The Black Doves creator just shared exactly how the show got its peculiar name

The name has nothing to do with the true story the show is based on

3 weeks ago

Has anyone else been wondering where Netflix show Black Doves got its name from? I mean, it’s a pretty cool name for an undercover group of spies, but the show is based on a true story and “Black Doves” has no correlation to what happened in real life. It feels, shall we say, random.

Well, the show’s creator has revealed where Black Doves got its name from, and it really is random. It turns out he just gave it the name of something to do with his personal life. So we were never going to guess the inspiration ourselves.

Joe Barton, who wrote and created Black Doves, is from Brighton. He revealed in an interview with Radio Times, a pub there is what the show is named after. Joe Barton named the show after his local pub, Black Dove, where he wrote some of the show. He started writing what would become the Netflix big hitter in Christmas 2022.

“I wrote it on a whim, to be honest,” he said in the interview. “I started it on Boxing Day and finished it on New Year’s Day – it irritated the people I live with!”

via Netflix

Black Doves takes inspiration from the 2010 spy cop scandal. This was a scandal involving London officers who infiltrated protest groups as undercover agents.

It was said in the media a number of police officers had entered into romantic and intimate relationships under false personas. At least 139 police officers was sent undercover to infiltrate over 1,000 political groups, all assuming false identities. Senior officials didn’t know of the operation, and the officers involved got into relationships with targeted protest groups.