Everything I Know About Love TV series: a guide to Dolly Alderton's BBC adaptation
Dolly Alderton will be adapting her best-selling memoir Everything I Know About Love, a deeply personal and riotously funny account of surviving your 20s, into a television drama for the BBC.
In her award-winning book, the journalist, podcaster and columnist shares self-deprecating, and occasionally heartbreaking musings on love, friendship, relationships, and growing up as millennial. Quite often on the receiving end of these relatable tales of disastrous dates, breakups, heartache and humiliation, are a group of solid female friends to provide support and a sense of humour.
The series will follow two close female friends as they enter their first flat-share in London and navigate early adulthood. Speaking at the BBC Drama Preview Q&A this week, Alderton said: "I am so excited that my TV show Everything I know About Love is being announced today. It is a semi-fictionalised adaptation of my memoir of the same name.
"And it's a messy, boisterous, joyful romantic comedy about two female best friends from childhood and what happens when they move into their first London house share and move into their first phase of adulthood, And I cannot stress enough how thrilled I am that it's being made by Working Title and the BBC."
Alderton added on Instagram: "I've been working with Working Title on the project for nearly four years and I am so grateful that this story has grown and developed in such safe hands. BBC drama has made extraordinary TV over the last year and it is an honour to be on their slate of upcoming shows. And before every boy I dated a decade ago messages me today to breezily ask how I am, it's semi-fictionalised, so don't panic fellas."
Piers Wenger, controller of commissioning drama at the BBC, added: "I'm sure people will compare it to Sex and the City, or to Girls but the truth is Dolly is an author in her own right, and she is uproariously funny and it's a very personal, and at times dark story, but with massive amounts of humour and emotional truths to it."
Alderton gained recognition and a following of young female readers after launching her dating column for The Sunday Times, in which she relayed the highs and lows of being a single woman in her 20s, cataloguing cringeworthy dates, successful ones, and everything in between in her typically self-effacing way. She and fashion journalist Pandora Sykes recently concluded their popular culture and current affairs podcast The High Low after four years as hosts.
What will Everything I Know About Love be about?
Alderton is writing the screenplay, which will be directed by China Moo-Young. BBC's synopsis reads: "Maggie and Birdy, besties since school, finally land in London to live it large, when the unexpected happens – dependable Birdy gets a steady boyfriend. A generous, funny, warm-hearted and uplifting Sex & The City for millennials which covers bad dates and squalid flat-shares, heartaches and humiliations, and, most importantly, unbreakable female friendships."
Off the back of the success of Michaela Coel's acclaimed BBC drama I May Destroy You, commissioning editor Piers Wenger expressed the importance of writers being given an uninhibited platform for their voice to be able tell their singular, unique stories without interruption.
"We're commissioning more and more writers who are writing about their own experiences - I think audiences want authenticity they want personalised stories, they want specificity as they're just looking for truth and you can't mug the audience off," Wenger explained. "And having writers writing about their own lived experiences as Michaela did, there's just something that allows those pieces to connect with audiences."
The cast of Everything I Know About Love
The cast for the romantic comedy is yet to be announced.
When will Everything I Know About Love air?
The air date for Everything I Know About Love will be confirmed soon. Alderton will also be serving as executive producer, alongside Jo McClellan for the BBC and Surian Fletcher-Jones, Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner for Working Title Television.
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