The Flatshare author Beth O’Leary has revealed that her story, which has now been turned into a romantic comedy-drama by Paramount Plus, was inspired by a period in her own life.
The story follows two 30-somethings who share a small flat in London – so far so normal – with the catch being that they have never actually met each other.
As hospice nurse Leon (Anthony Welsh) works nights, while online journalist Tiffany (Jessica Brown Findlay) has regular hours, they have devised a system by which they will never need to be home at the same time.
That’s how they manage to sleep in the same bed each day without even knowing what the other looks like, communicating only though sticky notes left during the other’s time in the flat.
Author Beth O’Leary got the idea for this unusual arrangement from a time in her life when she had relatively little contact with her then-boyfriend (now husband), due to their own working patterns.
“[He] was working as a junior doctor and worked lots of night shifts,” she said at a Q&A event. “We lived together but we passed like ships in the night a lot of the time – I would be walking home from the station and sometimes see him going in the car to the hospital.
“And I would start to kind of piece together a sense of how his day had been from the little things around the place. So things like how many coffee mugs were by the sink (‘Aww, he didn’t manage to finish his coffee’) or the trainers by the back door (‘I’m glad he had time to go for a run’).”
O’Leary continued: “The little things that, when you’re not actually together, give you a sense of the other person. It just got me wondering what would happen if two strangers lived this way?
“What would you learn about somebody from all the little things that they leave behind? And one of the things that I love about the opening of the series is the impressions that they make of each other as they enter the flat and see the other person’s version [of it].”
The Flatshare earned positive reviews from critics and became a Sunday Times best-seller, with the live-action adaptation being commissioned as the first British comedy to come out of fledgling streaming service Paramount Plus.
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Screenwriter Rose Lewenstein, who penned the television version of The Flatshare, added that the concept of a cash-strapped romcom appealed to her, believing that it “resonates” particularly strongly right now.
“You can still work with all of the romcom tropes; you can still have someone running across town, but maybe they’re on a bus from Norwood instead of in a car to the Ritz,” she said.
“And you can still have somebody shouting out their love – a Romeo and Juliet moment – but it’s a council flat in Kennington rather than a Victorian conversion in Primrose Hill. I loved playing with all of those things and it really felt like a romcom for our times, our generation.”
The Flatshare is available to stream on Paramount Plus. Check out more of our Comedy coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what’s on.
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