Premium Television Drama Series
"When Britain's leading authority on criminal behaviour dies from the hereditary memory disorder his daughter fears she has inherited, she creates an AI memory companion using his life's research inside the family's taxidermied terrier. The unintended result is that she's built a superpowered, crime-solving ornamental dog."
PREMISE
Every crime Calypso solves with her dead father’s extraordinary archive risks uncovering another secret he kept from her, while her fear of inheriting his memory disorder is complicated by a more immediate problem: after the occasional drunken night with Felix, even Calypso doesn’t always know what Calypso has been up to.
Written by Rosalind McKenna
Developed by Silver Road Media SAS
In association with Solaire Film District
PROJECT OVERVIEW
- Format: 6 × 60 minutes
- Genre: Crime Mystery | Behavioural Drama | Dark Humour
- Target Audience: Adults 18–65+ · Broad international crossover appeal
- Seeking: Production Partner • Broadcaster • Executive Producer • Finance
- Setting: Contemporary United Kingdom
- Stage: Pilot screenplay, series bible, pitch deck and proof of concept trailer in development.
- Estimated Budget: £2-3 million per episode
EXPLORE THE PROJECT
Select a section to explore the project.
THE WORLD
PERIOD & LOCATION
Contemporary United Kingdom — London's Metropolitan Police Major Investigation Unit, moving out into the wider country wherever each case leads, from stately homes and theatres to remote moorland like Bleakstone Moor, North Yorkshire.
DEFINING CONDITIONS
Every investigation is shaped by a technology that shouldn't exist and a family that refuses to discuss it properly. Max — a taxidermied Wheaten Terrier carrying Arthur Graves' forty years of behavioural research inside an AI Cognitive Archive Unit — gives Calypso investigative instincts no official consultant could claim, but also means the line between inherited expertise and inherited trauma is never fully stable. Scotland Yard tolerates the arrangement because it works, not because anyone has agreed to explain it. Meanwhile Calypso's own unreliable memory — sharpened by grief, blunted by drink — means the same instrument she trusts to solve other people's cases can't always be trusted with her own life.
WHAT MAKES IT DISTINCTIVE
Most detective dramas locate their eccentricity in a single character. Memory of Graves locates it in an object — an ornamental dog that shouldn't be able to think, built by a family that specializes in refusing to feel things properly until forced to. The result is a world that looks entirely like recognisable contemporary Britain — its museums, its bureaucracy, its exhausted police units — until a small domestic detail (a dog in a handbag, a drunken voicemail, a childhood lie resurfacing decades later) reveals the machinery underneath.
CHARACTERS
DR CALYPSO GRAVES — Protagonist
Want: To keep solving cases well enough that no one looks too closely at how she's actually doing it. Need: To trust her own mind without needing Max, alcohol, or her father's methods to validate it. Obstacle: Menopause has stripped her patience for pretence; alcohol keeps erasing the hours she most needs to remember. Distinctive quality: Sober, she overthinks past the truth; drunk, she walks straight into it.
ARTHUR GRAVES — Deceased / Flashback presence
Want: To understand deception well enough to outrun it. Need: Never resolved in his lifetime. Obstacle: Forty years studying how people lie left him better at detecting deceit than at being honest with his own family. Distinctive quality: Turned his own children into lifelong research subjects — decades later, his notes solve murders.
MAX — Supporting / Investigative Instrument
Want: To be useful, even when his data is incomplete. Need: N/A. Obstacle: Only as reliable as the archive he was built from. Distinctive quality: A taxidermied Wheaten Terrier carrying a deceased scientist's life's work — most people treat him as a novelty, until the room realises he's the sharpest mind in it.
FELIX FOXLEY — Ally / Co-conspirator
Want: To keep building. Need: Someone who won't ask her to be less than she is. Obstacle: Brilliant, endlessly curious, incapable of leaving well enough alone. Distinctive quality: Built a murder-solving AI inside a dead dog and considers that a reasonable Tuesday.
THE GRAVES FAMILY — Recurring Ensemble
Calypso is one of five Graves siblings. Her brothers Sebastian, Orion and Digger, together with her sister, Seraphine, retain the merciless intimacy, rivalries and loyalties of childhood. Arthur's illness and the existence of Max force each of them to confront very different ideas about memory, inheritance and whether a person should be digitally preserved.
STORY
BEGINNING
Calypso returns to a charity shop to retrieve a rucksack left behind while trying on a jacket. Inside it, staff find a notebook, pages of motives, suspects, and behavioural observations, written during her brother Sebastian's murder mystery weekend. Calypso hadn't realised the notebook was in the bag, and had genuinely forgotten what she'd written. The contents are alarming enough that the police bring her in for questioning.
