“That’s an old story,” Luke said.
“Which is why it’s interesting,” Sidney said. “She’s been in jail for ten years and has clung to her innocence without falter.”
“Let me interview a hundred inmates at Otisville and I’d hear the same thing a hundred times. All sob stories from felons who are guilty as sin.”
“You run current-event stories, Luke,” Graham Cromwell said. “You’ve cornered the market on opinion news. This is a true-crime documentary. It won’t pull from your audience.”
Now Luke was the one who offered a fake smile. “You think I’m worried about her taking my audience?”
“Are you?” Sidney asked.
Many in the room turned to stare at the Bear.
He offered a small chuckle. Even this sound came with an annoying echo. “Certainly not.”
“Then stop interrupting and listen to her pitch,” Graham said.
Sidney glanced at Graham, then back to her audience. She caught a quick wink and a subtle head nod from Dante Campbell.
“Grace Sebold is well-known, so I anticipate an early surge of interest to piggyback on my base viewership. My other docs started slowly and built a larger audience over time as the episodes got closer to the conclusion. Here, I’m hoping for a bigger initial audience.”
Sidney cleared her throat. “The other difference is thatThe Girl of Sugar Beachwill be produced as a real-time documentary. I’ll produce episodes as I investigate. I’ve cut the pilot and roughs of the opening couple of episodes, a summary of which we will screen this morning. It includes my interview with Inspector Pierre from St. Lucia, the evidence that convicted Grace Sebold, and the early love affair between Grace and Julian Crist. The episodes will be a retelling of events, as I understand them. A mix of reenactments as well as live footage of my investigation. The audience will discover what I discover as I discover it.”
“There’s a lot of risk there,” Luke said.
“I tend to agree with Luke on this,” Ray Sandberg said from the front row. Sandberg was the president of the network. He would have the final say in green-lighting Sidney’s project, or cutting its throat. “A problem withSerialwas avery unsatisfying ending that left more questions than answers.”
“So let’s learn from that,” Graham said. “We’ll build the suspense, and give them a satisfying ending. The payoff could be huge. We’re going to bring back Grace Sebold and Julian Crist. We’re not only going to dive into their love story and find out who they are, but we’re also going to find the truth.Thatwill capture an audience.”
“Capturing an audience is not what concerns me,” Ray said. “It’s capturing them with a grand promise and not delivering. Then we lose their trust. Has anyone seen the numbers for the second season ofSerial? We don’t know the whole story about Grace Sebold. What happens if you come up with nothing revealing other than a young medical-school student who killed her boyfriend?”
“That’s the lure,” Sidney said. “I don’t know what I’m going to find when I start digging, and neither does the audience. But there’s more to the Grace Sebold story than any of us know.”
“Based on what?”
“My trip to St. Lucia, where Grace Sebold has spent ten years in jail. I spoke with the detective who ran the case. The investigational capabilities down there are not the same as here in the States. Their economy hinges on tourism, and the entire police force was under pressure to solve this case. Wrap it up and make it go away so potential tourists weren’t deterred from visiting the island. I think, in order to close the investigation as quickly as possible, they made the evidence fit the narrative. I also spoke with Grace Sebold, as you’re about to see. We had a long discussion about her case and about the evidence that got her convicted a decade ago. She can convincingly poke holes in every bit of it.”
“If she can so convincingly convey her innocence to you,” Luke Barrington said, “why could her attorney not convince a jury?”
“She was forced to use local counsel. It’s law in St. Lucia that a local attorney needed to be part of her team. He was not a skilled defense attorney and made crucial errors during the trial. Of course, in the heat of the battle and after the shock of losing her boyfriend and being accused of his murder, Grace was unaware of these mistakes. Only with time did her attorney’s inadequacies become so glaring. And we all know that juries can be persuaded by theatrics as much as they are by facts. The day she walked into court, Grace Sebold was practically convicted by the news media and by the Internet.”
“How many episodes?” Ray Sandberg asked.
“I’ll need to map out my production plan and get a grip on the arc of the story. But my current proposal is for ten, with some leeway, obviously, based on my investigation. I’ve cut the pilot and have outlines for what I want to do for the first four installments.”
“Timing?”
“Summer,” Graham said. “Three months in summer. June through August. Ten weeks to let Grace Sebold’s story unfold.”
“Not justtellher story,” Dante Campbell said from the front row. “Sidney wants to give the audience the truth, which she thinks is different from what has been told to the world up to this point. I’m already a fan.”
Sidney smiled at Dante, pinched her brows together in a silent nod of gratitude. The woman trumped even the great Luke Barrington in the network’s power rankings, her morning show bringing in hundreds of millions in yearly revenue.
Without delay, and as Dante’s backing still hung in the air, Graham dimmed the lights and Sidney stepped to the side of the screen as the first cut of her pilot episode began to play.
The Girl of Sugar Beach
“Match Day” Part of Episode 1
