Editor’s note: Deadline’s It Starts on the Page (Limited) features 10 standout limited or anthology series scripts in 2025 Emmy contention.
Say Nothing, FX’s limited series about The Troubles in Northern Ireland, took five years to make – a long time in television terms but nothing compared to how long the peace process took.
The series is based on Patrick Radden Keefe’s 2018 book Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, which told the story of the abduction and murder of Jean McConville, a mother of 10 who was wrongly accused by the IRA of being a British Army informant. It explores the lives of a group of people growing up in Belfast between the 1970s and 1990s, including members of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA), who killed McConville, and also bombed the Old Bailey in London.
The show has already started its awards-season run; it was nominated for Best Drama at the Irish Film and Television Awards, which also nominated creator-showrunner Joshua Zetumer for Best Script. Zetumer also picked up a writing award at the USC Scripter Awards, and the show was nominated for a Limited Series WGA Award earlier this year.
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Say Nothing is told through the eyes of Dolours Price and Marian Price. Zetumer says the show follows the sisters on a “thirty-year journey from idealism to disillusionment.”
The young women became symbols of radical politics and the series explores the way this deeply divided society tipped over into armed conflict and highlights the long shadow of radical violence, and the emotional and psychological costs of a code of silence.
One of the main vehicles for the story is the Belfast Project, a series of interviews organized by Boston College that would serve as a resource for historians with the promise that the interviews would only be released after the subject’s death.
In episode 9, “The People in the Dirt,” as the details of McConville’s death become clearer, the emotional toll of the struggle also comes into focus. Dolours claims that she and Marian only drove McConville to her execution but, later, it turns out that Marian was the one who pulled the trigger. Marian denies this and Gerry Adams, who is portrayed as a senior IRA commander, also denies being involved, as well as being a member of the IRA.
In his intro to the script for the finale, Zetumer speaks of the challenge of adapting Radden Keefe’s “complex” and “thorny” book without letting the project “collapse under its own weight” and teaching himself as an American to write Belfast dialogue without speaking in a Belfast accent.
Say Nothing tells the story of two Catholic sisters, Dolours and Marian Price, who grow up amid the chaos roiling Belfast in the late 1960s. They begin as eager young activists trying to change the world, but after being injured during a peace march, the sisters take up arms and join the
Irish Republican Army. Dolours and Marian still want to change the world, but soon believe that violence is the only way to do it. Over the course of 9 episodes, the series examines the fallout of that decision, following the sisters on a thirty-year journey from idealism to disillusionment.In this episode — the finale, entitled “The People in the Dirt” — we find the Price sisters nearing the end of that long journey. By now they’ve spent their youth fighting for a united Ireland and paid a heavy price for their beliefs. They’ve watched friends die, they’ve planted bombs, they’ve nearly died themselves on hunger strike. All of it in service of one goal: to force the British out of Northern Ireland. The sisters are horrified when their childhood friend, Gerry Adams, helps architect a peace deal that allows the British to stay. Now in middle-age, Dolours is thrown into a tailspin. If the British aren’t leaving, then what was it all for??
With the Peace Process years behind her, Dolours now spends long nights self-medicating with alcohol and burning with an anger that she can scarcely control. Most of all, she wants to talk, to process her trauma by breaking the IRA’s code of silence and confessing to all she’s done in service of her beliefs. In the first scene of the finale, we find Dolours ready to come clean about her role in one of the most infamous crimes in the Troubles: the abduction and murder of widowed mother-of-10, Jean McConville.
I spent five years making Say Nothing, and there wasn’t a month that went by when I didn’t think it was all going to fall apart. The series is based on a brilliant book by Patrick Radden Keefe, which should be required reading for anyone interested in the cost of political violence. But the book is also so complex, so thorny — and my own ambitions for the series were so vast — that I thought surely the whole endeavor would someday collapse under its own weight. Now, six months after premiering, I think I’m still in shock that we were able to bring this complex, powerful story to the screen.
Writing Say Nothing felt like walking on a tightrope. Firstly, I wanted the show to be accessible to audiences who’d never heard of the Troubles. At the same time, I wanted the series to be authentic down to the little granular details. As an American, the first thing I had to do was teach myself to write Belfast dialogue without speaking in a Belfast accent myself. Over the course of writing, I held interviews with ex-IRA members, travelled to Belfast, read every book about the Troubles that I could get my hands on. I had extensive conversations with our cast from Northern Ireland as well as our director Michael Lennox (Derry Girls). At one point, I was conducting so much online research that Google’s algorithms actually thought I was in Belfast and began giving me restaurant recommendations on the Falls Road.
Even with an obsessive showrunner at the helm, this series would’ve gone nowhere without the outsized talents of our writers’ room. So lastly, a massive THANK YOU to Clare Barron, Joe Murtagh, Kirsten Sheridan, and to our writer’s assistant, Andrew Lewis. Without you, we would’ve been lost.
Joshua Zetumer
Read the script below.