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It arrived in a giant cardboard box, kind of like Sony had sent me a microwave. I’ve received a lot of promotional mailers in my day, but this one stood out for the sheer amount of space it took up.
After slicing open the packing tape and digging through the layers of bubble wrap, I came to this plywood box.
The plywood box originally had crime-scene tape plastered to it, but that came off the minute I tried to dig into it. Opening the box only led to another layer and another, all of which were clues to a mystery.
Lifting the lid of the black box revealed a screen…
which immediately played a trailer personalized for me for the show, Game of Silence. It’s the story of five young friends — Jackson, Gil, Shawn, Boots and Jesse — and how one big mistake messes up their lives forever. Twenty-five years later, one member of their group takes action based on his terrible memories, and it’s like he opens that carefully shut box all over again.
The screen with the trailer was still near the top though. There were many more layers to unveil, including this folder:
And these photos of the show’s main characters, both as children and now.
Below are Jackson (Curran Walters), Shawn (McCarrie McCausland) and Gil (Judah Lewis) at 13, before they entered the detention center. Not pictured are young Jessie (Katie Kelly) or young Boots (Cannon Kluytman).
Under the folder, came the next layer, another wooden box with the words Quitman Juvenile Detention Facility burned into the lid.
In that box lay some of the most closely held secrets and memories from these four’s childhoods and their terrible time in this place.
Until, underneath all of that, I finally came to the bottom of the small wooden box, where a small black case lay:
Inside of that was a USB drive in the shape of a key.
There lay the answers — or more accurately — nine episodes of NBC’s new drama to check out at my leisure or even binge-watch if I get too hooked to wait, with the finale left for influencers and critics to watch at the same time as everyone else.
Game of Silence was adapted by Sony Pictures Television from a Turkish series titled Suskunlar (Silent Ones). The show is executive produced by CSI‘s Carol Mendelsohn, Friday Night Lights and Parenthood‘s David Hudgins as well as Julie Weitz, Tariq Jalil, Timur Savci, Deran Sarafian and Niels Arden Oplev.
In Suskunlar, the kids go to jail for nine years for the crime of stealing baklava. In the U.S. version, they are sent away for nine months, but it’s a rough nine months.
Like the mailer, Game of Silence is a layered mystery. Watching the pilot was much like opening that first cardboard box — it was clear throughout that there was much more inside to be revealed.
“The very size, scale, layeredness of the whole mailer reflects the content. This is a complex, layered, rich story and we wanted to bring that to light through the mailer,” says Sheraton Kalouria, CMO, Sony Pictures Television.
Now a successful defense attorney, Jackson Brooks (Revolution’s David Lyons) has put his past behind him. He’s engaged to his boss and partner at his law firm, Marina Nagle (Claire van der Boom), and living a life of money and prestige.
Life hasn’t been so easy for his friends. Gil Harris (True Blood, Once Upon a Time’s Michael Raymond-James) still lives with a lot of anger that leads him to make impetuous and often violent decisions. It’s Gil who’s leading the charge for vengeance or justice, depending on your point of view.
Gil’s girlfriend, unbeknownst to Jackson, is Jackson’s childhood sweetheart, Jessie West (Bre Blair), but Jackson and Jess also have a big secret between them.
Shawn Cook (Rescue Me’s Larenz Tate) is still tight with Gil, Jessie and Gary “Boots” Nolan (Derek Phillips), while Jackson has lost touch with all of them, and likely purposely so.
The pilot lays all of that out, but there is much more to come, says Kalouria, which is why SPT thought it was important to give the 30 or so influencers to whom they sent the mailer the chance to see so many episodes.
“As each episode was delivered to us, people inside the studio were salivating to find out what happened next,” he says. “We felt like the pilot was above and beyond your typical pilot episode. We wanted to bring all of that to light through the mailer. We hope that the size of it will make people think ‘maybe this is one I ought to make a special effort to watch.‘”
Game of Silence debuts with a special premiere episode on Tuesday, April 12 at 9 p.m. ET/PT, airing after The Voice, and then moves to its regular time slot, Thursday at 9 p.m. ET/PT, on April 14.
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