END OF THE ROAD

Police Drama Television Series (Pilot)

Written by Joe Acton 

Logline Synopsis 

We have two lives, and the second one begins when we realize we only have one. Confucius said that in 550 BC!! Bill Blair is living it out right now in Alaska, truly the last great End Of The Road in the United States. The Big Empty won’t forgive your sins or redeem your transgressions, but it will let you start over, no questions asked. Mostly.

An Army Ranger Sniper who transferred to the CID after criminally negligent intel got his entire platoon killed in a Taliban ambush, his second life really got rolling when he was cashiered out of the Army for charging a Two-Star Theater General with embezzling a hundred grand from the translators’ funds. Everyone has their price: the Army’s was their public esteem, the General’s was his career, and

Bill’s was his reputation – and retirement.  Calls were made, papers signed, and Bill retired with full 20-year benefits and an investigator’s position with the Anchorage Police Department. Easy peasy. This will be like working for Andy and Barney with Gomer working on his car, right?

What the hell could possibly be going on in Alaska? Turns out, it’s a place to start over AND to hide out, from the authorities, adversaries, other criminals, and society in general, e.g.,

• Millions of dollars of illegal and endangered ivory smuggled out by the Russian Mafia.

• A serial killer who kidnaps his victims and flies them in his bush plane to the wilderness where he gives them a head start and then hunts them.

• China supplies 90% of the US fentanyl market through Mexico. They’re now changing and sending it airfreight through Japan to Anchorage International and then to Phoenix Arizona, where it connects to the Jalisco and Sinaloa Cartels.  How do we know that? One of our informants told us. And then he got deaded and dumped onto the Cook Inlet mudflats. But without a tongue.

• A missing nuke from the Cannikin nuclear tests on Amchitka back in 1971; and now a DOD agent is murdered while looking for it.

• Three people get catfished into killing a teenager and posting it on SnapChat, for a promised $9M. There’s no rich guy, no money but there is a dead girl in a campground. And that’s why this is an anthology series: there’s too many compelling stories told against the backdrop of Alaska’s majesty to settle for merely interesting stories we’ve heard before told against the same B rolls of NYC, LA, and Chicago.

Robert Service was right: “There are strange things done in the midnight sun by the men who moil for gold. The arctic trails have their secret tales that would make your blood run cold.

End of the Road is as unique a police drama as Alaska.