Based on the bestselling novels by Marian Keyes, new drama The Walsh Sisters lands on RTÉ One on Sunday. John Byrne talks to the show's chief writer and cast member, Stefanie Preissner.
Marian Keyes is an expert on such matters. When she says, "Stefanie Preissner is amazing!" I take her comment at face value.
I'm at a screening at the IFI in Dublin, where the first episode of The Walsh Sisters is getting an airing ahead of its launch on RTÉ One. Before the lights go down, key cast members and Marian Keyes are on stage to discuss the show.
The six-part first season is based on two of Keyes's books, Rachel's Holiday and Anybody Out There?, featuring the fictitious five siblings. The cast includes Stefanie Preissner, who plays Maggie.
Preissner has also written four of the six episodes and was charged with the onerous task of turning those novels into a TV show. If the opening episode is a barometer, Marian Keyes is correct – she's done an amazing job.
Not surprising, then, that the multi-talented Preissner (she's a writer, actress, script supervisor, and columnist) sees common ground rather than contrasts between them.
"I think that the reason that I was chosen was because we are quite similar," says Preissner, when asked about adapting Keyes's books for the small screen.
"In that the tone of [my TV series] Can't Cope, Won't Cope, the tone of [my stage show] Solpadeine is My Boyfriend is so much like women of a certain age, going through things in their life, and using humour as a coping mechanism. I think it works really well.
"I think there are elements of Marian – and I actually don't know if that's because I was a really big Marian Keyes fan before I got this job – in my own writing, which is really inspired by her."
Then there's the dynamic in publishing, where if a man writes a book, it's 'art', but when a woman does likewise, it's considered more, well, disposable.
As Preissner puts it, "I love how she speaks about, almost, so she really believes that it's a patriarchal thing, to make women feel like the books that they want to read, the things that they're interested in, the things that happen to them, are just chick lit. You'd read it on a beach.
"And instead of being offended that her books are in that genre, she uses it. Because she knows that so many more people are going to access it.
"And I've heard her speak so eloquently about how, if David Nichols writes One Day, he's nominated for a Booker or whatever, awards, and her books are about the same thing . . ."
"Now she's seen as a national treasure," she adds. "There are pictures of her in museums and whatever, but for so long it was just, 'Ah yeah. That stuff. I'm going to put it in the charity shop when I'm done on the beach.'"
Preissner's chatting in a room at Luttrellstown Castle, on the outskirts of Dublin, where a scene from The Walsh Sisters is being shot. It's a bit of a gaff and could easily be the set for a season of The Traitors Ireland.
First impression: this is a major production. There seems to be an army of people in the crew. As one producer tells me en route to the room where we're interviewing cast members: "There are around 100 people in total working on the show."
It shows in the final result, as the opening episode is captivating, rattles along, and looks fantastic. It reminds me, in terms of quality and cast, of Cold Feet, which was a phenomenal success for ITV back in the late 1990s and early Noughties.
The Walsh Sisters is very different, though. It follows five Irish sisters - Anna, Rachel, Maggie, Claire, and Helen - as they navigate addiction, grief, motherhood, relationships, and the chaos of a typical Irish family.
But when a sudden incident causes a collective pause, old wounds resurface, and long-buried secrets spill out. As Rachel fights for sobriety, Anna faces a profound personal crisis, and the others struggle to hold everything together.
The sisters must confront who they truly are and what they want for their futures. And, unlike in the books, it has to play out over six one-hour episodes.
In the end, the show came together very quickly. But, as Preissner points out, the period before that covered a sizeable chunk of the now 38-year-old's life.
"Seven years ago – 2018 – I was called to a meeting in London," she recalls. "They were interviewing various writers who might adapt the show.
"In order to prep for that meeting, I had to read the books and then think about what I would do as a writer. There's a hundred ways you could do it.
"I went into the meeting, I said, 'Look, this is how I would do it, and this is where my life and the lives of these characters overlap. I'd this experience, and this and this and this.'
"Then you leave, and you wait, and they were like, 'Great! Let's go.' And, seven years later . . .
"So, when I started writing this, I was single – and now I have children. I got married and, on my first pregnancy, it looked like this was going to go into production with a different financier."
"And I went, 'Oh God, I'm going to have to take maternity leave in the middle of it.' But that didn't happen. That was my first baby," she laughs.
"I got pregnant again. I had Billy last January, and that was when I knew this was going into production. So it was three weeks' maternity leave and then scribble, scribble, scribble."
Stefanie Preissner is almost matter-of-fact about the job that she's done, adapting these much-loved books – those relatable sisters and family – into what must surely be the TV drama event of the year.
And it certainly wasn't a straightforward task.
"There's different ways that you can do it," she explains. "If you're adapting something like Harry Potter, it's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 – it's all there and you're just deciding what to put forward.
"But because in each of Marian's books . . . so, say Rachel's Holiday is about Rachel. But in Rachel's Holiday, Anna is not going out with Aidan, hasn't met Aidan at all.
"Helen is much younger in Anna's book, and my character has two children. But in my book, I have fertility issues."
"It's not just a matter of condensing these stories," she insists. "It's about creating a timeline where they and their characters can co-exist.
"So you kind of think, 'How can I make these books live parallel to each other? Which stories am I putting forward?', and because Marian is so beloved, that does kind of hang pretty heavy on me sometimes.
"I spent a lot of time on Marian Keyes fan sites, Goodreads, and Reddit threads. 'Who's your favourite Walsh sister? I better put that in. I better put that in.'"
"The narrative thread through season one is," she explains with a musical analogy, "if you imagine the five sisters as faders on a sound desk, Rachel and Anna are really up full.
"Then we kind of play around down here with Claire and Maggie and Helen throughout different episodes, bringing them up."
Was that the plan back in 2018, to base the first season on the first two books?
"It was going to be The Walsh Sisters, the four texts - and then how Claire is referred to in those four texts," she recalls. "But really, I focused on Rachel's Holiday and Anybody Out There?.
"In the earlier drafts, there was more of Angels, which is Maggie's book. When I was looking at the scripts, I was like, 'As an audience, you'd be going - how could they possibly have this much drama?'
"So we dialed her back a little bit. There was so much going on."
Which implies that there's a lot more to tell about the Walsh Sisters beyond this six-part run. Understandably, Stefanie Preissner's been asking herself what can be done next time around.
"Every day I get to see the rushes of that day, and every weekend I get an assembly, which is a very rough cut," she explains. "And you're saying, 'Actually, now that I'm seeing it on-screen, these two are the beating heart of this story'.
"And when I go away from them, I want to go back to them. So I pull this back a bit, and go earlier in this person's story, so that we have more to play with next season.
"Hoping that there is a next season!"
"I think it's really important to think like that," she says. "Otherwise, you'll burn through the whole lot if you know it's a limited season.
"But The Walsh Family, the fact that Marian is writing books about the same characters 36 years on . . ."
Smiling, she adds: "We have a lot of story to go through here."
The Walsh Sisters, 9.30pm, Sunday, RTÉ One
