Creators of TNT’s Good Behavior at the New York Television Festival (NYTVF) on Tuesday evening gave some insight into why the show’s star, Michelle Dockery, chose to play Lettie — a complex, gritty, yet ultimately good-hearted southern girl struggling with addiction — as a follow up to her turn as the elegant, erudite and very British Lady Mary on Downton Abbey.

In the first episode alone, we see Dockery’s character engaging in some particularly artful cat burglary, drinking massive quantities of alcohol and practicing an intriguing brand of honey-pot vigilante justice with a hangover that hurts to watch. But there are a lot of darkly comedic moments as well — something viewers saw whispers of in the cutting deadpan of Lady Mary.

“What I love about this character is that she is unapologetic and complicated and flawed but she is fundamentally an optimist,” said Sarah Aubrey, executive vice president of original programming for TNT. “That’s what I was really drawn to. I don’t think women are given that license to not only be complicated but also joyful.”

Aubrey revealed that the show was initially pitched to her by an agent as Breaking Bad in reverse, and starring a woman.

But while the shows share similar themes, they have opposite trajectories.

“Instead of it being about a descent, it’s an ascent — this pilot is basically her [Lettie’s] low point,” Aubrey said.

Good Behavior is based on a series of novellas by Wayward Pines writer Blake Crouch.

Crouch, who’s also a co-creator, explained his inspiration to the NYTVF audience.

“This show started with a short story that I wrote called ‘The Pain of Others’ in 2009. And it just started with an image that I had of a woman in flashy sunglasses walking into a hotel,” Crouch said (this scene does in fact pop up in the first episode).

“I just wanted to explore who this woman was — she so clearly spoke to me,” Crouch said.

“Characters are hard to write…but she was easy because it’s like she already existed. I kept coming back to her and I wrote another novella and another novella,” Crouch added.

When it came time to find an actress who could handle playing such a dynamic protagonist, Chad Hodge, the series co-creator, executive producer and show runner, said they surprisingly went with the first name that was suggested to them: Michelle Dockery.

“Her name was pitched and it was like literally the first one I was like, ‘oh, that’s Lettie,‘” Hodge said.

“It’s so different from Lady Mary but I just thought if an actress can do what she did with Lady Mary, she can do anything,” he added. “Michelle and I joke that if Lady Mary was alive in 2016, she would probably be Lettie.”

So it’s perhaps not surprising that despite Dockery’s finesse at portraying frosty English aristocrats, Aubrey says the actress identifies more with characters like the down-and-out Lettie.

“She seems so refined on Downton but Michelle is much more this character than she is Lady Mary,” Aubrey said. “She comes from sort of a hard scrabble background; she’s got a lot of moxie.”

And a lot of moxie is what’s needed to carry a drama series that aims to break out of the box of traditional female protagonists. The show’s creators made inclusion a priority and approached this series differently, starting at the production level, by insisting that a woman — Charlotte Sieling — direct the first episode.

“This is a woman’s story and there’s nothing I can do about it, but I’m not a woman and neither is Blake,” said Hodge. “Because it’s about a woman, a woman has to create it with us.”

Aubrey thinks that is, in part, what makes the show unique.

“There’s a lot of premium cable drama right now, but we feel that a lot of those shows are kind of relentlessly dark and also relentlessly male,” she said.

Aubrey’s hope is that at the end of the show, viewers don’t want to “cry and go to bed.” Rather, she said, “the idea is to come back next week and see this kind of spirited woman.”

Good Behavior premieres November 15 on TNT.

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