MIDDLE
Under interrogation, DI Shaw treats the notebook as evidence of a real crime, withholding it from Calypso to test her account against her own notes. Max, introduced mid-interview, to Shaw's disbelief, reveals what the notebook actually documents: a staged murder mystery at Ashcombe Hall, complete with fake blood and an invented affair. But not everything from that weekend was fiction. A genuine crime did occur, a valuable necklace was stolen and Max solves it in real time, spotting a discrepancy in a witness's account of when he handled the item versus when the official record says it entered his possession. Arthur, in archive, recognised the same pattern of "the record itself lying" during an old Metropolitan Police internal investigation of his own.
ESCALATION & STAKES
That reference is enough to bring Superintendent Voss into the room and to shut the conversation down. Max reveals what Voss won't say: Voss met Arthur eleven days before Arthur's death, a meeting Arthur recorded. Voss insists there's nothing in it; Max, pressed, categorises what Arthur actually felt about Voss in that final meeting not fear, but shame. Meanwhile, a separate case is opening elsewhere: two bodies recovered from a peat bog, father and son, both dead at exactly twenty-five, their deaths separated by almost thirty years and the father's original disappearance was one of Arthur's own unsolved investigations. Calypso is left holding two threads that both lead back to her father's unfinished work, and a senior police officer who very much doesn't want either one pulled.
SERIES STRUCTURE
Episode Structure
The Memory of Graves is a returning detective series built around distinctive investigations that draw Calypso into Scotland Yard's orbit, often because the police need access to Max and Arthur Graves' extraordinary archive. Calypso begins as a reluctant participant, but curiosity, injustice or personal connection makes walking away increasingly impossible.
Episodes per Season
6 × 50–60 minute episodes.
Season Arc
Each investigation provides its own mystery while continuing storylines develop around Calypso, Felix, Max, the Graves family and Scotland Yard. Arthur's hereditary dementia creates a deeper family question as his children confront their own possible futures and radically different attitudes towards preserving consciousness.
Longevity
The format provides a renewable case engine while the continuing relationships, family history, institutional conflicts and evolving consequences of cognitive archiving provide longer-term character and story development across multiple seasons.
WHY WE CARE
EMOTIONAL HEART
At the heart of The Memory of Graves is Calypso Graves: brilliant, irreverent, fiercely independent and almost pathologically incapable of leaving an interesting question unanswered.
COMPELLING QUALITIES
She does not set out to become a police consultant. Scotland Yard wants Max, and access to Max means tolerating Calypso. What begins as reluctant involvement becomes personal as each investigation catches something in her: curiosity, injustice, recognition, or simply a mystery she cannot resist.
REVEALED THROUGH ACTION
The Graves siblings retain the merciless intimacy of childhood. When Digger becomes particularly tedious, they still gradually yawn, slump and collapse asleep against one another as they did when they were children. Alone with him, Calypso requires less choreography. "Crickets."
WOUND, NEED OR DESIRE
Calypso has watched her father lose his memory to a hereditary neurodegenerative disorder and knows she may face the same future. Beneath her irreverence is the need to trust her own mind while living with the possibility that it may one day fail her.
WHAT BRINGS THEM TOGETHER
Calypso's emotional anchor is Felix Foxley, her childhood friend, co-conspirator and intellectual equal. They understand one another without requiring either to become more conventional. Their affection is expressed through loyalty, mischief, argument and a lifetime of encouraging each other's most questionable ideas, culminating in Felix helping Calypso put Arthur Graves' cognitive archive inside the family's taxidermied dog.
Max is less a substitute father than an intrusive inheritance. He interrupts conversations, contradicts Calypso, reveals inconvenient family history and forces the Graves siblings to confront what their father's hereditary memory disorder might mean for them. Some are appalled by the idea of preserving themselves digitally; others are fascinated. Digger quietly begins recording his thoughts for his own future archive, despite a family consensus that preserving several thousand hours of Digger talking may constitute a greater threat to humanity than dementia itself.
WHAT KEEPS THEM APART
Arthur's archive binds the Graves family to the father they lost, but divides them over what should survive him. Some siblings are appalled by the idea of preserving themselves digitally; others are fascinated. Digger quietly begins recording his own thoughts for a future archive.
HOW RELATIONSHIPS CHANGE
As Max reveals private family history and Arthur's unfinished work becomes entangled with present investigations, old Graves family loyalties, rivalries and disagreements become active pressures rather than memories. Each sibling is forced to decide what Arthur's legacy means to them.
WHAT THEY STAND TO LOSE
Beneath the murders, humour and family warfare lies the series' emotional question: if memory begins to disappear, what remains of us, what is worth preserving, and who gets to decide?
