Wilderness writer Marnie Dickens unpacks her captivating Amazon thriller

The first, delivered with no little menace, is from Taylor Swift. The superstar's new version of her 2017 single Look What You Made Me Do is the Amazon Prime Video revenge drama's theme.

"I don't like your little games... The role you made me play of the fool... No, I don't like you," she sings.

The song is an update that has been recorded as part of Swift's ongoing remake project to thwart the cash-in ambitions of Scooter Braun, the divisive music industry executive who bought the rights to her back catalogue.

Then, it's the turn of the show's star, Jenna Coleman. Acknowledging those who warned her of the perils of trusting men, cuckolded wife Liv, in a voiceover that calmly alerts us to her plans, salutes the "Greek chorus of all women telling me it's never safe".

Like Swift, Liv is on a a mission to reclaim her agency. It's a connection not lost on screenwriter Marnie Dickens, who is understandably thrilled to have the song open her drama.

While she says she can’t speak for the musician, she says, "The day [Taylor] said yes was a win for the show and for me personally."

And so, from the off, this six-part drama (tagline: "Look what he made her do"), playing on the primal fear inherent in the Great American Outdoors, deftly puts viewers on the edge of their seats, and on notice.

Here be monsters – and they're mostly unfaithful blokes.

The lyric at the heart of Taylor's song speaks directly to our heroine Liv's central dilemma," says Dickens of a "sync" that's a huge coup for a show adapted from Welsh former journalist Beverley Jones's 2019 novel.

"The man she loves has betrayed her, lied to her and ripped her reality out from under her. He has pushed her to a place where there's only one option – cold, hard revenge."

As for Coleman's line, it's essential for mapping out "where we go across the series, to Liv's whole experience, and to where she’s come from", notes Dickens. "That comes from her background as she fights to be more than the sum of her parts – at the same time as ignoring the advice and the experiences of her mother in terms of men who do women wrong."

Liv and new husband Will (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) are freshly transplanted to New York, courtesy of his job. The British couple have a luxury loft apartment, but the terms of Will's visa mean Liv can’t work. Never mind, they're love's young dream... until high-flying smoothie Will betrays Liv's trust.

In a major play for reconciliation, Will tries to bribe – sorry, compensate – Liv with the honeymoon they never had. It's the “trip of a lifetime... white-water rafting, Arizona, Vegas, the lot". Having seen how her mum back home (Claire Rushbrook) remains ruinously obsessed with the man who abandoned her years previously, Liv is prepared to forgive and maybe eventually forget. Then, right before the trip, she discovers another incriminating message – complete with Lurid in flagrante video – on Will’s laptop...

Liv keeps her cool and her counsel. She pushes on with the holiday, plotting to use their Wild West road trip to get even with her husband. And while their powder-blue, soft-top Ford Mustang would have perhaps raised eyebrows on the M40, the US backdrop also supplies an atmosphere that Dickens’s native Buckinghamshire wouldn’t.

“Beverley had done that road trip and felt it had a beauty but always a proximity to danger. It’s that feeling that you couldn’t be more at risk from the elements. Your smallness as a human being becomes very apparent. It’s the kind of place where you step the wrong way and you’ve stepped off the edge of a ravine.

“A lot of unfortunate accidents happen, and Liv uses that to her advantage,” continues the 37-year-old writer. “New York represents the civi- lised world. But the wilderness is where we get in touch with our bestial, primal selves.”

Dickens studied history at Oxford and secured her entry into the production side of TV via a summer job on the set of Sally Wainwright’s 2006 drama The Amazing Mrs Pritchard. After graduating, she “ping-ponged” between production work on Law and Order and Spooks. Her true interest, though, lay in the characters and scripts. “I felt excited and lucky when I could build a rapport with actors or run scenes with them. And when scripts came in, I’d tear through them on my way to handing them out to other people.”

Writing, she realised, was her true passion. Her first original drama was the 2016 BBC3 thriller Thirteen, starring Jodie Comer as a woman who has been held captive in a cellar for 13 years. Her second, 2019’s Gold Digger, starred Julia Ormond as a woman who falls for a man half her age.

"Since I was really young, I was always writing nonsensical stories. When I was a teenager, I had a guitar and wrote gloomy love songs. I’ve always been writing, one way or another."

Dickens's love of, and facility for, a "propulsive, twisty-turny" plot lies in part in literary canon – and in what many of them missed.

"I read those classics as a kid, as we all have to, and I sometimes found the female characters a bit lacking. Or they didn't have agency. So, for me it's Vanity Fair. Here's Becky Sharp, this character who rode out the story with utter gumption. I remember saying to somebody how much I loved her. And they said: 'Well, that says a lot about you if you think she's a heroine!'"

Like Liv in Wilderness and the lead characters in Thirteen and Gold Digger, Thackeray's sharp-elbowed Sharp was a heroine with purpose: "That sort of thing is interesting to me. It's a common thread between those three shows. They're about women defying the boxes society is trying to put us in the whole time."

That said, Dickens loves a good, glossy yarn, too: "My cultural background, unapologetically, is loving TV – those pulpy, fun soaps, or brilliant shows like Buffy. I'd love to be able to lean on classical literature. But the truth is that fun storytelling and betrayal all comes from classic TV dramas, not books."

Does she have personal experience of betrayal?

"Not the classic betrayal like in this show," she said. "I've been in slightly messier situations. [In those] it wouldn't entirely be clear that I had a reason to feel wronged. But whether you're the cheater or the cheated, most people can relate to the intoxicating pull of an affair, or having your heart smashed. It does feel like that's the most relatable thing about this drama: what it is to be in love, and then what it is to be heartbroken."

We came in on a quote so, in the manner of Wilderness's delicious cliffhanger dynamics, let's go out on one, too.

"We're voyeurs," intones Liv in Dickens's pin-sharp script. "We want the blood and the dead girls on slabs and a look inside the mind of the sick f**k who did it. I guess in this case, that sick f**k is me."

We don't like to be rude, Marnie, but, is that you?

"Ha ha! I guess I'd say, aren't we all? So, yes, I suppose I am in a way."

To be fair to Dickens, to write so convincingly, a screenwriter has to believe in their material to their marrow. There's a professional reason for her being that way.

"Yes! Thank you for giving me that get-out-of-jail card!"

Wilderness arrives on Amazon Prime Video on Friday 15th September. Sign up for Amazon Prime's 30-day free trial, which renews at £8.99/month.

Try Radio Times magazine today and get 10 issues for only £10, PLUS a £10 John Lewis and Partners voucher delivered to your home – subscribe now. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.