Abacus Brings Fitz & Merryweather to Content London

Abacus Media Rights (AMR), an Amcomri Entertainment company, will launch pre-sales for brand new Victorian detective drama series Fitz & Merryweather, created by Ben Edwards (Shameless, Wild at Heart) and Rachael New (Grantchester, The Mallorca Files) – the creative team behind the PBS/Masterpiece series Miss Scarlet and The Duke – at Content London.

Upbeat crime drama series Fitz & Merryweather is set against the backdrop of an everchanging London in the mid-19^th century, as the hero detectives investigate cases of murder, theft, blackmail and missing persons.

Other creatives on the series include executive producers Patty Lenahan Ishimoto (Clean Sweep) and Patrick Irwin (The Fall), both executive producers on Miss Scarlet and The Duke, whose careers in content creation and financing span more than 25 years.

Jonathan Ford, Managing Director at AMR comments, “We are delighted to be on board this exciting project at the very beginning and we can’t wait to see more international partners join us on what we expect to be an incredible journey. Having joint showrunners with the experience and passion of Ben and Rachael along with their remarkable in-depth knowledge of the era means Fitz & Merryweather will be an outstanding drama franchise to be part of from the start.”

Ben Edwards and Rachael New add, “We want to tell stories about the side of Victorian life you don’t see as much on screen. The one with every race, colour and creed represented. Stories about new arrivals coming to London from across the world, outsiders who have no-one to turn to when they find themselves in trouble.

Our mission is to create a compelling and entertaining series that reflects the many aspects of Victorian society that are still relevant today. We’ll work with a team of diverse writers from multiple backgrounds, people with unique personal perspectives from their own family histories. Our goal is to recreate what it was like to arrive in a new country as an immigrant in an age that saw abject poverty run alongside amazing advances in inventions, industry and medicine.”

This is the other side of Victorian life – a time of great expansion when London’s population was growing at a rapid rate with immigrants arriving from all four corners of the globe in the hope of a better chance in life.

Life is hard enough for these new arrivals, but a new breed of criminals emerges to prey on those fresh off the boat. If these newcomers become victims of crime, they have little chance of getting justice. The police aren’t interested and lawyers are too expensive. So, what can they do? They can hire Fitz and Merryweather, a mismatched detective duo specializing in helping those who have no-one else to turn to – Fitz, a low rent private investigator from Ireland just about scraping a living in London and Merryweather, fresh off the boat from the island of Trinidad. To further complicate matters, Merryweather has an ulterior motive for immigrating which involves a love affair with a married woman who is on the run with a bounty on her head.