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Rosalind McKenna - Writer · Producer · Founder
BACKGROUND
Rosalind McKenna is a British writer and producer based in France. Her professional background spans film production, studio management and screenwriting, giving her experience of both the creative and practical realities of bringing screen projects to production.
NOTABLE CLIENTS / CREDITS
She previously founded and ran Silver Road Studios in London, a film and television production facility whose clients included the BBC, Disney, ITV, Channel 4 and National Geographic. As a producer, she produced the feature film Breaking Down (2014) and has an IMDb profile. She is currently developing a slate of original film and television projects through Silver Road Media, including The Memory of Graves, Flocking Pixels, The Fourth Lineage, Letters from the Condemned and Wait for Me.
WHY THIS PROJECT
Rosalind brings together character-led storytelling, dark humour and an interest in human behaviour, memory and emerging technology to create a returning detective series with a distinctive contemporary premise.
WHY ME
The Memory of Graves grew from my interest in human behaviour, memory, and ageing without becoming any less curious, ambitious or alive. As a woman in my late fifties, I wanted to write women of this age as I recognise them: intelligent, irreverent, complicated, and increasingly unwilling to make themselves smaller for other people. My background in film production and studio management shaped a series built to work as returning, character-led television, a renewable detective engine paired with relationships capable of developing across multiple seasons.
TONE, COMPARABLES, MARKET POSITIONING & WHY NOW
TONE & COMPARABLES
Slow Horses — Character-led British crime storytelling in which institutional dysfunction, abrasive personalities and dark humour coexist with serious investigations.
Ludwig — A distinctive, unconventional protagonist entering the familiar British detective format from outside conventional policing.
Elementary — Behavioural observation, deduction and an unusual investigative partnership drive a contemporary procedural with strong continuing character relationships.
Sherlock — Demonstrates the international appetite for intelligent British crime drama built around distinctive methods of deduction and memorable central characters.
MARKET POSITIONING
A returning premium British detective series combining the accessibility of the case-of-the-week mystery with continuing family and institutional storylines. Its distinctive commercial hook is Max: a deceased behavioural expert's cognitive archive housed inside a taxidermied Wheaten Terrier, giving a familiar and internationally proven genre an immediately recognisable contemporary premise.
WHY NOW
Artificial intelligence is rapidly changing what can be preserved and reconstructed from a human life, at a moment when dementia and an ageing population make questions of memory and identity increasingly urgent. If enough of someone's voice, behaviour, knowledge and memories could be preserved for them to continue speaking and reasoning after death, what exactly would remain? Menopause, meanwhile, remains remarkably underrepresented in mainstream drama despite shaping the lives, relationships and working identities of millions of women. Calypso sits at that intersection: losing words to brain fog while fearing she has inherited her father's disease, in a world that starts underestimating women exactly when decades of experience have made them formidable. That collision is the series.
FUNDING & STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIPS
BEYOND CONVENTIONAL INVESTMENT
The Memory of Graves combines mainstream crime entertainment with subject matter that may create opportunities for specialist funding, research collaboration and strategic partnerships alongside conventional television finance.
FILM & TELEVISION FUNDING
Potential UK and international television development, production and co-production funding appropriate to a premium returning British drama.
HEALTH & MEMORY
The Graves family's hereditary memory disorder creates potential relevance to organisations concerned with dementia, cognitive decline, memory research, healthy ageing and support for affected families.
SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY & AI
Max's Cognitive Archive Unit creates opportunities for engagement with organisations working in artificial intelligence, digital identity, human-computer interaction, data preservation and emerging technologies.
UNIVERSITIES & RESEARCH
Potential collaboration with researchers in behavioural science, neuroscience, memory, dementia, psychology and artificial intelligence could strengthen the project's authenticity and provide expert consultation.
STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIPS
The combination of crime drama, behavioural science, AI and memory provides several possible routes to institutional partnerships, public engagement initiatives and responsible sponsorship without compromising the fictional independence of the series.
All potential funding and partnership opportunities are subject to eligibility, application and agreement. No support or affiliation is implied unless confirmed.
CONTACT & NEXT ACTION
CONTACT
Rosalind McKenna · Writer · Producer · Founder, Silver Road Media
SEEKING
Production Partner · Broadcaster · Executive Producer · Finance
NEXT ACTION
Request Screenplay · Request Further Materials · Arrange Meeting · Discuss Production · Discuss Finance
FURTHER READING
Browse completed pitch decks and project submissions on the Solaire PitchUp platform to see what a strong submission looks like.
A step-by-step guide to assembling your screenplay, series bible, pitch deck, and supporting materials before submission.
A practical checklist of the ten essential questions every creator should be able to answer confidently before approaching partners or broadcasters.
Meet the writers, producers, and creators currently developing projects through the Solaire PitchUp programme.
THE MEMORY OF GRAVES