This article contains spoilers for all episodes of Outrageous

BritBox’s newest drama Outrageous combines the traditional family saga period drama format with an historical and political analysis of biographical and issues. You may have heard of the Mitford Sisters — whether through their published works, their marriages, or their politics — but this is the first time a series has chronicled all of their lives. Bessie Carter (Bridgerton) stars as eldest daughter Nancy, and her narration introduces her younger siblings Diana (Joanna Vanderham) and Unity (Shannon Watson) who joined the rising fascist and Nazi movements, while a fourth sister Jessica (Zoe Brough) went in the opposite direction and became a Communist activist.

GBH Drama interviewed screenwriter Sarah Williams and Executive Producer Matthew Mosley on how they brought the turbulent 1930s to life.

GBH Drama: Mary S. Lovell’s biography The Sisters is 400 pages long. How did you sort through a century of info on the Mitford family and decide what to feature?

Sarah Williams: It took a lot of thinking. We, first of all, had to find an in point and an out point, and find the moment where things began to change, where they stopped being just any aristocratic family, and events were set in motion that would take them all in very different ways. The moment we settled on is that moment where Diana decides she’s bored in her marriage, meets Oswald Mosley, and decides to dedicate her life to him. We thought that was the moment when things began to unravel for the family.

I have to do all the planning before I can start writing scenes, especially with something like this, because you are dealing with facts. Of course, there’s a certain amount of artistic input into it, the fact is that someone gets married on this date, someone gets divorced on this date, someone meets somebody, Unity goes to Munich on this date — so there was a lot of planning before I could start breaking it down into which individual scenes I might use.

Matthew Mosley: What it meant for us is that this series became about the coming of age of these sisters. Even though Nancy’s quite grown up when we start season one, they all go on a big coming-of-age journey. Nancy finds what she thinks is true love and gets married. By the end, they’re all set on their very path, so that shaped where we ended series one as well. There were things that we discovered or at least brought out more and more through the process. I think one of the things that emerged quite strongly was the relationship between Nancy and Diana, which sat at the center. That’s the most important relationship. Building to that in Episode 6 — what happens between them, and making that a really strong moment for the two of them at the end of the series — was something we honed through the process.

GBH Drama: What was your approach in balancing the society parties with accurately depicting the Mitfords’ involvement in the 1930s fascist and communist movements?

Sarah Williams: The politics in the show is always viewed in terms of the family. I’m writing a family saga. The politics are only referred to as part of what’s happening to this family. The big question is: can the family stay together whilst being pulled apart by these extremist political views that some of the sisters adopt? It’s all quite integral, but both the politics and the family were very integrated, so it didn’t feel like a big decision to make [as to] where to put the emphasis.

Matthew Mosley: One of the things that Sarah was always very clear about in this show is that it’s not all society balls, it’s not all women in beautiful silk dresses, sashaying through ballrooms; this was a family who, yes, they were aristocratic, they had huge privileges, they were well-connected, they knew everyone who was anyone. But also, as we see in the show, Farve [the sister’s father] is terrible at maintaining the family finances. He can’t keep a hold of the money. It is slipping away from him. This is a family, to a certain extent, on hard times. We see that. We see them wearing second-hand, hand-me-down clothes in the country house. We see that texture of real family life behind the scenes that we sometimes don’t get, I think, in period dramas. That was an important part of the vision for the show.

GBH Drama: Speaking of the country house, what was the vision for the set design as audiences see both very lavish and very modest living spaces throughout the series?

Matthew Mosley: The Mitford family house was such an important location for us because it expresses so much. On the one hand, it’s this prison that the girls are desperate to escape from, but on the other hand, it’s the family fortunes. It’s the big family house that Farve needs to hang on to, to pass on to the next generation. That’s his one job. So, it’s a key location for us. We wanted something a bit more eccentric that reflected some of Farve’s personality. In reality, he purpose-built that house for his family. A lot of the siblings hated it, but it was him, and it symbolized him. We found our location, which was perfect. In terms of the set design and dressing it, we wanted to draw that contrast between the lavish world of high society and the home life of the Mitfords. In Swinbrook House, we use a lot of earthy tones, dark greens, and browns that run through the set design and the costumes. Then when we get to London, it’s much more glamorous — beautiful gold pastels, those sorts of colors — to draw that distinction between the two worlds that our characters are in.

Sarah Williams: I love the scenes when they’re in that cramped apartment when they’ve had to rent the big house out because they’re just stony broke. It’s very interesting to me how they just carry on. The family are 10 people in a small room, but they carry on without feeling humiliated in any way. They somehow just keep going.

GBH Drama: Why was Nancy chosen as the narrator and as the focal point character?

Sarah Williams: Nancy felt to me the most relatable of the sisters. It was very important to us that we had an anchor in telling this story. She was also a natural storyteller as a writer, and the eldest.

Matthew Mosley: Nancy narrated the beginning and then through the development we found that she always starts and ends the episode. This frames the experience of each episode for the viewer.

GBH Drama: How did you balance portraying each sibling’s large personality? What advice did you give to the actors?

