Video: McMafia’s James Norton, Juliet Rylance, Hossein Amini & James Watkins

McMafia co-creators Hossein Amini and James Watkins share with TV Drama how they mapped out the eight-episode production, and stars James Norton and Juliet Rylance offer up insight into their characters.

Amini and Watkins have spent most of their careers writing and directing movies. When adapting Misha Glenny’s nonfiction work McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld, however, they knew that television would be the best medium to tell a story about life in and around a mafia organization. Commissioned by the BBC, with AMC as the U.S. co-production partner, McMafia stars Norton (Happy Valley, Grantchester, War & Peace) as Alex Godman, the British-raised son of Russian exiles with mafia ties who becomes embroiled in his family’s criminal enterprise. The series has wrapped its run in the U.K. and begins its North American broadcast this week. Amazon Prime Video, meanwhile, will take the show to much of its footprint, excluding the U.K., China, the U.S. and Canada.