The mystery of the Fairfax pilot
Most people can empathise with the bitter-sweet feeling that accompanies the end of your favourite series of television, but for Monica Cooper this feeling came early. Her favourite TV show was never made.
A pilot episode is a prototype that is produced on a small budget for the benefit of network executives. They are intended to showcase the premise of the show and serve as a way for production companies to 'sell' their series. If successful, the pilot will usually act as the first episode of the show, but there is often a noticeable jump in quality and budget between episode one and two. Those pilots that are not picked up and turned into full series, are usually never seen by the public. Fairfax has been seen.
The only official synopsis of the show that exists online states:
“FBI agent Solace Fairfax (Samuel B Moore) must readjust to life in his sleepy home town of Coincidence, Pennsylvania. After reconciling with his eccentric mother and father (Arissa Wu, Hunter Rhodes) and learning that his crazy psychiatrist (Rita Petrov) will be his roommate, things get very strange.”
I ask Monica to give a more detailed description of the pilot but to keep it under 5 minutes. It takes her seven attempts.
“Okay, let's try again,” she says with a giggle. Monica, a project leader in the fashion industry, is a short and energetic woman. Her hair is thick and red and when I speak to her via webcam she is wearing no less than six necklaces.
“Agent Fairfax is this kind of Jack Bauer, Jason Bourne type special agent working for the FBI but after a disastrous mission, his bosses put him on administrative leave to sort his life out and get his shit sorted. They move him back to his home-town, Coincidence, Pennsylvania, and set him up with an apartment there. Because its the pilot they kind of throw all the regular characters together, so you meet his mum and dad who are both these eccentric professors and his dad is this uptight silver fox having an affair with a 22 year old student and his mum is this really smart hippie psychologist. Anyway, he has to see this therapist named Doctor Quintero and she's this beautiful psychiatrist and there's this instant chemistry between them, but she's just got divorced and is kind of a shit show herself – that's kind of a running joke through the pilot – she's much crazier than he is. Like, her office is now in the back of a pet store. So he goes through meeting all these characters and when he finally makes it to his new place, he finds out that Quintero is also his room-mate.
Then he wakes up in the morning and it's totally different. Like, everything. The colours, the music, the way its filmed. Its suddenly like this gritty detective show. Fairfax gets all confused because although it looks the same to him, he can't understand why he was acting the way he was and none of what has happened makes sense. He tries to contact the FBI but he's been declared persona non grata and all his aliases and documents have been burnt. When he sees Quintero she's much more realistic and kind of just, like, she doesn't look like the character in a sitcom any more. He's freaking out and she's really concerned but then its back to how it was - the colours and the music and the way its filmed. It's suddenly on a sound stage and there's three cameras and a studio audience but Fairfax is still normal and is finding it terrifying.
The final five minutes gets really weird. Fairfax is panicking and Quintero's not taking him seriously and he opens the door to their apartment and it opens up to a backstage area, like it would on a sound stage. He starts opening cupboards and they're empty and he shows her how none of the electrics have any wiring. Quintero isn't sure what's happening, but she doesn't believe him until he shows her that all the furniture is arranged to face one direction. Then it's like, suddenly, they can see through the forth wall. They get off of the sound stage and they're in this television studio and its completely empty but you can still hear the audience laughter track. They're trying to find their way out when they run into these expressionless security guards who start chasing after them in this weird robotic way, screaming like howler monkeys the entire time. The episode ends with Quintero and Fairfax running for the fire exit, chased by a growing crowd of these security guards who are now leaping from the rafters and pouring out of the walls. Then it ends with this cheesy sitcom music.”
Watching Fairfax is a strange experience. The ideas are interesting and it creates a genuine sense of dread as the show progresses, but the ideas are all thrown together and don't quite gel to form a cohesive product. The pilot looks good and although there are times that the lack of a full-series budget is apparent, its produced with a professional edge. The writing is tight and the juxtaposition between the sitcom setting and the action/horror aspects work really well to create an atmosphere of dread. The pilot was written and filmed in 2011 and shopped to a number of networks but not surprisingly, the studios failed to pick it up.
“They couldn't see a place for it,” Monica says. “Even with stuff like Lost on the air, this was too weird and too surreal – too artsy – too smart. The networks all basically said the same thing, that it would make people feel stupid and they wouldn't like it. It didn't have any big names attached to it and there was nobody there vouching for it.”
