MURDERWOOD

I’ve just finished my spec TV drama, MURDERWOOD. It’s up on Circalit http://www.circalit.com/laurencetimms/projects/murderwood/ and available for reads and reviews. It would genuinely appreciate as many reads and reviews as possible. I mean proper reviews: constructive criticism that highlights the things that works and underlines the things that don’t. This kind of feedback only serves to improve a script.

Here’s the logline and synopsis as a taster:

MURDERWOOD
A quiet English town becomes a crime-ridden frontier as it stuggles to cope with an influx of unearthly human-like creatures.

Fairies aren’t the tiny winged creatures of legend. In fact, they’re a lot like us. But their world has become a place of oppression and they’re escaping in their hundreds into our world, just as they did a thousand years ago. Back then we treated them as sacred, supernatural creatures. Now we just see them – the Faer – as carriers of disease, the bogeyman behind every crime, a burden on the state, thieves, animals…monsters.

The quiet market town of Marwood is where they come through. The main portal lies in the former RAF Marwood base, now a detention centre holding hundreds of Faer refugees. However, the land around Marwood is like a sieve, with Faer slipping through at will. Most of them come to escape the suffering in their own world but some of them come with criminal intent, for the Faer are just like us: good, bad or evil.

The local police force is stretched to breaking point as the locals turn against their unwanted neighbours, saddling them with the blame for every act of vandalism, every case of arson, every assault, every murder. Vigilante gangs roam the streets at night, ostensibly protecting their homes. Human criminals are drawn to Marwood, intent on trafficking unsuspecting Faer into prostitution, drug running and slavery.

On the front line is the Faer Crimes Team, an underfunded, overworked group of CID’s least wanted, shuffled sideways to deal with crimes nobody else wants to touch. Their job is made more dangerous by the strange powers some Faer possess: the ability to alter our perceptions, to influence our emotions, even to wrest away control of our bodies.

With the government ignoring the problem, the locals’ xenophobia reaching new heights and the stream of refugee Faer showing no sign of slowing, things are only going to get worse.