Trivia / Century Falls

• Creator-Driven Successor: As described on its own Trivia page, Century Falls served as a successor to 1991's Dark Season. Its plot was originally formed as the basic idea that Russell T Davies had planned for its second of two stories in a sequel series that never entered production.
• Deleted Scene: Enough material was actually shot for there to be seven episodes of Century Falls, but just over thirty minutes worth of footage was ultimately not used - including a longer cut of the villagers' meeting and a scene in which Mrs Cooper was unmasked as a traitor, both from episode five. Though disappointed that these extra details were dropped, Davies has said it was essential to maintain the consistent cliffhangers that he desired to close out each episode, and stick to the BBC's demands for a six-parter in any case.
• Development Hell: Like Davies' previous serial Dark Season, Century Falls was partly made as a replacement for another project — this one being in limbo. The serial replaced Time of Terror, a proposed new fantasy drama about British children escaping a bloody revolution at a foreign baccalaureate school that Dark Season director Colin Cant was overseeing. However, the scripts for this by a different writer were seen as so poor that it had fallen through, leaving Cant to parachute Davies in after their previous success.
• Half-Remembered Homage: Davies has admitted that his initial drafts for the series involved another connected plot strand, centring around a professor and his assistant researching a mysterious stone circle. This blatantly derived from — if not outright plagarized — Children of the Stones. However, these and other excised story aspects (such as a surprise reappearance of Tess's father) were ultimately written out of the scripts when it became clear the BBC would only offer the budget and schedule time for a shorter series.
• Spoiled by the Cast List: Averted, as in the credits of the early episodes one name is pointedly withheld.
• Surprisingly Lenient Censor: To his apparent surprise, Davies faced virtually no opposition in the creative process of the series' finalised content, with the exception of the producer Richard Callanan expressing concern that certain horrific lines specifically detailing how the titular evil pagan power, Century, will fuse with an unborn child would be cut out. However, even these remained intact in the broadcast edit!
  • Later on, however, Davies would remark that he may have gone "too adult", despite still being proud of the series. His superior at the BBC, Anna Home, has also said that she took some heat from even higher powers at the corporation for allowing his boundary pushing to go out in children's slots. Perhaps as a result, it was never repeated — unlike Dark Season, which was reran not just once but twice by the BBC.
• What Could Have Been: Century Falls was originally planned to receive a Spiritual Successor in the form of a series tentatively titled by Davies as The Heat of the Sun, an intended final entry in his unconnected serial lineage that had started with Dark Season (see above).
  • Taking viewers away from the leafy village, folk horror trappings of Century Falls and into the concrete jungle, urban thriller aspects of London, The Heat of the Sun was to centre around three young characters: a troubled psychic boy with a TV show backed by a shadowy regime aiming for world domination, an Asian girl from an abusive home with a homicidal father, and a younger sister visiting her gang-leader brother in the British capital, currently under martial-law and populated by rebel groups like his. Over the course of the chaotic final week of the 20th century, the three would come together, running away from their families and discovering the truth about why vulnerable homeless people have been going missing...
  • However, like the proposed continuation of Dark Season, this series would ultimately never come to fruition, albeit for different reasons. Davies himself has blamed The Heat of the Sun never going into production on his ongoing commitments with Granada Television on shows such as The Ward, and a shift by most British children's television in the subsequent period into targeting younger audiences more. Far fewer pure drama series were commissioned — especially of the short-run serial type, a harder sell in much of the increasingly important international television import market. The director on both series, Colin Cant, was also sacked from the BBC shortly afterward, allegedly due to going overbudget on his works.
  • Nonetheless, Davies did not rule out The Heat of the Sun still happening one day, despite him not writing a word of it. Key proposed elements of the concept (such as the poor disappearing, Britain placed under martial law, and the narrative device of leading up to a new year) have naturally since found their way into his subsequent works. These include Years and Years and Doctor Who, specifically the latter's Turn Left.