Brawl
Format: 8 x 1hr prestige crime drama
Genre: Rural Thriller / Noir / Psychological Drama
Setting: Small-town Victoria, present day
Tone: Gritty, emotionally raw, slow-burn suspense
Logline: Struck down by Meniere’s disease, ex-cop Bridget McKenna returns to her small hometown and becomes entangled in the disappearance of a local Indigenous man—only to uncover a town-wide conspiracy of silence that forces her to confront not just the killers, but her own buried guilt.
Synopsis
When Melbourne cop Bridget McKenna is struck down with Meniere’s Disease, she returns to her rural hometown under the guise of medical leave to convalesce, she’s hoping to disappear – to recover, regroup, and figure out what the hell her life is now. But the past doesn’t wait, and the town she left behind has only grown more insular, more secretive, and more hostile to people who ask the wrong questions.
When Ruth Barrengarry, a local Indigenous woman, begs Bridget to help find her missing nephew Johnny, Bridget reluctantly agrees to ask around. The police – led by Fred Keen, the town’s unshakable Chief – have done nothing. Johnny was a known stirrer. A drinker. Loud. Online. He filmed everything. Said too much. The consensus is: “He’ll turn up.”
But he doesn’t.
As Bridget digs, her symptoms worsen – Meniere’s attacks leave her disoriented, half-blind, vulnerable. But she keeps pushing. Because something isn’t right. And what begins as a missing persons case slowly unravels into a murder covered up by the entire town.
Johnny was killed in the pub – by Mal Keen, Fred’s brother and the town’s beloved footy coach. Executed in plain sight. His body burned on a vineyard fire pit. And everyone saw it. The town didn’t hide the crime. It absorbed it.
Bridget finds herself locked in a battle she didn’t ask for – against power structures that operate without paper trails, against silence weaponised as loyalty, and against her own past. Because she wasn’t clean in Melbourne. She covered up a corruption scandal. She took kickbacks. Her last partner died doing the right thing – and Bridget didn’t.
Now, as young cop Reece begins to see the truth, Bridget finds hope. Until he’s killed. Burned in a car. Just like Johnny.
In the end, Bridget releases the truth herself – publicly, irreversibly. Footage leaks. Arrests are made. Mal is taken down. Fred vanishes. Luke, her ex, finally confesses his own silence. Talia, Johnny’s cousin, survives with scars – and a renewed purpose.
Bridget loses her badge. Her mother walks away. Her body is permanently damaged. But she tells the truth. And for the first time in years, she doesn’t run.
Season One ends not with justice, but with exposure. The town is wounded. The silence is broken. But the system – the real one – is still standing. And Bridget isn’t finished.
Concept
Brawl is a visceral, slow-burn crime thriller about the cost of complicity in a town where everyone knows and no one speaks. When Johnny Barrengarry vanishes, Bridget is drawn into a case that the town insists isn’t a case at all. But what begins as a search for a missing man becomes a reckoning with an entire culture of silence—one rooted in generational power, community fear, and inherited injustice.
Bridget has no badge, no authority, and a body she can no longer trust. But she still has her instincts—and they lead her deep into the town’s underbelly, where the powerful don’t fear the truth. They just deny it.
Each episode peels back the social order protecting the perpetrators: football clubs, council offices, pubs, family ties. As Bridget unearths what happened to Johnny, she must also face what happened in Melbourne—the corruption she covered up, the partner who died, and the person she might have become if she’d stayed silent.
Development Stage
Mini Bible and Pilot Treatment
