CANDILAND

Poetic, unpredictable, and embedded in truth, Candiland is a balanced meal of magic, mystery, and comedic relief, kind of like momma’s meatloaf…

Available to read upon request.

THE PILOT

We begin at Valley Presbyterain Hospital in 1972, where a mysterious 4-year old child is found wandering the halls. That orphan is our headstrong, vagabond Louisa Hill.

22 years later, Louisa gets a deed to a house from her long lost, late grandmother that send her back to her birthplace. Though she knows nothing about her family or the first four years of her life, Louisa packs up what little she owns and heads for Candi, California with high hopes and heavy holes in her pockets.

When she arrives, the property is barely liveable let alone sellable and includes an unexpected guest...In her first day, Louisa quickly discovers there is a lot going on below the surface of this town and to get anywhere, she must pivot her hasty plans and dig her heels in.

As the series unfolds, Louisa is determined to crack the case on Candi and her own history. She uncover the ugly truth the town and her family were built on and threatens the future of Candi because of it. But the alternative, to allow Candi to fall into another sinkhole of corruption, is a far greater destruction.

BASED ON…

Though definitely not a place you would vacation at or plan to raise a family in, spend one week in Lytle Creek and it does become a place you’d write home about….but not in the ways one usually does. After venturing around, hearing from the locals and doing a bit of research - it was clear we had two choices: do drugs or write a tv show about it.

In all seriousness, the characters, plot points and history of our series are based on truth. There really is a church kingpin who stipends meals and controls the cash of a group of halfway-sober convicts. There was a contractor who went missing the day before he was supposed to start work on Laura’s dad’s decrepit, creekside cabin that still has not been found. The town really was built on a bedrock of mining and gold-stealing bloodshed.

Anytime we’d share these stories - the reactions were always the same: was Donnie killed? What else is this town hiding? And what happened to the dog? The only way we could grapple with all these questions was to try and answer them ourselves.

WHY A WHODUNNIT IN 1994?

Our iPhone can tell us where we parked our car, how badly we are sleeping, it even lets us pay strangers to buy our groceries. Sure - technology is incredibly convenient but it’s not very compelling. In this world, less tech means more action. We want to see these characters nose to nose, sniffing out clues and covering their tracks, not playing phone tag and deleting text chains. Let’s take it back to the days when an app was still an appetizer.

FINAL THOUGHTS

We wrote this show for the towns that you pass from one place to the next, those unknown trail markers that often go unnoticed, but have plenty of their own story to tell. As lovers of travel and gossip at the local bar, we believe that if you hang out anywhere long enough, you will find history and people worth exploring. We all contain multitudes, even if we appear to only contain booze and bacon grease.

And there is something about a tiny, crime stricken town that feels refreshing and somehow paradoxically innocent. We live in an era so jaded by over-exposure to information, to everything. Nothing shocks us anymore. But if we venture far enough into the hills, there are parts of this country, and certainly of this world, that still exist in the before. When all we have is access to answers, it seems there would be nothing more gratifying than a lack thereof. Not just as writers, but as people in the twenty-first century, we long for a time when time was slower. When days were longer. A nostalgia for that feeling of a before that we hope to satisfy with Candiland.

So grab a knife and fork and let’s eat.