Inspiration from the BBC’s Shetland
Why your best content often comes from the world of stillness
Gary Bloomer | SHAKING THE TREE # 244
If you watch the BBC’s fictional police drama Shetland for the crime solving, you’re only half paying attention.
Yes, the mysteries and characters are masterfully presented and powerfully played.
But the true genius of the show lies in its steady, relentless, methodical pace.
Shetland is a deliberate, lingering, and profoundly quiet show set against a dramatic landscape of commanding geography, fierce winds, roiling seas, and ever-changing, rolling grey skies.
Since its debut on BBC One in March 2013, Shetland has brought Ann Cleeves' novels powerfully to life through the screen adaptations of David Kane.
Anchored for its first seven seasons by Douglas Henshall's BAFTA-winning performance as DI Jimmy Pérez, the show later introduced Ashley Jensen as DI Ruth Calder, while maintaining its depth through beloved characters like DS Tosh McIntosh and DC Sandy Wilson.
In an era of television content that’s frequently defined by frantic, dramatic cuts; flashbacks that make no sense; annoyingly loud, electronic music; shaky, on-the-move camera work, and the desperate need to grab your attention in the first three seconds, Shetland is part understated rebel, part unpolished gem.
As the name suggest, Shetland is set on and around The Shetland Islands, a cluster of islands approximately 140 miles (170 km) north of the Scottish mainland, out between the Atlantic Ocean and the North Sea. The islands are closer to Norway and the Faroe Islands than they are to London—a Nordic proximity that has deeply shaped both the Island’s history and its culture.
Renowned for it’s dramatic, treeless coastlines with its deep voes (fjords), Shetland is a stunning beautiful, beguilingly rugged place that’s rich in wildlife, including puffins, ponies, and orcas.
Shetland’s Norse heritage remains vivid in its place names, in its dialect, and in its festivals like Up Helly Aa, an annual festival of fire with its roots in Norse traditions that’s held between January and March to mark the end of Nollaig or Yule.
Shetland’s culture is also known for its traditional music and its distinctive knitwear. Despite its far-north location, the climate is temperate but often windy and cloudy.
In essence, Shetland is a rugged crossroads between Scotland and Scandinavia, offering striking landscapes and a deeply profound sense of both remoteness and history.
The show though dares to be both slow and still, and in doing so, it doesn’t just hold the viewer’s attention—it commands a deeper, much more valuable form of it.
For anyone willing to slow their pace and take the time to look, there is a deeply hypnotic content creation methodology hidden in Shetland’s misty scenes … a counter-intuitive blueprint if you will that we’d all do well to study.
Think of it as The Shetland Method.
Lesson 1: Setting the scene
Every scene in Shetland is grounded by the drama and steadfastness of the weather and the landscape. The atmospherics are as dramatic as the geography and as relentlessly present as the geology.
To understand Shetland’s landscape is to read a violent and magnificent history written in stone. This is not a gentle place of soft, undulating hills and verdant woodlands; it’s a complex, open-air museum of tectonic drama, glacial superiority, and relentless, pounding seas.
Geologically, Shetland is a tale of two ancient worlds colliding. The islands are not a mere extension of Scotland, but a northern shard of the Caledonian Mountain chain—the same primordial range that forms the Scottish Highlands and the mountains of Norway.
Hundreds of millions of years ago, continents crashed together here with mind-numbing slowness and with unimaginable force, slowly folding, fracturing, and baking rock into a tortured mosaic of Old Red Sandstone, ancient metamorphic gneiss, and glittering igneous intrusions.
This is the "bones" of Shetland: a hard, resilient skeleton forged in fire and pressure.
Then came the ice.
During the height of the last ice age (roughly 27,000 to 15,000 years ago), glaciers acted like huge planetary planes, scouring and scraping an already ancient landscape. Ice sheets several hundred meters thick smoothed the island’s summits into gentle curves, gouging out deep, U-shaped valleys, and then, in their slow retreat as the planet gently warmed, they performed their final constructively-destructive act: they drowned the world they had carved in floods of meltwater.
As the ice sheets melted and retreated, sea levels rose, flooding those deep glacial valleys to create what are arguably Shetland’s most defining geographic features—its voes or fjords.
These long, deep, narrow sea inlets are not quite the same as their nearby cousins: the Scottish lochs and the Scandinavian fjords; they are Shetland’s unique signature.
Voes finger their way deep into the heart of the islands, ensuring that nowhere is truly far from the sea. This glacial drowning created a coastline of astonishing length and staggering complexity—a fractal-edged masterpiece of cliffs, stacks, arches, gloops, and hidden bays where the ocean is forever breathing and beating against the land.
The islands are a vast, treeless plateau rising from the North Atlantic on which its most prominent hills, while not as towering in height as the Monroes of the mainland, are as majestic in their bare, wind-scoured isolation.
The land is a patchwork of peat bogs and hard and rocky knolls, known as roches moutonnées, [rosh moo-ton-ay] a French term that literally translates to fleecy rocks or sheepback rocks. It’s a geological term for a specific landform shaped by the relentless movement of glaciers and ice sheets.