Like approximately three quarters of all pilots that are produced, Fairfax circulated the networks before vanishing. Monica was only able to see Fairfax because of a Youtube channel that specifically exists to purchase and host pilots that were never bought up. The Fairfax pilot was hosted on the account in 2017 and those who saw it became obsessed.
“For a show that was never made it has a huge fan-base!” she assures me with a broad smile, tying her hair back in a loose ponytail. “People are crazy for this show. Its the whole mystery of where it was going to go, how it was going to progress, whether or not it was going to be this sort of Twin Peaks surreal thing or more like a thriller. I started a website for fans of the pilot and sent a link to everyone I knew, many of whom did the same thing. One day, we started talking about whether or not there was any way that we could get this thing going again. That's when things got really weird.”
One of the reasons that fans have latched on to this particular pilot, the reason it has become surrounded in rumours, theories and urban legends is nothing to do with the surreal concept.
“I was there on the ground floor,” Monica tells me proudly. “I started looking up the writers and couldn't find any evidence that they were still working, so then I started looking for what else they might have been involved in. Nothing. Nothing before the pilot, nothing afterwards. So I think maybe they just never cracked into television, so I look up Samuel B Moore, the actor who plays Fairfax. He's incredible in the show and he's good looking and I thought maybe he'd gone on to do movies or something, so I went searching for him. Nothing. Not only do I find no mention of any other work, I find no mention of him at all. No facebook, no twitter account, nothing that you'd think a young actor would want to have to publicise himself. So I start looking for Rita Petrov, the woman who played Doctor Quintero – same thing. I searched everyone on the show, all the cast – nothing. Then I started looking up the director, the production company, the camera crew. Nothing in the credits exist.”
Monica created a fan website dedicated to the show – The Fairfax Room in which she catalogued information about the pilot. There are a huge number of theories about the show, the directions it would have gone in and who might be responsible for its creation. As The Fairfax Room grew in popularity, the community that blossomed there dedicated itself to trying to decode what they saw as secret messages within the show.
“You start thinking, well, obviously this is just another way of breaking the forth wall or whatever, right? It's a show about a guy trapped in a sitcom and then you watch the sitcom and then can't find the actors or anything – it makes it more real I guess? So we start thinking 'okay, they're all using fake names', and we watch a ton of shows from the same time period looking for the actors – they don't turn up anywhere. We start calling talent agencies and seeing if they have records about auditions they might have got clients and nobody has any record of Fairfax as a show. So we start thinking maybe the producers used a fake name for casting, shows do that sometimes, but we can't link anyone to Fairfax from any talent agency. A couple of the guys on The Fairfax Room try and suggest that maybe the whole thing was an amateur pilot and it was produced by a bunch of film students or something but we started looking at the sorts of costs involved and you'd need a huge amount of money. Even so, a couple of the guys go out and contact film schools across the East coast and nobody has any record of it as a project. Someone suggests that maybe the Youtube account – the one that posts all these pilots – maybe its like some art project thing and they're actually just producing them all but when you go through all their videos there is nothing like Fairfax there – people you recognise are in them, or a quick search of their name will bring up hits on the internet. We managed to get hold of some network guys and some of them remembered watching the pilot!”
Monica finally takes a breath and laughs shyly. She apologises, takes a sip of water, then carries on.
“Over the last 3 years we have tried everything. Everything! I started making these!” she gestures to a poster on the wall – a glossy print for the show. “I designed it and made it myself and I'm selling them online. I'm making money off of them and the only reason I'm doing it is because I’m waiting for someone to hit me with a cease and desist. Someone made this show, the actors in it are real people, but none of them have ever been seen before or since. The production company – White Hive Entertainment, has never existed. The catering services were provided by a company called 'And Action Catering'. Doesn't exist. The copyright information is held by a law-firm which does not exist at an address that does not exist. Someone made Fairfax, there are people who must be real in it, the actors must be real, but they're like Soviet cosmonauts, they've just been erased from history.”
When I laugh, Monica shoots me a slightly wounded look.
“I'm not saying that's what actually happened, Mr Walker. I'm just saying, something has happened to those people. Its the internet age and its show business. People aren't able to just erase themselves like this.”
The pilot episode of Fairfax is available on Youtube and numerous file sharing platforms. To date, nobody has been able to identify a single person or company involved in the production of the Fairfax pilot.