Leading, Collaborating, Championing: Red’s Arresting Women

Assessing the work of RED Production Company founder, Nicola Shindler, through collaborations with television writer Sally Wainwright, this article works to think through the industrial conditions in which RED's work takes place. Moving from the industrial and contextual outwards to examine the series Scott & Bailey (ITV, 2011–16) and Happy Valley (BBC, 2014– ), I consider Shindler's working practices of leading, collaborating with and championing professional women. Nominating the labour of RED as one of ‘quietly feminist’ work, I ask how Shindler self-narrativises the work of the company in order to trace the shift in its oeuvre from its male-dominated authorial beginnings to a more diverse group of writer-collaborators in the present day.