‘Blue Lights’ Co-Writer Fran Harris & 925 Productions Developing ‘Cold Feet’-Style Drama ‘Yes!’ With RTE & Screen Ireland Backing — MIA Market

EXCLUSIVE: Fran Harris, co-writer on BBC cop show Blue Lights, is developing a Cold Feet-style drama series with backing from Irish pubcaster RTÉ.

Harris has been working on the relationship drama Laura McNicholas, founder of Dublin-based indie 925 Productions, who is here in Rome at MIA Market pitching Yes! to buyers, co-production partners and distributors. RTÉ is aboard alongside Screen Ireland to support development, but the series isn’t yet greenlit.

McNicholas told Deadline it was being set up as an hour-long relationship drama “along the lines of Cold Feet as an ensemble. “There will ideally be multiple storylines and threads we can explore, giving it renewability for many seasons,” she added.

The plot is being billed as a “generational story about self-rediscovery” in which several unhappy college friends who reconnect in their late-30s been look for new venues after hitting crises in their lives, such as being widowed or divorced. “The main theme is based on the idea that sometimes the messiest decisions lead you to the place you need to be,” said McNicholas.

“It will be set in Dublin mainly, but we are setting it up as a co-production, which is why I’m here in MIA talking to potential partners about how that would work. In Ireland, there are a lot of tech companies with international staff, and so that’s Yes! will set up.”

McNicholas is pitching Yes! in the MIA Market Drama Co-Production Market & Pitching Forum, where it will be up against 13 others series projects from Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Lebanon, Netherlands, Switzerland, United Kingdom and the U.S.

Writer Harris has a background in development and distribution at Warner Bros, Universal Pictures and 20th Century Fox, and is currently adapting Alex Hay’s novel The Housekeepers as a returnable TV series for Miramax. She was also in the writers room for the TV adaptation of Guy Ritchie film The Gentlemen and is writing an original, returnable drama for Gaze/Anton Corp and an original crime thriller TV series with the Emmy winning producers Richard Yee and Krish Majumdar producing for Me+You and Fremantle.

Further back, she co-wrote Season 1 of the BBC’s police drama Blue Lights with Declan Lawn and Adam Patterson, produced by Two Cities TV, and was in the writers room and wrote one episode for the RTÉ and BBC crime drama Clean Sweep and Mopar Studios international crime thriller North Sea Connection.