Emergency Exit
Logline
Emergency Exit
What if there was a service which could arrange not only your accidental death – no questions asked – but all the financial, legal and funeral support to ease the transition? A service for men who want to bow out of life without the anguish of a suicide on those they leave behind? …An “Emergency Exit.” This is the central conceit of this 6-part dramedy series.
After a clinically depressed GARETH BEALES (45) fails in a suicide attempt, he meets the charismatic FINLAY O’BRIEN (35) at a therapy group and is introduced to a shadowy service which provides the 360 “emergency exit.” Meanwhile a detective, DEVLIN WALCOTT (55) investigates the “accidental death” of his friend but becomes increasingly obsessed by the service he uncovers – for himself.
Pitch
The series takes place in Yeovil, a small market town in the South West, whose former fortunes as a centre of glove-making have faded, and whose economy is propped up by a helicopter factory and military barracks. It suffers the same hollowed out, collapsed, depressed fortunes of many other small market and satellite towns.
While EMERGENCY EXIT has the ingredients of a crime thriller – a murder, investigation, secrets, blackmail, a villain and a victim – they are held together in a very different way. It is not a police crime series about a secretive company that assists deaths for a fee.
The series is instead a truthful, tender, often comic, look at the lives of three men whose lives become impossibly entwined and how attitudes to masculinity have changed. It’s about how fragile men can feel, and how they live with crippling feelings of being worthless, unvalued, guilty and ashamed.
The highest suicide rates in the UK are from white males aged 40-50. This crisis of middle-age masculinity is endemic but rarely explored on screen. But EMERGENCY EXIT is not a story about suicide; it’s an honest and intimate exploration about three men’s lives, what a life means – and a celebration of male friendship.