This mortal coil

How Kate Atkinson's life-loop novel became a series starring Thomasin McKenzie.

- RUSSELL BROWN

LIFE AFTER LIFE, TVNZ+, from July 8

It’s a screen trope: the character who constantly dies and “wakes” to relive the same life over and over. But in such stories, the character is usually aware of the loop and is attempting to exit it. In Life After Life, Ursula Todd (played by our own Thomasin McKenzie) is not, initially at least, aware that she has been living a succession of do-overs – iterations of the possible life that began with her own stillbirth in 1910. It’s complicated.

Complicated enough that previous attempts to adapt Kate Atkinson’s 2013 novel of the same name for the screen have foundered. Which, says series writer Bash Doran (The Looming Tower), was motivation to actually get it done.

“I had been told it was unadaptable by other people, and that got me intrigued. I really love a structural puzzle.

“Also, I loved the book and I couldn’t put it down. I just thought that if you can’t put this story down, this is a story that everybody’s going to want to watch.