Freaky Links TV series (2000-2001)

From the internet movie database http://us.imdb.com/Title?0247095

Plot Outline: A take-off on "The Blair Witch Project," in which a guy finds out that his supposedly dead brother isn't dead after all when he sees him on the Internet. It's all about his spooky adventures in finding the truth.

Well I would say it was more like a teenage version of X-Files then Blair Witch Project.

Cast

Producer was Mark Burley

Here is an episode guide from http://www.geocities.com/akasha7_7/freakylinkstable.html

Basically this show was one of the first to try and combine the internet with television. It was kind of like a failed predecessor in some aspects to the new show “Push, Nevada” (which I’ve been watching and am still undecided on it’s likeability).

So why didn’t the show last? Well here is one article blasting away at it, calling the storylines confusing and nonsensical, and the cast “wooden” and un-compelling.

http://www.gist.com/tv/article.jsp?adf=sff100600.adf

My Freaky Links Fiction (season  2 – episodes 14 - 26)

Show synopsis;

Episode 14:

“Prairie Rain” – Chloe is driving alone through a storm to meet up with the rest of the “gang”. Her car skids out of control hitting a tree. When she awakes she is in a very strange farmhouse, in a very strange valley. A large but gentle farmer takes her in until she can recover her strength. However, it becomes apparent to Chloe that he is also hiding her both from the other inhabitants of the valley and from her friends. Is he helping her as he claims, or does he have other ulterior motives? She is in no shape to contest her situation at the moment, nor is she in any imminent danger that she can see. Her time is counting down though and she must unravel the mystery that she has crashed into before the mystery unravels her.

Episode 15:

“The Diner” – We flash back to the storm that was raging in episode 14. As Chloe was speeding along the highway to meet her friends they too were heading to the agreed upon meeting place. However, they realize the storm is too strong and head into a diner for shelter and warmth. It’s your typical stormy weather strands a group into a mysterious diner with a bunch of weird townsfolks story. While the gang is there they each take turns telling a bit about their first ever “ghost story”. But those stories pale in comparison to the story then told to them by the eavesdropping stranger. Is it truth or is it fantasy?

Episode 16:

The Freaky Links gang receives a very plum job indeed. They are hired by a Canadian Investment Bank to go to the Carribean to search out sightings of a colleague they all thought gunned down a year ago. The banker had embezzled some money from a Mercenary Company and tried to hide out in the Carribean. However, they caught up to him and killed him in the Turks & Caicos. Or so it was believed. But in a case that bears some remarkable resemblances to Derek’s own haunting by his dead brother Adam, the wayward banker’s image and voice files are finding their way into the corporate computer network and sending scares to employees and customers. The gang is pretty convinced that it is the work of some hacker with multi-media manipulation, but if nothing else it promises to be a paid vacation in the sun.

Episode 17:

The Freaky Links gang discovers that they are under electronic surveillance by the government. When they try and clear up the situation through diplomacy they find one denial after another by government agencies and then a wall of secrecy. Next they turn to doing their own electronic countermeasures but discover the hard way that whoever is watching them has many resources and are not playing around. After their offices are trashed as a warning they turn to a mobile office and fight fire with fire. After nailing down an IP address to a secret government location (thanks to some illegal hacking of their own) they commandeer a military helicopter to take them to the location. What they discover is an abandoned oil rig that holds a very special government server called “NEMESIS”. However, this nemesis will not be as easy to overcome as kicking the server into the ocean.

Episode 18:

A Jewish Holocaust survivors webpage contacts the Freaky Links gang for help. They have a website dedicated to displaying the pictures of the Holocaust on a rotating basis. All the pics, thousands of different prints, depict acts of cruelty and murder by the Germans of the Jews. And all the pictures were taken with one man’s camera, a camera which until recently was housed in the adjacent museum. Now, however the camera has gone missing and new pictures have begun to circulate with the old pictures. These pictures are of revenge killings of Germans. The survivors organization have exhausted all secular methods of investigation to find who has stolen the camera and is responsible for taking the new pictures, hacking their website, and possibly the murders.

Episode 19:

Ghost sightings of a “little cloaked girl who floats in the air” are pursued by the freaky links gang. However, all trails lead to a tourist spot where they reenact town life of the pilgrims circa 1800. Problems arise when following the leads because the townsfolk refuse to break character, even off camera. The longer the gang stays in the town the more they realize how self-sufficient the town really is, and begin to wonder when the only signs of modernization they find are the tourists. Have they really stepped back in time as the brochures suggest?

Episode 20:

A very rich, eccentric entertainer (actress, musician, writer) hires the freaky links crew to follow up on a conspiracy theory that she had posted on her website that has got her blacklisted from Hollywood. She wants her name vindicated and her sanity proven. Going into the engagement though even the Freaky Links crew have their doubts about the women’s sanity. However, when things begin to spin out of control very quickly the crew have no doubt that she is the real thing.

Episode 21:

More video of Adam is sent to Derek at Freaky Links. This time though Lan is able to make some discoveries about the footage being faked which leads the crew to the town of the perpetrator. However, in order to prove it and catch the faker they will have to break the law and risk getting caught by local law enforcement. By the time they figure out that the whole thing is a trap it’s too late, and now they know that NEMESIS is still alive and out to even the score.

Episode 22:

The Freaky Links crew is drawn to a beach resort town where miracles of biblical proportion and that parallel biblical miracles are occurring. Derek takes the opportunity to go surfing and witnesses a miracle first hand as he is swallowed whole by a shark and lives to tell about it. Then when one of the local townsfolk begins to build an arc and claims to be told by God that the great rains will come again, the crew must quickly unravel the mysterious occurrences before the growing agitation amongst the other townies finally blows up into a full scale lynching of the prophetic arc builder.

Episode 23:

While on a case Derek is knocked unconscious. In that state he gets closer to unraveling the mystery surrounding Adam then ever before. But how much of what he learned in his dreams is true, and how much can the crew follow up on?

Episode 24:

An imposter website to Freaky Links develops a movie that is going to be released (direct to video). The gang receive an advanced copy of the movie anonymously, and many of the plot lines strike a little too close to home (like the star of the movie looking for his dead brother after receiving quick time footage of him alive).  The movie has the group exploring an abandoned costume house that is supposed to be haunted and is done in pseudo-documentary style. The Freaky Links crew decides that the best way to stop the release of the film is to go to the costume house, debunk the movie’s claim with footage that they can air on the Freaky Links website. But of course they find more than they bargained for at the costume house.

Episode 25:

The gang receives a v-mail from a subscriber who lives in the wilds of Northern Canada. He has footage of a military chopper which crashed in the woods near his “estate”. The crash occurred a month ago, the military reported that the copter had gone done into the Pacific Ocean with no survivors. Yesterday the subscriber found the crash and made the footage. He claims to have found no signs of any life form living or dead. It hasn’t snowed in the last month and the subscriber claims to be an avid outdoorsman and swears some signs should be found. The Freaky Links gang suggests that the servicemen may have jumped out with a parachute, but the subscriber says all parachutes are accounted for on board, unused. The gang flies to the Great White North where the subscriber picks them up and takes them to their estate. Soon enough in their investigation parallels to the disappearing pilgrims of John White begin to appear.

Episode 26:

In perhaps their most bizarre finding yet, the Freaky Links crew investigate raids by “Pirate Ghost Ships” on farmers in the middle of the prairies.