When Alice Seabright watched her new BBC One drama Chloe for the first time, she got a “vulnerability hangover”. That, the film-maker explains, is the feeling you get when you’ve said too much on a drunken night out. “The next day you think: why did I tell them all that stuff about me? I felt like that: too exposed, uncomfortable and kind of gross.”
On the one hand, that kind of reaction is apparently par for the course when it comes to making film and TV. “It’s a known thing that when you watch an assembly [first cut] you want to puke,” Seabright tells me over Zoom from the plush Bristol flat she has been staying in during Chloe’s production. Yet the show left the 32-year-old feeling more unsettled than usual. This was different from rewatching the episodes of Netflix smash Sex Education she directed, or even her back catalogue of quirky, quietly moving short films.
For a start, the responsibility was far greater than anything she had experienced before. Seabright is Chloe’s showrunner: the term imported from the US that refers to the person who oversees the writing, directing, general creative vision and pretty much every other detail of a TV series. “If it’s shit, it’s your fault,” is how Seabright succinctly sums up the job.
There’s another reason why Chloe might feel like an act of gut-spillage for its maker. The plot isn’t straightforwardly autobiographical by any stretch: the twisty, multilayered drama revolves around disaffected twentysomething temp Becky, who cons her way into a posh, arty social circle in order to make sense of the death of the title character, an aspirational young woman she followed compulsively on Instagram. Yet Chloe frequently feels like a more abstract kind of confessional.
Taking in themes of low self-esteem, anxiety, success (or lack thereof), status, social media obsession and addiction, the show homes in on something strange and unsavoury about being a woman today. You feel it in Becky’s punishing, indulgent Instagram use, scrolling solemnly and hungrily through seemingly perfect existences. It’s in her constant fabrications about her supposedly glamorous life, which mirror the desperate keeping up of appearances that abounds online. It’s also there in her paranoid imaginings of people mocking her and working out who she really is. “I feel like everyone who works on the show relates to Becky,” says Seabright. “Even though none of us have ever infiltrated the life of our dead ex-best friend.”
There are downsides to making such a viscerally contemporary drama: namely, the fact you have to work extensively with phones. Forget children and animals, screens are the 21st-century film-maker’s bete noire. “I feel like I never want to see a phone again – it was a fucking nightmare,” says Seabright, referring to the finicky business of incorporating a smartphone screen into a shot. Integrating phones into the plot was another challenge. “It’s a really, really hard thing to figure out how to storytell through screens,” she says. “But so much of our drama literally plays out on our phones. I couldn’t get around it.”
Seabright came up with two clever solutions. The first was to treat Becky’s phone as an object pregnant with meaning. “In mysteries and in detective stories, closeups of clues are really important, so the phone’s a clue a lot of the time, or the computer sequences she’s going through. It’s the same as in an old-fashioned film where they’d pick up a letter and you’d punch in on it.” The second was a technique she calls “stilted movings”, in which Instagram photos come to life on screen – often to reflect what Becky knows about the context of the picture at any given moment.
In one sense, Seabright’s success has been a long time coming; in another, it all seems to have happened unbelievably quickly. She started making films for fun as a teenager living in Toulouse; having grown up near Saffron Walden, she moved back to her French mother’s homeland at the age of 10. At 18, she returned to the UK to study psychology at UCL, joined the film society, met her partner (also now a film-maker), and learned how to use cameras and edit. Jobs in the film industry – editing, administrative roles – followed. In her spare time, Seabright managed to make a handful of shorts with impressive casts that won significant plaudits (2016’s Pregnant Pause, starring Alexandra Roach and Sally Phillips, was longlisted for a Bafta).
Yet it wasn’t until 2018, when Seabright started studying at the National Film and Television School, that directing began to seem like a real professional possibility. Then, things moved fast: within a year she was named a Screen International Star of Tomorrow, was hired as a director on Sex Education (she also co-wrote a season three episode with the show’s creator, Laurie Nunn), and began working on Chloe.
If you had to identify a thread that runs through Seabright’s work, you might settle on empathy. Many of her films are nuanced takes on women struggling with complicated feelings: the mordant End-O (2019) stars Sophia Di Martino as a woman suffering from endometriosis; Strange Days (2018) is about a woman fixated on a friend who went missing when they were teenagers (Seabright says the latter planted the seed for Chloe). Empathy is, she agrees, one of her animating principles as a film-maker – and as a person. “That’s just how I am, sometimes to my detriment. I always have this tendency to go: let me put myself in this person’s shoes, and sometimes it’s like: ‘They’re a murderer, Alice, don’t do that.’ I find it quite easy to relate to people, even though I’m quite socially awkward.”
Now, Seabright is awaiting Chloe’s primetime airing – also with some awkwardness. “I’m not going to lie, I’m a bit worried,” she says. One concern is the show’s distinctly millennial subject matter and tone. “When we first developed it, I thought: well this might be a BBC Three, 10.35pm sort of thing. The closer I get to transmission, the more I’m like: wait a minute, loads of people are going to see it … ”
It seems fitting that the creator of a show that pulses with impostorism and self-doubt should be so frank about her own. Let’s just hope the vulnerability hangover isn’t too punishing.
Calling the shots: five more showrunners to watch
Patrick Somerville
After working as a writer on The Leftovers, the Chicagoan cut his showrunning teeth on Netflix’s offbeat Jonah Hill-Emma Stone drama Maniac. His latest project is Station Eleven, a drama set in post-pandemic dystopia that – eerily – began production in 2019 and was about a fifth of the way in when Covid hit.
Nida Manzoor
As a teen, Manzoor wanted to be a “brown girl Bob Dylan”. Last year, the creator-writer-directer-producer channelled her frustrated rock star ambitions into We Are Lady Parts, her joyous and instantaneously beloved Channel 4 sitcom about a British-Muslim punk band. A second series is on the way.
Charlie Covell
It was her gloriously droll writing on the 2017 Channel 4 and Netflix hit The End of the F***ing World that marked this Londoner out as a bracing new talent. Now, she is helming her very own series for the streamer: Kaos is a blackly comic take on Greek mythology with “Game of Thrones scale”.
Alena Smith
By the time the third and final series of Dickinson – the wacky, anachronistic drama based on the life of 19th-century poet Emily – aired on Apple TV+, it was widely considered a seriously creative TV feat. Whatever its writer-producer Smith does next will be well worth watching: she’s signed an exclusive deal with Apple.
Jen Statsky
Having spent her career writing on great female-led comedies – Parks and Recreation, The Good Place, Broad City – last year the New Yorker finally got to make her own. Hacks, which she co-showruns with Lucia Aniello and Paul W Downs, pairs a young comedy writer with a standup grande dame and has picked up a slew of awards.
Chloe is on 6 and 7 February at 9pm on BBC One and on iPlayer; it’s also available on Amazon Prime
