How real TV scandals and online abuse inspired Douglas Is Cancelled

“In my Doctor Who and Sherlock days, I was continuously [called] a misogynist, a sexist, a homophobe, a racist. Those accusations are very hard to rebuff definitively. How can you prove you’re not?”

As the showrunner of two behemoths of British television, Steven Moffat became very familiar with threats of cancellation. Although never accused of any misconduct, he was frequently lambasted on social media and in online forums for his choice of storylines, characters and dialogue. “Cancel culture” had not yet entered the popular lexicon in 2017, but he sensed something in the air ripe for comedy-drama and began work on a script.

Seven years later, the result is Douglas Is Cancelled, a four-part series that casts Hugh Bonneville as Douglas Bellowes, a clubbable and complacent TV anchor who co-presents a flagship news programme with his younger, savvier colleague Madeline Crown (Karen Gillan). When a tweet appears accusing Douglas of making “an extremely sexist joke” at a wedding, an online mob forms to condemn him, and Madeline is forced to pick a side.

“Newsreaders can’t read the news if they’ve expressed political opinions,” says Moffat. “They are told that the best thing to be is balanced, boring and bland, and I can’t think of another job like that. [We all know] you shouldn’t say anything in private that you wouldn’t say in public, but we’re human and we need to let off steam . . . Context is important.”

Douglas Is Cancelled was already in production when reality started to catch up with it. In May 2023, Phillip Schofield, longtime co-presenter of ITV’s Good Morning, admitted to an “unwise but not illegal” affair with a colleague more than 30 years his junior. Two months later, news broke that BBC anchor Huw Edwards was accused of paying a teenager for explicit images. Moffat found actuality echoing his scripts, though not wholly unexpectedly.

“I don’t know that there’s a moment in history where you wouldn’t have had something like this recently,” he says, drawing a distinction between the gravity of allegations that are often lumped together. “As far as I can see, neither [Schofield nor Edwards] harmed anyone . . . If we all have our lives destroyed because we’ve been unwise, then we’re all going down.”

“The way they were handled in the press is extraordinary,” adds Bonneville. “[Judgment] has become instantaneous with social media as judge, jury and executioner, no due process and an assumption of guilt. Of course, if crimes have been committed they must be prosecuted, but our press has always thrived on the idea of another person for the tumbril. I’ve stopped using Twitter because it has become so utterly poisonous.”

Moffat was finishing his first draft of what began as a play when the #MeToo movement started gathering momentum in 2017, but spent years honing its themes. It was Gillan who prompted the shift from stage to screen.

“When I mentioned that I’d written a play, Karen asked to read it and immediately suggested we could make a film of it,” Moffat recalls. “Once I’d started on a different play [2022’s The Unfriend], I began to wonder: could we add some more characters and chop it up into episodes?” These became, among others, Douglas’s wife and tabloid editor (played by Alex Kingston), his slick producer (Ben Miles) and his clueless agent (Simon Russell Beale). “In some ways, it’s good that the show didn’t happen for a number of years,” Moffat says. “When you make those shows immediately after something has happened, they can be too unfocused, too emotional, too splenetic.”

Take The Morning Show. Apple’s prestige drama launched in 2019, a well-intended but scattershot and ultimately confused soap opera wrestling with similar issues. Here, Steve Carell’s TV anchor is accused of sexual assault, leaving him in disgrace, his victim brutally exposed and colleagues floundering. In trying to say everything proscriptively and preachily, it ended up saying very little.

Douglas Is Cancelled does several key things differently. For one, it parades its theatrical origins with scenes of unusual length, intensity and single location. “Alan Ayckbourn once wrote that TV intercuts between scenes and chops them up for no other reason than it can,” says Moffat. “You’re not increasing the pace — it’s about the rate of incident, not the number of times you switch location in a minute.”

Not that his series lacks pace — in fact, it opens with two episodes of rat-a-tat-tat dialogue and snappy satire. Then, a profoundly unsettling third act set in a hotel room calls into question everything we think we know about one of the main characters.

“The readthrough had an extraordinary atmosphere about it — the script goes like the clappers and feels like W1A on acid,” says Bonneville, comparing it to the satire depicting a dysfunctional BBC, in which he also starred. “There were gales of laughter and then, by the end, there was real discomfort. I wanted to go and wash my hands because I felt grubby. The tone gets much more sinister than you’d anticipate, which I hope will have viewers thinking they’ve been laughing at something that probably isn’t that funny.”

Crucially, Moffat makes demands of the viewer by refusing to provide easy answers and by cannily withholding the details of Douglas’s joke until the end. Thus, we must choose between the rush to judgment or the potential failure to call out abhorrent behaviour.

“There’s no perfect answer, which is why it’s worth making a drama about it,” says Gillan, for whom Madeline’s situation is as recognisable as the labels — “ruthless”, “ambitious”, “sharp” — deployed against her. 

“Madeline has had to put walls up because of everything she’s been through,” she says. “So she’s perceived as calculating and manipulative when inside she’s very vulnerable . . . She’s thinking: is this really happening? Sometimes it’s not black and white.”

Gillan acknowledges recent changes in the film and TV industries, such as the recruiting of intimacy coordinators and the push to hire more female filmmakers, but suggests they do not go far enough. “Now we need to fix the system that enables those people to get into positions of power, and ask ourselves whether silence should sometimes be taken as complicity.”

Gillan’s performance is one of the highlights of Douglas Is Cancelled and makes possible one of Moffat’s central aims. “As #MeToo unrolled and I was writing, I asked all the women I knew whether they’d had similar experiences,” he says. “Their first answer was frequently: no, never. Then a few days later, they’d come out with an absolutely hair-raising story that they’d just forgotten about.”

Moffat came to realise that cancel culture was not the only core subject of his series. “Just as important for me was to celebrate the strength and resilience of women to deal with this kind of thing and move on. That isn’t celebrated enough.”

‘Douglas Is Cancelled’ is on ITV1 and ITVX from June 27

Find out about our latest stories first — follow FTWeekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen