CHAPTER 11
The office was a cacophony of glass walls that offered little in the way of privacy for the executives running the network.
The architectural design allowed Sidney, as she exited the elevator, to see that the media room was already full.
She took a deep breath and hurried across the office.
When she pulled open the door, she was relieved to hear the quiet murmur of several overlapping conversations.
A dozen rows of chairs lined the room, all facing the north wall, where a DVD projector lit up a floor-to-ceiling screen with the title:
The Girl of Sugar Beach,
Producer: Sidney Ryan
She squeezed into the only vacant seat, which was in the front row and reserved for her. She believed for a moment that her last-minute arrival went unnoticed.
“The Great Sidney Ryan has finally joined us for her own screening,” Luke Barrington announced in his deep, obnoxious voice.
Sidney closed her eyes and exhaled. She had mistakenly believed Luke only used the insufferable voice during the recording of his prime-time news program.
However, over the last year, she learned the rhythmic churning of hop-along syllables and cavernous inflection came with everything he uttered, from the detailing of a young woman’s death on his top-rated news show, to the retelling of his weekend over Monday-morning coffee.
Sidney wanted to claim that the sonorous voice, which had privately earned him a nickname of “the Bear,” was plastic-banana fake, but since Luke had never once faltered from this tone, she could only argue that it was annoying.
“Now that we’re all behind schedule,” the Bear continued, “let’s rush things along, shall we?”
This was directed at Graham Cromwell, who ran the news division at the network.
Graham walked to the front of the screening room and stood in the glow of the DVD projector. “Thanks, Luke. Sorry to keep you from your morning round of golf. But perhaps you should put in a few hours of work this week. Your ratings are flat.”
This brought a chorus of chuckles.
“Flat,” Luke said. “And still the highest ratings of the network. And on all of prime-time news.”
Graham opened his mouth in mock amazement. “Highest ratings of prime time? Really? No one in this room has heard this breaking news.”
This brought more chuckles. Luke Barrington was a self-promoter of epic proportions, and modesty had never been a strong suit.
“My ratings are flat, incidentally, because I was on vacation for ten days. And, as we all know, the network has yet to find a guest host that can hold my audience.”
“It was a joke, Luke. We’re trying to set Sidney up here in prime time as well, since her previous documentaries have been so well received. We think there is opportunity here with this latest pitch. She has clearly generated a following.”
“So let’s see it then,” Luke said. “The suspense is killing us.”
Spoken, Sidney thought, like a true asshole.
“Sidney?” Graham said.
Sidney stood and took her place at the front of the media room. In addition to the packed audience inside the room, she noticed other staffers congregating in the hallway to get a sneak peek of her much-buzzed-about documentary.
“True crime is popular,” Sidney said. “We all know this. And it’s getting hotter.
We don’t have to look further than Making a Murderer and The Jinx to see the huge ratings potential for the networks.
48 Hours is a perennial ratings winner. Serial was one of the most downloaded podcasts in history.
The public has an appetite for true-life crimes broken down into real-life thrillers told through documentaries.
“As Graham pointed out, my previous three documentaries took unknown cases and unknown prisoners and brought to light their stories of wrongful conviction. We grew a larger audience with each doc, and we’ve developed a bit of a niche here—finding victims of wrongful conviction and bringing their stories of injustice to light.
My pitch today for my new documentary is different in two ways from my previous films. It’s an ambitious pitch that is filled with potential. I hope you all agree.”
Sidney noticed that additional network staff had filed into the back of the media room, making it a standing-room-only crowd.
She also noticed that Graham Cromwell had given up his seat when Dante Campbell, the cohost of the network’s top-rated morning show, Wake Up America, snuck in.
Sidney faltered for just a moment when she recognized all of the power that had assembled in the room: the queen of morning television, Luke Barrington, the suits in the front row.
She was suddenly glad she had been running late so that the enormity of the moment hadn’t had a chance to crush her.
“First,” Sidney continued, “instead of an unknown case, this time I’ll be highlighting a well-known individual.”
“Who is it?” Luke Barrington asked in a bored voice.
Sidney smiled, a veneer that suggested to all in the room that she was thrilled to be conversing with such an esteemed legend of prime time. In her own mind, though, her curved lips were the equivalent of raising her middle finger.
“Grace Sebold.”
There were some murmurs in the crowd, a quiet buzz of excitement at such a high-profile case.
“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 that The Girl of Sugar Beach will 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 with Serial was a very 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. That will 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 of Serial?
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 just tell her 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.