Er­line An­drews

Danielle Di­ef­fen­thaller, one of the most well known and ac­claimed tele­vi­sion pro­duc­ers in the Eng­lish-speak­ing Caribbean, is work­ing on a new se­ries that she boasts will be un­like any­thing view­ers have seen be­fore. She just needs ac­tors, a plat­form to show it, and mon­ey.

Di­ef­fen­thaller, and her long-time writ­ing part­ner Mervyn de Goeas dis­cussed in a re­cent in­ter­view the im­mense chal­lenges of putting to­geth­er a se­ries–even for peo­ple with their stel­lar cre­ative track record. They wrote, pro­duced and di­rect­ed West­wood Park, a soap opera pop­u­lar across the Caribbean that orig­i­nal­ly ran from 1997 to 2004 and still airs on ca­ble TV in North Amer­i­ca.

The two last worked to­geth­er on the dra­ma se­ries The Reef, which aired for one sea­son on CN­MG in 2008. There was no sec­ond sea­son. An at­tempt to get one off the ground il­lus­trat­ed a big prob­lem with get­ting fund­ing for film/ TV pro­duc­tion in T&T.

"We had the sec­ond sea­son of The Reef writ­ten," Diefen­thaller said. "And when I start­ed to go look­ing for mon­ey, one of my reg­u­lar spon­sors said, 'Well, Danielle, you know we give to char­i­ty al­ready for this year.' I got so in­censed. I was of­fend­ed, livid, vex.

"All this time peo­ple feel they were giv­ing to char­i­ty," she said.

"Af­ter we work 18-hour days non-stop to put out a prod­uct that is giv­ing you a ve­hi­cle for your prod­uct."

The new se­ries–a dra­ma called Plain Sight–will show the dif­fer­ent sides of the crime prob­lem in T&T: look­ing at the ex­pe­ri­ence of law en­force­ment of­fi­cers, crim­i­nals, vic­tims, res­i­dents of high-crime ar­eas, and res­i­dents of up­per-class ar­eas whose hands aren't as clean as peo­ple might think. Plain Sight is in­tend­ed to de­stroy mis­con­cep­tions peo­ple on dif­fer­ent sides of the is­sue have of each oth­er.

With the se­ries, Di­ef­fen­thaller said she wants to "burst bub­bles".

"Let's get an un­der­stand­ing of who we are as a peo­ple," she said. "We all live in lit­tle mi­cro­cosms and lit­tle bub­bles and we don't re­al­ly know each. West­moor­ings doesn't know Laven­tille, and Laven­tille doesn't know West­moor­ings, and there's this sus­pi­cion of each oth­er.

"Let's give a hu­man face to every­one, on every side of the di­vide," Di­ef­fen­thaller said.

"When you hear some­body's been shot, au­to­mat­i­cal­ly there are many as­sump­tions that are thrown, and we don't know the re­al sto­ry," she con­tin­ued. "We de­cid­ed let's put a hu­man face to that killer, that moth­er who said her son was the great­est thing on Earth and he was a good boy."

No side would de­monised or glo­ri­fied."We are all vil­lains, and we are all an­gels. It's to show the good and bad in every­one," said Di­ef­fen­thaller.The idea for the se­ries "has been on my mind for a while," she said–six years to be ex­act.

Di­ef­fen­thaller said she doesn't think the show "can be com­pared to any­thing." The one se­ries that comes close is drug-traf­fick­ing saga Nar­cos on Net­flix, she said."It's an amal­ga­ma­tion of many peo­ple," she said of Plain Sight.The new show and West­wood Park are "like chalk and cheese," she said.

The on­ly sim­i­lar­i­ty, said de Goeas, on the phone call with Di­ef­fen­thaller, is that the sto­ry­lines will come from the ex­pe­ri­ences of re­al peo­ple.In their re­search for the se­ries Di­ef­fen­thaller and de Goeas are in­ter­view­ing po­lice of­fi­cers, for­mer prison in­mates, moth­ers of crim­i­nals, so­cial work­ers and oth­ers.

But where­as the sto­ry­lines on West­wood Park were tweaked al­most to the point of par­o­dy, Plain Sight will at­tempt to re­flect re­al­i­ty.Asked if the se­ries, then, is not in­tend­ed to stir up pa­tri­ot­ic feel­ings, Di­ef­fen­thaller said that de­spite the tough sub­jects she be­lieves Plain Sight will make Trinida­di­ans and To­bag­o­ni­ans feel good about their coun­try.

"You will be proud," she said. "Our coun­try is beau­ti­ful no mat­ter what you do. (In Plain Sight) there will be good peo­ple and bad peo­ple and beau­ti­ful vis­tas. You'll be, like, 'Wow, that is Trinidad, boy!'"

But, she said, the sound­track will not in­clude na­tion­al­is­tic an­thems like Sweet T&T.In­stead, jazz mu­si­cian Eti­enne Charles will score the se­ries and the sound­track will in­clude old so­ca songs and ca­lyp­soes.

Di­ef­fen­thaller and de Goeas have the script for eight hour-long episodes. They even have a Cana­di­an dis­trib­u­tor will­ing to raise US$1.4 mil­lion for them and help get the show on an on­line or tele­vi­sion plat­form. Michael Mosca, head of Equinoxe Films, is "will­ing to work with us" and "do what­ev­er it takes to make it an in­ter­na­tion­al pro­duc­tion," said Di­ef­fen­thaller.

"He's very ex­cit­ed about the project. He loves the script. He doesn't want us to com­pro­mise the in­tegri­ty of the sto­ry, which is ba­si­cal­ly Trinida­di­an," she said.

The prob­lem is that's on­ly half the mon­ey they need to raise if they want to pro­duce some­thing of the qual­i­ty that will in­ter­est dis­tri­b­u­tion plat­forms like Net­flix, Hu­lu and Ama­zon Prime. They are hop­ing to raise enough mon­ey to at least do a pi­lot that will im­press peo­ple enough to at­tract more fund­ing.

They're cur­rent­ly cast­ing roles. Ex­pe­ri­enced ac­tors ear­marked in­clude Michael Cher­rie, Er­rol Sita­hal and Win­ston Duke, ac­cord­ing to a doc­u­ment pro­vid­ed by Di­ef­fen­thaller. In De­cem­ber the pro­duc­ers put out a cast­ing call for 29 parts.The show is set to be­gin pro­duc­tion by the end of March and the first episode will pre­miere in Sep­tem­ber, the doc­u­ment said.

Get­ting the ac­tors ready will be an­oth­er chal­lenge. T&T has a lot of raw tal­ent and a lot of the­atre tal­ent, said Di­ef­fen­thaller, but they'll have to be trained for the par­tic­u­lar ap­proach need­ed for tele­vi­sion.

"It's a very dif­fer­ent beast," said Di­ef­fen­thaller.

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