The Big Lie
5 x 60 minute serial
The Big Lie follows a dysfunctional family and a compromised police force as they investigate the puzzling suicide of twenty-eight year old Mark Fairchild in the face of threatening and obstructive behaviour from the conspiracy theory community, who believe Mark was murdered by a shadowy elite to silence him.
The Big Lie looks at the dark-side of conspiracy theory culture. These aren’t the heroic investigators of The X-Files. Today’s conspiracists are the product of a deeply divided society, and are prepared to carry out extraordinary acts to get to the ‘truth.’
Without the certainty of facts, The Big Lie shows the cost of living in a post-truth world for an ordinary family: division, paranoia and madness.
I came up with the name before the “Big Lie” became the label used by Republican fantasists to describe Joe Biden’s “false” election win in 2020. The idea does not address the Trump administration directly, but was in part inspired by the Pizzagate affair, in which an online conspiracy theorist fired a shotgun in a pizza restaurant in Washington rumored to be the HQ of VIP paedophiles. I latched on to the idea of the frenzied baseless speculation of the paranoid online spilling over into real life violence and destruction.
The Sandy Hook school shooting is another inspiration. In that case, conspiracy theorists harassed the parents of victims, claiming that their children never existed and were government actors planted at the scene. The pain and hurt this caused families already dealing with tragedy is unimaginable.
The mysterious death of Max Spiers, a conspiracy ‘researcher’ who died while visiting a UFO convention in Warsaw in 2016, is the final direct inspiration for The Big Lie. It looks in retrospect like Max died of complications relating to drugs, but of course the community he was a part of leapt on his death as evidence of a secret ruling class out to silence dissenters speaking truth to power.
All of which is a roundabout way of saying this idea is still incredibly current and relevant, and there is a full series outline you can read if this is of interest. Just message Chris below.