“Ambient Darkness” is the second episode of an hour-long television series that I created, pitched, and helped flesh out in my final year of undergraduate school under the tutelage of Canadian screenwriter Frank Borg. I worked with a fairly unlikely and diverse team that included two Film Production students and a friend of mine who worked mainly with comedy. The premise of the show resembles that of an Agatha Christie novel, with guests converging at an old house for a special event, becoming trapped, and then gradually being killed off episode by episode. As the options for who the murderer would be gradually get smaller, the stakes rise. The brief was that we were going to add an element of prestige drama to the formula, foiling it with rich characters and modern pacing while preserving the complicated plots, the intrigue, and the suspense.
In the end, four hours of the show made it to script, including the pilot episode. The biggest criticism of my episode, “Ambient Darkness,” was that the tone was too light for the tone of the show and that it crammed in too much in fifty minutes. These were valid criticisms, especially the latter, but there is a lot to like here, and the light tone occasionally betrays a submerged darkness that—in juxtaposition—works well.
Where we open: someone among the guests has just died. Rather than the predictable response of starting with panic and chaos (which in hindsight may have been the best way to go), the remaining guests take in the event with caution. The woman who died, the wife of guest Perry Wyss, was very sick on arrival, so no one suspects foul play, but there is a pall on things. The guests respond in their fashion: some make the pretense of mourning; others try their best to make light out of the situation. The idea is that death hovers around them, an ambient darkness, despite their best efforts to act calm. Each character has something to hide.
In episode 1, the guests (who hail from many different places, different ages) convene for the funeral of Mr. Ash, the man who, it is revealed, is their father. Now discovered as bastards and siblings, the guests must reevaluate their relationships to each other (if they had any), and vie for Ash’s inheritance. And somewhere in the rooms above, there is a scream.
Perry, a Swiss biologist, is the only one who suspects murder. He hoards his deceased wife in the chambers above, inattent of his mischievous son, to discover the cause of her death by the means most familiar to him.
