Karen Pirie is back in action, solving another cold case — sorry, historical case — to get answers and justice for families. Emer Kenny returned as creator and showrunner, while Lauren Lyle stepped back into the Doc Martins and bum bag to become Karen Pirie once more.
We chatted with the two of them about Karen Pirie season 2, including why adapting the second novel in the series was the right one to do. After all, we just have to look at Reacher to see how the novels don’t always need to be adapted in order.
At the same time, we talked about where we find Karen now, and what it was like for Lyle to continue bringing this character to life.
Precinct TV: Emer, I’ll start with you. You spend a lot of time, especially this season, focusing on not just the case of the past, but the story of the victims’ families. It’s rare a show focuses on victims’ families, so why was that important to you in Karen Pirie season 2?
Emer Kenny: It’s hugely important because that’s why Karen does what she does. It’s to get justice for the people who have been victims of horrible crimes and have lost people. I think, in drama, there has been a trend for many years of having a victim at the heart, perhaps a young woman, and her becoming a kind of plot and not a person.
So one of the things Lauren and I both love doing is delving into women’s stories, and Karen really relates to the young women in the stories. In season 1, she was killed, and in season 2, she’s kidnapped.
PTV: There’s just so much heart to what, in this season, Cat’s mom and dad are going through.
EM: I think the first series we talked about how trauma ripples outward, and that really interests me. You can’t quantify the effect of something like that until you look at it in a kind of macro scale. It’s not just the person who’s kidnapped that has gone through something. Losing your child is the most horrific pain, and that goes through the whole season, where you’re following the parents’ experiences without hopefully being too grim.
I don’t want to watch anything that’s too bleak. As a parent myself, I need to feel like there’s hope as well.
PTV: Can I ask why you decided the second book was going to be the second season, instead of mixing and matching books to seasons?
EK: I think it was the central character who is kidnapped, Caitriona Grant. To me, she felt like a really compelling character, an heiress to a fortune. In the book, it wasn’t an oil fortune, but I thought that would be a good addition because of the oil rigs in that part of the world.
As you watch the series, she becomes more and more complicated. Without too many spoilers, maybe she isn’t such a victim as she seems, and that is a really interesting idea.
Everything gets flipped on its head. People you think are alive are dead, and people you think are dead are alive. It keeps changing. For me, that was a great and epic follow-up to the first season, which was more linear in that someone was killed and we had to find out who killed her. This one is much more complicated.
PTV: Lauren, let’s talk about Karen Pirie and where we find her now that she’s proven herself to be a badass.
Lauren Lyle: I think we’ve often talked about how Lauren and Karen go in tandem. The first season was my first time leading something and getting a lot of responsibility, being tasked with something that I wasn’t sure I could do. Then we won some BAFTAs and we got a lot of praise, and I seemed to be qualified to do the next season.
Then you come to the next season, and you start to panic about whether you can do it. It’s a lot more responsibility. There are a lot more people watching the show, and it’s a bigger case. So, it feels like we’re going in the same way.
Emer is also building things that happen in both of our personal lives and the world around us into the world, and that gets fed into Karen as a character. We sort of find her as a bit of a reluctant boss, where she’s wanted all this power and control — in the same way, I’ve wanted lots of power and control — and then when you get it, you don’t quite know what to do with it. It’s quite overwhelming and nerve-wracking to show up and deliver.
But she does. She’ll do it whichever way she wants to do it, and won’t follow any rules and doesn’t really care what any consequences will be. She just sees the next step in front of her, but that quite often lands her in hot bother. I don’t think she’s necessarily learned from that.
She also has the daunting task of having to fill this task force and have people coming to her for answers and explain why she’s doing things in a certain way. She doesn’t want to explain why she’s done things in a certain way. Like being an actor, sometimes, you don’t know why you’ve done something. It just worked, and you can’t explain that. But she is police, and she has to explain why she’s done something, which she finds annoying.
PTV: I love we see her in the news interview where she’s tripping over her words, but then when she’s with Cat’s dad, she’s very human and in her element. What was it like balancing these two sides of Karen’s abilities?
LL: We talk loads about the balance in the humor and the stakes of the darkness of the show. Karen has to, because she doesn’t want to do the traditional methods, has to be able to connect with people and care. And she does care. I’ve always talked about it. She knows what it feels like to be a young woman that’s scared to walk home at night. She is one of those women, so she can fully relate to the dangers of the world in a real and personal way, and I think that’s why she’s good at what she does, and she gets what she needs from people.
In the same way, Emer talks about how she trojan-horses humour and her personality into a crime show. I think Karen Trojan horses, and it means that she can get things out of people because she cares. Sometimes, it’s in a manipulative sense, but it’s not dark manipulative. The end goal is to get what she needs for the greater good.
I love that she can stand up to James Cosmo. He’s 6’5” and he’s got that amazing booming voice, and I’m a little bit smaller than him. Having to go toe to toe with that kind of presence, and she totally does, it’s just magic to watch.
PTV: Lauren, when it came to the first season, we talked about how Karen is a very flawed woman, and I love that we get these flawed women in leads. What’s it like continuing that in the second season?
LL: Don’t we all have flaws? I think that’s what makes her so relatable. I’ve talked about this before, saying that I sometimes get offended when people say she’s dead normal, or so normal that they can relate. I would never want to be called normal. That’s such an insult, but maybe that’s because I’m an actor! I would rather be called really annoying than normal.
I think there is something about her that’s so relatable, and she acts in a way that I think says so much about what she’s dealing with. It’s extraordinary, but she’s not the type of person you would expect to have to deal with that sort of thing, which is amazing to watch.
She isn’t doing it in a sexy or perfectly slick way. It’s messy and realistic, and then funny, because you think, ‘Of course, that’s how I’d react.’ I think it’s really fun to acknowledge that this is mad, some of the things she’s dealing with. There’s extremely high intensity and pressure, and you wonder what she’s going to do. She’s not superwoman, so she doesn’t have a superpower to fall back on. She has to figure it out, and it’s quite fun to imagine what you’d have done to figure it out and see it play out in front of you.
PTV: Emer, I love how while you’ve kept a lot of Karen’s personality from the book, you’ve been able to develop it in a way that makes sense for today’s world and for Lauren to play. Why did you develop her in that way?
EK: It attracted a female audience, and quite a young audience, that it just made me feel like people are hearing what I’m saying. I was speaking about what it felt like to be in the world, at my age, and in my gender, so I made her to feel authentic to me. If it’s authentic to me, it’s going to hit with the audience.
I think Val also did in the book, so there’s a bt of Val in there, which is her own experience. Val was a journalist in a male-dominated newsroom, and I’ve been in a lot of writers rooms where I’m the only woman there.
We’ve poured a bit of ourselves in, and then Lauren gets the scripts and she puts a little bit of herself in there as well. She is different from the book, but hopefully in a way that just feels rooted in 2024/2025. She’s somebody that you know, maybe a little funnier or a little cleverer, and she’s exciting to watch.
PTV: So to wrap, how would you both describe Karen Pirie season 2 in three words?
LL: Delicious, terrifying, and funny.
EK: Epic, cinematic, and twisty.
Karen Pirie season 2 premieres on Thursday, Oct. 2 on BritBox.
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