When a teenage travel influencer becomes the sole survivor of a brutal massacre at a remote Australian farm, she is hailed as a national hero – until a young detective begins to realise that the story everyone believes may not be the truth.
ORIGINAL STORY: Martin Cuff
STRUCTURE: 4 x episode Limited Series
GENRE: Psychological Thriller, Crime Drama, Mystery, Family Dynamics
RIGHTS: © Martin Cuff, All Rights Reserved
REFERENCE: Gone Girl meets Scrublands, with the gritty realism of Australian crime dramas such as Mystery Road, The Dry, and Animal Kingdom.
TONE: A psychological thriller grounded in the gritty realism of contemporary Australian crime drama. The series combines the investigative tension of Mystery Road and The Dry with the psychological manipulation of Gone Girl. The tone is tense, unsettling and morally ambiguous, building gradually as the investigation exposes the fragile stories people tell themselves about innocence and guilt. What begins as a tragedy gradually reveals itself as a story about control, performance and the terrifying power of narrative.
PRODUCTION: Although the story is currently set in Australia, the narrative structure is intentionally geographically flexible. This allows the project to be adapted to the landscape and production infrastructure of whichever territory leads the production, while maintaining the core dramatic structure and themes.
SHARENTING: Sharenting is the practice of parents sharing their children’s lives on social media for audiences and income. One in four children in the Western world has a social media presence before they are born. The most successful family channels generate between eight and ten million dollars a year, with individual sponsored posts commanding fees of up to two hundred thousand dollars. The children at the centre of these channels have no legal right to consent to being filmed, no guaranteed claim on the money their image generates, and in most countries no mechanism to have content removed once it is posted. Only five American states require parents to set aside any portion of a child’s earnings for the child themselves. The hours they work, the content they appear in, and the terms on which their childhood is monetised are, almost everywhere in the world, entirely at their parents’ discretion.
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Read a sample of the Sharenting novella here: