‘Line of Duty’ creator Jed Mercurio is planning to explore the past of Superintendent Ted Hastings.
The British television writer and producer has worked on the drama – based on the investigations of AC-12, a controversial police anti-corruption unit – scripts for the last six years and has teased he has some exciting things up his sleeve for the future that he thinks will keep viewers hooked.
In an interview with the Radio Times magazine, Jed spilled: "Yeah. That’s an area of interest and will be explored. The fact is that ‘Line of Duty’ has a very big story arc across all the series and one of the things that we haven’t done is to delve into Hasting’s past. That will happen in a future series."
As head of the police unit, Hastings stands accused of discriminatory management and unethical behaviour, and his back story is going to be explored in more depth as the show goes on.
But with future series still hanging in the balance, as the BBC has not yet commissioned a sixth instalment in addition to the confirmed fifth, Jed has a back-up plan to prevent a cliff hanger.
He explained: "We haven’t had that meeting with the BBC. But if there’s not another commission, I would have to approach series five as the last."
And he’s already planned out which characters will make it through but revealed that they don’t know who will be saved and who will be axed.
He added: "We all talk to each other, but everyone understands that we want to make the best possible piece of drama. So it may happen that, as with Craig Parkinson, who had been a mainstay of three series [as Matthew "Dot" Cottan], there comes a point when the best thing that can happen to the character is to exit and create a launch point for new stories."
And he’s not afraid to go back to the drawing board when something unexpected happens as Jed revealed that the character of Ted Hastings didn’t originally "fit" Adrian Dunbar, who plays him.
He said: "Even though Adrian didn’t fit the character I’d sketched, he did something very vivid and interesting with the lines, and so I reconceived the character to fit him. I regard that as one of my great pieces of luck, to the extent that I now see auditions as being part of the writing process."
Line of Duty to explore Superintendent Ted Hastings’ past in future series
