When a loveless musician, Joe, and heart attack survivor (just) samples a woman’s voice from audio recordings found online, they become lovers in a lucid ‘dream’ world made of energy, intention and instant manifestation. Joe risks his sobriety and sanity to navigate this new world, find Erika in the ‘real’ world and save them both from power-crazed quantum shamans The Cohort.

SYNOPSIS:

Angeltek

‘My name is Joe Thorn. I’m a good musician. A bad son. An addict (recovered). And I’m crazy in love with a woman who doesn’t exist. I’m with her every night, but I’ve never touched her. I know her inside out, but we’ve never met. I don’t know where I go, but it’s not a dream. When I come back, I remember one word… Angeltek. One truth… #wearetheangels. If she’s real, I’ll find her…’

Angeltek is a funny, raw, moving sci-fi romance: The Adjustment Bureau meets The OA. As a TV show, it’s a 60 min x 8-episode limited series with themes of addiction and recovery, quantum mechanics and angels, music, magic and the redemptive power of true love. The project has multi-media potential to start life as a fiction podcast with web platform, video, and found footage scattered across ‘real life’ social media, (like Archive 81 but with more diversity of media and blurring of ‘real life’ and fiction).

Logline: When a loveless musician, Joe, and heart attack survivor (just) samples a woman’s voice from audio recordings found online, they become lovers in a lucid ‘dream’ world made of energy, intention and instant manifestation. Joe risks his sobriety and sanity to navigate this new world, find Erika in the ‘real’ world and save them both from power-crazed quantum shamans The Cohort.

Joe: ‘When I started making music, I wanted to change the world. Now I just want to get through the day.’ A younger Tom Waits c. Heart Attack and Vine, Joe’s goals are simple: Stay sober. Keep breathing. His heart-and-gut-wrenching lyrics reveal a deep sensibility under his growly, life-can-fuck-off exterior, which is borne of disillusionment with the music industry, a soul-destroying battle with addiction and a ‘true love’ which ended in a vicious divorce and cost him his money and health.

Erika: ‘Yes, I’m scared of everything out there. But most of all, I’m scared of everything in here.’ Sweet and socially anxious when they meet briefly in real life, as the woman in Joe’s ‘dreams’ (actually a ‘future’ version of herself), she’s a mystic, a warrior, a keeper of reality-warping wisdom.

The Listener: Mercurial, pan-sexual, attractive/loathsome occultist who lives in a smoky Victorian den and is dangerously beyond concepts of right and wrong, good and evil. Shaman, guru or psychotic mad man, he’s the only one who can help the lovers.

Synopsis: Soulful, broken musician Joe Thorn is quietly living out his short prognosis, after losing his beloved sister to cancer, his wealth to his ex-wife and his health to two near-fatal heart attacks. He’s ten years clean and sober, lives quietly, attends his AA and CA meetings, and freelances at a swish branding agency he doesn’t understand, where his creativity sells unwholesome products. He is encouraged by his dear friends and fellow recoverees Marcus and Greta to look for love again.

While searching for a female vocal to put on a track at work, Joe stumbles upon the intriguing voice of Erika, reading from a mystical ‘Book of Angels’. He encounters ‘her’ in vivid, sexual ‘dreams’ in which they are lovers, wildly in love and the defenders of the dangerous-in-the-wrong-hands mystical secrets of the book. In waking life, he’s desperate to use her voice on his track. When his plucky, posh young intern side-kick Emily can’t trace her for the permission, they end up on a quest to find her by other means – enlisting the help of a young trio of occultist ‘cyber-detective’ lovers.

In the waking world, Joe takes the plunge and has a date with the sultry, beguiling, sassy-but-vulnerable Kiri. He shocks himself by opening up to her about frightening episodes in his childhood, in which his older sister tried to shield him from drunken violence. Back in the ‘dream’ world with Erika he’s distressed that he got close to Kiri, but she assures him he’s done nothing wrong. They have a mission, and now it’s urgent – they must retrieve the Book of Angels before ‘The Cohort’ get their hands on it. It’s hidden in their ‘dream’ world, in their own Angeltek offices, but their attempt to get it fails and The Cohort are now coming for Erika… in real life. Joe believes all this is real now and is desperate enough to call on The Listener via his occultist friends. This sinister figure, who seems to have history with his ‘dream’ world Erika that she doesn’t remember, teaches him to open the door between the ‘dream’ world and reality, revealing where she is in real life. But to open the door he must face his childhood demons and put his faith in the impossible…

And so the quest begins… When Joe steps through the door, he finds Erika in the real world (well, he thinks he does – he’s entered a parallel timeline briefly). She’s very different to the woman Joe knows from their ‘dream’ world – anxious, fragile, bookish and with no knowledge of their connection, although she’s very drawn to him. Before they can get to know one another, Erika vanishes, without trace, from this entire reality. Joe does everything he can to trace her, but it’s like she never existed, and his sanity is brought into question and his sobriety tested to (and beyond) it’s limits. All he has is her voice on the mysterious ‘Readings from the Book of Angels’ short audios on Youtube, and encounters with ‘her’ in dreams.

Refusing to give up on Erika, Joe calls on dangerous occultist and walker between worlds The Listener and makes contact with Erika who is on another timeline (in another version of reality essentially). This is via social media, using the Angeltek energy magic/quantum physics in the mysterious Readings from Book of Angels. They meet as consciousness actually inside the fabric of reality, in the stacks of energy that make up music (think Shamanic journeying of their consciousnesses) and strengthen their ability to communicate across dimensions via tech, using social media platforms. Joe endures trial after trial at the hands of The Listener, a merciless teacher, as he searches for a way to reach Erika physically, and must also face all his fears, traumas and emotional blocks (can he risk all and open to love again?) on the path to finding her. If he remains on his current timeline, The Listener shows him, he’ll have a fatal heart attack, so time is running out…

Joe must also protect Erika from a shadowy business cohort who want the Book of Angels and its reality-bending secrets to fuel their masonic magic and manipulate events for their own material gain and at any cost. He is shocked to realise that he unwittingly led them right to her, via now-ex-girlfriend Kiri, who is revealed to be working for them. Worse, it’s revealed that Erika doesn’t have the Book of Angels they seek - she, a mystic, IS the book, and, having found out, they will tear her apart to unlock its secrets. Joe and Erika must master the Angeltek magic, jump a timeline to reunite and defeat the cohort, while facing The Listener’s price for his guidance – rather than being prepared to kill for Erika, as Joe thought, he must be willing to die for her.

Jen Grisanti: ‘Kelly is a very talented writer who is a pleasure to work with.’

Addy Bruggeman on Kelly’s pilot The Rathbone House: ‘This is a very strong script with some very well-developed characters.’

Morgan Long (formerly of Gersh): ‘Kelly has worked really hard over the last two years with the likes of Jen Grisanti on building her screenwriting chops, and she is the kindest and most hardworking client I've ever worked with.’

Kelly McKain is a best-selling fiction author, and is published in more than twenty languages.

Angeltek playlist to go with the pilot at https://open.spotify.com/playl...