Pilot Synopsis

Stanley Arnold, a forgotten composer, hides a cassette tape from a murderous intruder. The next evening, pianist and forensic musicologist Emma Kord dazzles a TEDx audience with her uncanny ability to decode music’s DNA. Backstage, a Met detective hands her Arnold’s tape, Emma’s name scrawled across the label.

The recording captures a rehearsal with Arnold and two of his students from decades earlier. Emma recognises the voices of a young Sir Alexander Munrow, now a national treasure and composer of the blockbuster musical Childhood, and George Farrell, her former piano teacher and lover, killed in a car crash she survived. Hearing his voice again reopens painful memories.

While Munrow prepares for a gala performance celebrating Childhood’s twenty-fifth anniversary, Emma breaks into Arnold’s derelict house with her lawyer friend Viv. Determined to discover why Arnold left her the tape, she finds George’s old piano, the one she learned on as a college student. Hidden inside is a manuscript of Childhood, naming Arnold and Farrell as the composers — apparent proof the musical existed years before Munrow’s supposed authorship.

As Emma and Viv absorb the significance of their discovery, the building erupts in flames. They escape, but Emma realises she has left the manuscript behind and races into the fire to retrieve it. A gas explosion consumes the house. She stumbles out alive, but Viv, who went in to save her, appears lost in the blaze. The manuscript is destroyed forever.