True Crime podcasts are everywhere. Even in a mythical idyllic Irish village called Bodkin. Everyone listens to them, even the nuns. When three podcasters Gibert Power (Will Forte), Dove Maloney (Siobhán Cullen) and Emmy Sizergh (Robin Cara) arrive to investigate the disappearance of three townsfolk, they balance telling a good character piece to boost their subscriber numbers with solving a possible crime.

The ethics and sensationalization of true crime have been explored before. But Scharf’s underlying motive was to examine the nature of truth.

“There are very few things in this world that we can really truly say are true,” states creator Jez Scharf. “Bodkin, in some senses, is a game because no-one in the show is what they appear to be. That was also our ambition for the show,” says Jez Scharf the creator of Bodkin.

The show is really about how we tell ourselves stories and we call it the truth.

“The core of true crime is how it shapes perspective.  In Act 1 of Bodkin we come in, we’re in Gilbert’s perspective of telling a good story. Dove disagrees with him. She just wants the facts to solve the crime. And she does some unsavory things to get them. The whole show is a push and pull between perspectives.” Perspectives and the ethics of them. Emmy is somewhere in between to bridge the two.

Jez Scharf., Photo by Presley Ann/ Getty Images for Netflix

Bodkin deliberately avoids the use of flashbacks to solve the alleged crime, which may or may not be true. The residents of the village are taken at their word. Some have a motive to lie and some have a motive to tell the truth.

Everyone has a story to tell in Bodkin. After all, they’re Irish. “You can’t hate someone if you know their story. No matter what they’ve done.” In some respects, the actual events don’t even matter. The colorful characters do. Especially the ones with the most to lose.

Seamus Gallagher (David Wilmot) is a tragic character. He’s a poet and violent. He has a secret or two.

“Dove is this proof-seeking missile, and she’s very abrasive, very difficult, very funny, and very brilliant. But she has had to make herself tough in order to survive. Even when she’s doing terrible things, the fact that I understand her means that I can never hate her. And that’s the morality that we were trying to get at in the show,” notes Scharf.

Comedic Tone

Bodkin is ostensibly a dark detective comedy. “Nobody thinks they’re in a comedy. Everyone thinks that what they’re doing is serious. That’s funny. Life is often absurd. And when I say absurdity, I don’t mean silliness,” notes Jez. “Life is textured. Something incredibly funny can be happening at the same time as something very sad.”

Jez Scharf can’t fully define the parameters of absurdism. His job as the showrunner, is to be the “keeper of the tone. If something funny happened, then it needed to be undercut with something sad or dramatic.” This is how he kept the tonal latitude in check.

There are tinges of satire in Bodkin as it delicately mocks true crime podcasts. Everybody’s wants to be a detective. Sometimes it’s better to let sleeping dogs lie than dredge up the past to solve a crime.

Where The Idea Began

“The very first genesis of this story comes from a completely random place, but the movement of the story is very familiar.”

“I worked for an Irish producer for many years, and so I would meet a lot of Irish writers, read a lot of Irish stories and books. I was told about this story about an American called David Rupert, who was an American trucker, and his girlfriend who worked for the American wing of the IRA. She took him on a holiday to Ireland.”

Gilbert Power (Will Forte) and Seamus (David Wilmot) Photo by Enda Bowe/ Netflix

“He thought it was Disneyland. ‘Everyone’s so friendly, the Guinness is delicious, and the grass is so green.’ But he was unaware that he was actually hanging out with members of the real IRA. He was then approached by the FBI and MI6 to then wear a wire and spy on them.” His testimony got Martin McKevitt, the then leader of the IRA convicted and sent to prison.

“As an outsider to Ireland, I could really see how you could arrive and see the surface level beauty, friendliness, and never really dig into any of the darkness or any of the violence that might lie beneath the surface,” states the writer.

“The David Rupert story didn’t appeal to me enough to write it, but there was something about an outsider turning up in Ireland and getting themselves into more trouble than they were after, had something interesting, fun and true about it.”

In the original draft of Bodkin, Gilbert simply arrived in Ireland. Dove didn’t exist. Gilbert took everything at face value and needed an insider/ outsider, someone originally from Ireland, but not Bodkin, to show him the way. A matter-of-fact character that calls things as they are.

Jez Scharf thoroughly learned his craft for many years while still in the UK. He’s since relocated to the USA.

“I arrived knowing what I was doing, but also having a very different perspective, wanting to tell a slightly different type of story, or a more unique type of story,” he recalls.

On the back of Squid Game, he realized that “international and quite local stories can play fantastically worldwide.”

Bodkin was originally developed with Wiip Studios before migrating to Higher Ground, Barak and Michelle Obama’s production company.

The Writing Process

Every mystery requires a measured collection and evaluation of clues to eventually solve the crime. Bodkin is different in that they’re not police, so the people didn’t have any reason to talk to them. “Finding the ways in which they could get information out to people and discovering what was really going on is actually incredibly tricky.” Then the writers had to fold in some plot twists to drive the story forward.

Bodkin consisted of a trans-Atlantic writers’ room. There were three American writers, Scharf, a Brit, and three Irish writers working via Zoom.

Mother Bernadette (Fionnula Flanagan) Photo by Enda Bowe/ Netflix

“My natural writing instinct is to fixate in moments and take my time. And from the American perspective, there’s a much more structural, beating heart to keep things moving.”

This varying approach allowed the writers to have “major discoveries in each episode, but also have room to go down a little cul-de-sacs or finding the moments to dwell in. It has to be done in such a way that it reveals character.”

The people of Bodkin behave in a typical way. “Everyone knows everything, but no one’s saying anything. Which is a very Irish thing, in particular. Probably on the back of eight hundred years of British colonialism,” quips Scharf.

Episode 1 tells the audience how to watch the story. “Gilbert comes into this world, and he wants the shamrock, the Guinness, the friendly locals, and Dove says, ‘This isn’t real. This is a real town, but bad things happen and there’s darkness here too.‘”

And at that point, a guy in the pub stands up and sings. Someone mentions the fairies and the naïve Gilbert is intrigued. Dove schools him that it’s just folklore, so people don’t have the think about serious matters and face real life.

But Bodkin does have yoga-loving nuns, albeit excommunicated from the church. They listen to true crime podcasts too.