Gun play: how 'Love/Hate' became RTÉ's best drama

“It’s funny to see movie actors fighting to get into TV shows when it was always the other way around,” says Tom Vaughan-Lawlor. “It’s because the story and the exploration of characters can take place in such depth over the course of a TV series. It is like a great novel. You get to explore the massive arc of a character in a way you can’t condense into two hours of a movie. America’s had this golden age of TV. I think now we’re starting to hit that bar in this country.”

Meet the show-runner: Stuart Carolan

Is it a golden age of TV drama?

Most people do the boxset thing now . . . I like Homeland and Breaking Bad . . . I think American drama has influenced everybody. I just got a boxset of the French drama Braquo. I liked the Israeli version of In Treatment. I don't know if it's a golden age, but I think it's fantastic

RTÉ has given you a lot of freedom.

HBO shows can have a certain level of bad language or violence you don't get on network television. RTÉ 1 is the equivalent of a network channel and yet they've let us do things you just wouldn't see on BBC1 or ITV. Violence, sex and bad language aren't key to what we do, but we're allowed to do it because we're showing the truth . . . They know it's not about being exploitative.

There's a lot of attention to detail in the show.

I've a great team . . . [ director of photography] David Odd said he wanted it to look like a cross between Jack Vettriano and Vermeer.

Vermeer apparently loved light from the north, so not only did we need all sorts of strange locations but they also had to be north-facing.

Is there an end in sight?

I kind of have an end in mind but I don't want to say what it is [ Carolan has been given the go ahead for series four and is thinking of series five].

I don't know when I'll be working with people this strong and have this much support again.