Little Disasters author Sarah Vaughan says the Paramount+ series based on her novel gets what she thinks is most important right.
“I’m a little bit of a stickler for authenticity and being correct about the things that really mattered to me in books. So, with this, it was that we were accurate about perinatal OCD,” the British scribe told UPI in a recent Zoom interview.
Vaughan, who also penned the bestseller Anatomy of a Scandal, said she experienced this psychological condition in real life after the birth of her second child.
“It’s the reason that [main character] Jess has these gas-lighting thoughts, these intrusive thoughts and it’s the reason she doubts herself, and lets herself unravel, that she unravels as a mother and that she can’t give a straight answer,” the writer explained.
“She can’t trust her own thought process and it was something that I knew could have been conveyed in a very sensational way,” she added. “But it was really important that we didn’t over-sensationalize something that is sufficiently scary in itself.”
The six-episode series is now streaming on Paramount+
It looks at how the friendships of Jess (Diane Kruger), Liz (Jo Joyner), Charlotte (Shelley Conn) and Mel (Emily Taaffe) are tested when Jess brings her baby daughter to the hospital with a skull fracture she cannot explain and emergency room doctor Liz reports the injury to social worker Lucy (Cizzy Akudolu).
EastEnders icon Joyner said she wanted to star in the series because she had never seen this medical condition explored in a TV show.
She also was a fan of Vaughan’s work and was pleased to see the author serving as an executive producer on the show.
“When I came to actually read the script and the book, I just completely fell in love with Liz,” Joyner said.
“I really identified with her kind of overstretching herself in every which direction and kind of feeling like she was trying to be all things to all people, and kind of failing at a lot of them.”
Joyner was further intrigued by this specific dilemma where a woman is caught between a friend she always thought was an ideal mother and the scientific career that taught her to analyze the evidence and deduce that a child was abused or neglected by her parents.
“After a while, it felt really simple. There actually wasn’t a decision or a dilemma for Liz, because she’s got a career. She has a job to do,” Joyner said.
“She has to press that button. That’s the bottom line. Then, the fallout is something she has to deal with and that is definitely not so simple.”
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