Sarah Williams: Tom was beloved by all the girls. That is very useful for us because he is naturally a peacemaker and wants to bring them all back together. It’s amazing, to me, that they didn’t all hate him. Because he was the only one who was sent to school, he was going to inherit the title, he was going to inherit all the money, all the land, and all the houses. Yet they somehow all loved him. Unity is more complicated. And she was always the naughtiest child. She was always out to shock. She was always a difficult, obstinate, unwrangleable child. It’s very, very hard to unpick what drew her to fascism. To begin with, she copied her older sister, Diana; she followed her into fascism. And then when Unity got to Munich, she began obsessively following Hitler. But then when one day Hitler turned to her and invited her over, I think something went off in her brain at that moment which was, ‘I’m now prepared to do anything for this man to impress this man, to keep this man onside.’ It’s an incredibly bizarre, dysfunctional relationship that develops there; it helps us enormously to have the other sister’s reaction to it. That’s a very useful dramatic thing for me, to have the rest of them go, “what is she doing?”

Matthew Mosley: Shannon Watson, who plays Unity, does such an extraordinary job of portraying that character who’s obsessively fixated and vulnerable as well. She had this incredible quality right from when she first auditioned that we felt she could get under the skin of that very difficult character. Although we might not understand why she did what she did, seeing Shannon inhabit that part gives you, I think, a bit of an insight into what happened there. So much of the show is about sibling dynamics. We’re both from big families, and what you do in life can be so much a reaction to trying to carve out your niche from the other siblings. There’s an element, I think, of that in the Mitfords, and Jessica in particular, and Unity, her older sister going one way, and her thinking ‘I’m going to go completely the other way.’ I think she did believe passionately in her principles, but I think inevitably that sibling dynamic plays a role as well. The way Unity and Jessica play off each other was fundamental to understanding that.

Sarah Williams: Within this dynamic Pam is the voice of reason as well, but yet she’s surrounded by quite a lot of drama-queen sisters who feel incredibly strongly and passionate about their men or their causes. She’s like, ‘come on. Let’s be friends, play nicely.“ Pam gets all her drama out of her adventures.

Matthew Mosley: Pam is a slightly mysterious character because she lived less of a public life than some of the other sisters. In a lot of the biographies that have been written about the Mitfords, she is less talked about. We made Isobel Jesper Jones, who plays Pam, into a sounding board to the other sisters. The fact that she drove across Europe on her own in her car, it’s amazing. It shows the strength of character of these sisters, even the lesser-known ones like Pam, and the incredible achievements that they made.

GBH Drama: How did you approach giving Muv and Farve Mitford an active role in the story?

Sarah Williams: Muv and Farve, what a hard life they had. I wanted to show that, of course, they’re very eccentric characters, so it’s no wonder perhaps that they had this family. I also believe Muv and Farve had a loving, romantic marriage, and they loved their daughters and son. In a lot of British upper-class families, you feel that the parents are very distant from their kids and barely know them. The kids are brought up by a nanny. The parents, I wanted to show, were trying their hardest, in a way. They may have made a lot of bad decisions, but at the time, it wasn’t neglect at all. They were trying to do their best. Would you agree with that?

Matthew Mosley: I agree, and additionally, they represent the old order that our sisters are rebelling against. So, there’s an element of this story that’s almost a bit like Pride & Prejudice, where Muv needs to marry off her daughters and see them all settled and well placed. What happens in this story is that none of the daughters want to do that, apart from potentially Deborah, the youngest one. They all want to carve their destinies for better or worse. The parents are representing the world that some of the siblings are pulling away from and rejecting.

GBH Drama: Did you film in Germany for the Munich scenes?

Matthew Mosley: We didn’t film in Germany, but that wasn’t to do with any rules or regulations. It was more the practicalities of us making the show. It was all filmed in the UK. Which, again, was quite a challenge for our art department, et cetera, trying to portray Germany and Italy. We had to create all these different worlds in a 30-mile radius outside of London.

GBH Drama: If you had to pick a favorite sister, who would it be?

Sarah Williams: I think mine is Nancy. She’s a writer; I’m a writer. I don’t know. She didn’t live a very straightforward romantic life, but I think she had a good deal of empathy for her other sisters, and she’s funniest, I think. I suppose I’ll always like her for that.

Matthew Mosley: I have a soft spot for Jessica, who treads her extreme path. I suppose whether you agree with her politics or not at all, she does feel strongly for what’s going on in the wider world. She’s such an idealist and she wants things to be better. They are all such fascinating characters, aren’t they? I think in different episodes, you admire different ones. What the series also does is, it brings different sisters to the fore. We start really strongly with Nancy and Diana, and then Unity and Jessica emerge, but then in the later part of the show, Pam and Debo start to emerge quite strongly as well. There’s lots more interesting material to go into with those two as well.

GBH Drama: What do you want viewers to take away from watching Outrageous?

Matthew Mosley: The series is a way of looking at families and family relationships and how families are impacted by what’s going on in the wider world. Did we mention already that Sarah and I are both from big families? These sibling dynamics and how different siblings can tread very different paths is something that fascinates us both. I think in the UK, I’m sure in the US, in lots of different parts of the world, we are in a time when polarization is increasing, and ideas and political affiliations are really testing family bonds. That’s something we were so interested to explore, and I think people will take from the show.

Sarah Williams: I hope it might inspire people to speak to each other more and listen to each other more, especially within families. I think it’s tragic when families are torn apart by politics. The family bond is the key thing. If you can manage to find a bridge with a sister or a brother, then you might manage to find a bridge in the wider world as well. If it inspires any of that, I’ll be thrilled, but that may be asking too much.

GBH Drama: Did you envision the final episode with a follow-up season in mind, or is that the end of the story for now?

Sarah Williams: There are certainly plans and ideas for more, but nothing concrete yet. Of course, there’s more of their story to tell.

Episodes 1-4 of Outrageous are currently streaming on BritBox, with Episodes 5 and 6 to be released on July 3