SYNOPSIS:

The Ally is an hourlong fictional drama series, partially inspired by the true story of Evanston, Il -- the Chicago suburb that passed America’s first ever reparations bill in 2019. After her activist son is fatally shot at a demonstration, a daring and debauched actress named Sarah Cohen takes a leading part as a spy in a wealthy father-daughter team’s cloak-and-dagger plan to expose and destroy the soft-money political establishment in their city. However, Sarah’s dangerous tactics unwittingly threaten the cause of her cooler-headed best friend, Alderman May Richmond, who is fighting within the system to help her embattled community and preserve American rule of law. Hardly the public-facing fist of the movement, Sarah is a lush, promiscuous and volatile white woman -- as earnest as she is ruthless in her stealth pursuit of justice. Taking up the gauntlet of her deceased activist teenaged son, Sarah signs on as secret agent to multi-millionaire broker, Ori Friedman, an Israeli businessman who grew up poor on paltry reparations checks from the German government; along with his daughter, Emily, a computer programmer looking to complete the work of her recently deceased Black civil rights activist mother. Disenchanted with the glacial pace and scale of institutional justice, and equally moved by both the plight of Black Americans as well as their own competitive interests; the Friedmans find in Sarah, (a brilliant but ultimately misguided actor,) the perfect performer to carry out their Robinhood agenda to derail the plans of donors and politicians who stand in the way of overdue legislative change. The pilot will end with Sarah hired into Ori and Emily’s secret employ, where they will ply her with extortion leads of mega-wealthy white-collar criminals; a wild gamut running from wayward hedgies, murderous energy tycoons, mendacious news media personalities, money- laundering hoteliers, and other crumbling pillars of late capitalism plucked from front-page scandals. Meantime, her beloved and only true friend, Alderman May Richmond, leads a transparent crusade from inside her public office; working patiently and tirelessly within the boundaries of the law, to redress the legacy of Jim Crow redlining that shaped the town’s white wealth. While she shares the Alderman’s passion for the cause, particularly in the wake of her son’s death, Sarah is a flawed and shadowy champion, whose methods often unintentionally undermine and erode her friend’s protracted legal fight. The series will ask, over and again, if justice can be better served from inside or outside our hallowed institutions and who owes what to whom in this reckoning. The action will mainly spring from Sarah’s hunt in the underground, where we often find her holding a stiff drink in a swanky hotel room, employing a range of outlandish tactics in pursuit of America’s long overdue debt to Black citizens, a suffering she cannot ignore since the mysterious murder of her son, whose short life was marked by his passion for the reparations cause. While Alderman Richmond slogs through her days in city council meetings, ribbon-cutting events, deep archival dives and listening tours, all while caring for her own teenage daughter, who often takes a backseat to her blighted ward residents; meantime, Sarah is hijacking her way into rarified realms of the most elite circles of white wealth and exacting the bloody historic toll, by any means necessary. The Bigger Meaning In doing so it will ask: What is the role of an ally? More specifically, how does a white American enmesh herself in the Black American struggle? What personal sacrifices are required to prove earnestness to that end? How does a white person interrupt false narratives that arrange American wealth around merit, virtue and entitlement? The choice to focus on a white character in a series about reparations is an intentional corrective to a discussion that too often leaves white citizens off the hook in evaluating what they personally owe to their fellow Black citizens, whose ancestors’ stolen and tortured bodies provided white Americans with the largest wealth-creating asset in our nation’s history. The series will not shy away from examining the wounds that animate the tension between white allies and Black causes and how these at times fraught relationships hang in the anguished balance of the Beautiful Struggle. The Ally will thrust its characters into all white spaces and all black spaces and say the quiet part out loud. Genre Blending the murder-crime, dark-comedy vibes of Poker-Face with Your Honor’s eye to wider systemic intractability; The Ally will occupy a provocative cusp, (by turns hilarious and tragic,) between the personal and the political. Conceived as an hourlong episodic series made for streaming platforms i.e. Hulu, HBO, Showtime, Netflix, etc. Not unlike recent Shondaland hit “Inventing Anna,” which prefaces each episode with the admission that the story “is completely true except for all the parts that aren’t,” in a similar fashion, The Ally will allow fact and fiction to live freely side-by-side. Setting Bowing to forbears such as Wakanda and Gilead, The Ally will seek to create a mythic City of Evanston that uses rich and complex characters and irresistible plot points to compel a mostly white audience toward the truth and urgency of what they personally owe in settling America’s oldest and most barbaric debt.