The work of elemental power is everywhere on Shetland, showcased in features ranging from massive storm-beach boulders to the exquisite, wave-polished sands of St Ninian’s Isle—a tombolo that bridges two landmasses like a perfect marine causeway.
In essence, Shetland’s geography is a dialogue between two powerful sculptors: the immense, slow force of tectonics that built its foundation, and the relentless, liquid forces of ice and the sea, the latter of which continues to shape the islands today. It’s a landscape that feels both immensely old and dynamically, violently alive.
Throughout the show, the camera lingers on the craggy cliffs, the relentless sea, and the windswept, often empty roads.
This isn’t simply footage as eye-candy or for dramatic effect; it’s as intentional as it is foundational.
These anchoring shots are as much a part of the storyline as the performances and the dialogue; they establish and anchor the world, the mood, the motives, and much of the context for everything that follows.
In whatever way possible, your content needs to do the same thing.
Lesson 1. Knowing your anchoring shot
What is your core philosophy, your unwavering principle, the landscape (if you will) that every piece of your content is built upon?
My anchoring shots the worlds of description and analogy because I enjoy using them to emphasize the importance and interconnectedness of everything around us as it forms our view of the world and our place within it.
For you, it could be childhood drama; cooking; travel; your love of history. Whatever it is, figure out how to connect it to your reader, viewer, or listener?
Before you ask for a click or a like or a follow, before you make your point, you must first establish the world you’re asking your audience to step into.
This creates consistency and trust, and with it, belief in who you are and what you do.
People return to Shetland as a television show as much for its feeling of the place as they do for the characters and the plot. Similarly, your readers, viewers, and listeners need to return to your work for the consistent world you build.
I’m under no delusions that my opinions here appeal to everyone. But to someone, my opinions might make the difference between them doing nothing and them taking action
Lesson 2: Silence can be a powerful weapon
On the initial seasons of the show, Detective Jimmy Perez (a masterclass in quiet leadership if ever there was one) is a man of few words.
The dialogue is spare and sparse.
The scenes are regularly punctuated by a silence that speaks volumes, by the endless howl of the wind, and by the simple acts of listening, watching, and waiting.
This silence isn’t an empty element; it’s dense with meaning, forcing you to lean in, to listen more intently, and to participate in the act of deduction.
In a world of content that screams for engagement, have the courage to use silence.
This means not filling every second of a video with sound.
It means using white space in your design.
It means writing sentences that are clear, direct, and unhurried, allowing your strongest ideas room to breathe.
The silence, the space, and the void between your words is where your audience’s own thoughts and connections form. Don’t rob them of that space. Don’t deny them that place.
Lesson 3: Depth beats breadth
Unlike many other television dramas, Shetland [thankfully] doesn’t tackle a dozen cases at once. Instead, the show follows a single, tangled thread that winds its way deep into the closed-off community of island life, understanding that every person is connected and that every secret is buried in layers of history, commonality, and relationship.
When we’re creating content we are often tempted or even encouraged to be generalists, to create content on every trending topic to cast the widest net.
The Shetland Method urges you to do the opposite.
Go narrow. Go deep.
Content that’s an inch deep and a mile wide easily gets overlooked and ignored.
So, consider becoming the expert on one specific community, looking at one specific problem, and focusing on one specific thread.
Peel back the layers. Get to the core of the issue.
Delve into and tell the stories that many other content creators skip over because the questions are too simplistic or too complex. Dig into the topics that other people won’t touch because they’re not prepared to put in the work. Don’t lose sight of the fact that the results you get are as a direct result of the effort you’ve put in.
Depth is a competitive moat. It attracts a dedicated audience that craves specific expertise and that trusts you because you’ve done the hard, quiet work of understanding.
Lesson 4: The weather is a character (embrace your constraints)
In Shetland, the weather is never just something in the background; it’s a central presence that often dictates the pace, mood, and possibility of everything being revealed in any specific scene. The ferocious storms, the isolating fog, the crashing waves, even the sunny beach scenes—these are all constraints that the detectives must work within and around.
Rather than seeing your constraints—whether they’re your limited budget, your niche topic, or your unique voice—as stumbling blocks, reframe the narrative and see these things as stepping stones.
Let your constraints force you to be more creative, more resourceful, more authentic. The relentless grey sky of Shetland is what makes its visual style so distinct. Your limitations are what will make you distinct.
The lesson of Shetland is that being heard and seen isn’t about being loud or bright.
You can draw people in with depth, stillness, and an unwavering sense of place.
You can command attention by speaking less and saying more.
You can build a small yet loyal tribe not by chasing every trend, but by exploring one island, one idea, and one thread at a time, with patience and profound respect.
In other words, instead of seeing your content as instant flash that won’t last, create your content for the long, slow, satisfying burn.
As always, thanks for reading.
—Gary
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Next time on Shaking the Tree: Are you ready for the next big thing?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Originally from the U.K., Gary Bloomer is a writer, branding advocate, marketing specialist, and an award-winning graphic designer.
His design work has been included in Creative Review (one of the UK’s largest design magazines). Since 2009, he has answered over 5,000 marketing and business questions in the Know-How Exchange of MarketingProfs.com, placing him among the top 3% of contributors. He lives in Wilmington, Delaware, USA.