a script. Seven years later, the result is Douglas Is Cancelled, a four-part series that casts Hugh Bonneville as Douglas Bellowes, a clubbable and complacent TV anchor who co-presents a flagship news programme with his younger, savvier colleague Madeline Crown (Karen Gillan). When a tweet appears accusing Douglas of making \u201can extremely sexist joke\u201d at a wedding, an online mob forms to condemn him, and Madeline is forced to pick a side.\u201cNewsreaders can\u2019t read the news if they\u2019ve expressed political opinions,\u201d says Moffat. \u201cThey are told that the best thing to be is balanced, boring and bland, and I can\u2019t think of another job like that. [We all know] you shouldn\u2019t say anything in private that you wouldn\u2019t say in public, but we\u2019re human and we need to let off steam\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009Context is important.\u201dDouglas Is Cancelled was already in production when reality started to catch up with it. In May 2023, Phillip Schofield, longtime co-presenter of ITV\u2019s Good Morning, admitted to an \u201cunwise but not illegal\u201d affair with a colleague more than 30 years his junior. Two months later, news broke that BBC anchor Huw Edwards was accused of paying a teenager for explicit images. Moffat found actuality echoing his scripts, though not wholly unexpectedly. \u201cI don\u2019t know that there\u2019s a moment in history where you wouldn\u2019t have had something like this recently,\u201d he says, drawing a distinction between the gravity of allegations that are often lumped together. \u201cAs far as I can see, neither [Schofield nor Edwards] harmed anyone\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009If we all have our lives destroyed because we\u2019ve been unwise, then we\u2019re all going down.\u201d\u201cThe way they were handled in the press is extraordinary,\u201d adds Bonneville. \u201c[Judgment] has become instantaneous with social media as judge, jury and executioner, no due process and an assumption of guilt. Of course, if crimes have been committed they must be prosecuted, but our press has always thrived on the idea of another person for the tumbril. I\u2019ve stopped using Twitter because it has become so utterly poisonous.\u201dMoffat was finishing his first draft of what began as a play when the #MeToo movement started gathering momentum in 2017, but spent years honing its themes. It was Gillan who prompted the shift from stage to screen.\u201cWhen I mentioned that I\u2019d written a play, Karen asked to read it and immediately suggested we could make a film of it,\u201d Moffat recalls. \u201cOnce I\u2019d started on a different play [2022\u2019s The Unfriend], I began to wonder: could we add some more characters and chop it up into episodes?\u201d These became, among others, Douglas\u2019s wife and tabloid editor (played by Alex Kingston), his slick producer (Ben Miles) and his clueless agent (Simon Russell Beale). \u201cIn some ways, it\u2019s good that the show didn\u2019t happen for a number of years,\u201d Moffat says. \u201cWhen you make those shows immediately after something has happened, they can be too unfocused, too emotional, too splenetic.\u201dTake The Morning Show. Apple\u2019s prestige drama launched in 2019, a well-intended but scattershot and ultimately confused soap opera wrestling with similar issues. Here, Steve Carell\u2019s TV anchor is accused of sexual assault, leaving him in disgrace, his victim brutally exposed and colleagues floundering. In trying to say everything proscriptively and preachily, it ended up saying very little.Douglas Is Cancelled does several key things differently. For one, it parades its theatrical origins with scenes of unusual length, intensity and single location. \u201cAlan Ayckbourn once wrote that TV intercuts between scenes and chops them up for no other reason than it can,\u201d says Moffat. \u201cYou\u2019re not increasing the pace \u2014 it\u2019s about the rate of incident, not the number of times you switch location in a minute.\u201dNot that his series lacks pace \u2014 in fact, it opens with two episodes of rat-a-tat-tat dialogue and snappy satire. Then, a profoundly unsettling third act set in a hotel room calls into question everything we think we know about one of the main characters.\u201cThe readthrough had an extraordinary atmosphere about it \u2014 the script goes like the clappers and feels like W1A on acid,\u201d says Bonneville, comparing it to the satire depicting a dysfunctional BBC, in which he also starred. \u201cThere were gales of laughter and then, by the end, there was real discomfort. I wanted to go and wash my hands because I felt grubby. The tone gets much more sinister than you\u2019d anticipate, which I hope will have viewers thinking they\u2019ve been laughing at something that probably isn\u2019t that funny.\u201dCrucially, Moffat makes demands of the viewer by refusing to provide easy answers and by cannily withholding the details of Douglas\u2019s joke until the end. Thus, we must choose between the rush to judgment or the potential failure to call out abhorrent behaviour.\u201cThere\u2019s no perfect answer, which is why it\u2019s worth making a drama about it,\u201d says Gillan, for whom Madeline\u2019s situation is as recognisable as the labels \u2014 \u201cruthless\u201d, \u201cambitious\u201d, \u201csharp\u201d \u2014 deployed against her.\u00a0\u201cMadeline has had to put walls up because of everything she\u2019s been through,\u201d she says. \u201cSo she\u2019s perceived as calculating and manipulative when inside she\u2019s very vulnerable\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009She\u2019s thinking: is this really happening? Sometimes it\u2019s not black and white.\u201d Gillan acknowledges recent changes in the film and TV industries, such as the recruiting of intimacy coordinators and the push to hire more female filmmakers, but suggests they do not go far enough. \u201cNow we need to fix the system that enables those people to get into positions of power, and ask ourselves whether silence should sometimes be taken as complicity.\u201dGillan\u2019s performance is one of the highlights of Douglas Is Cancelled and makes possible one of Moffat\u2019s central aims. \u201cAs #MeToo unrolled and I was writing, I asked all the women I knew whether they\u2019d had similar experiences,\u201d he says. \u201cTheir first answer was frequently: no, never. Then a few days later, they\u2019d come out with an absolutely hair-raising story that they\u2019d just forgotten about.\u201dMoffat came to realise that cancel culture was not the only core subject of his series. \u201cJust as important for me was to celebrate the strength and resilience of women to deal with this kind of thing and move on. That isn\u2019t celebrated enough.\u201d\u2018Douglas Is Cancelled\u2019 is on ITV1 and ITVX from June 27Find out about our latest stories first \u2014 follow FTWeekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic \u201cIn my Doctor Who and Sherlock days, I was continuously [called] a misogynist, a sexist, a homophobe, a racist. Those accusations are very hard to rebuff definitively. How can you prove you\u2019re not?\u201dAs the showrunner of two behemoths of British television, Steven Moffat became<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-124287","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124287","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=124287"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124287\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":124288,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124287\/revisions\/124288"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=124287"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=124287"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=124287"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}