Six-Part Drama Series · In Development

Digital Reflux

An emotionally armoured tech founder builds an AI agent to manage human relationships — only to have her own defences shattered when her dying mother and heavily pregnant, estranged daughter crash back into her life.

Created & Written by John Swindells · More Than Illusion Media
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01The Series

Three generations.
One family in collision.

Claire Hartley built Mavis, an AI agent designed to help people navigate their most intimate relationships without the friction of human vulnerability. As her company races towards a nine-figure valuation, the sudden collision of her mother’s terminal cancer and the return of her heavily pregnant, estranged daughter shatters the architecture of Claire’s hyper-controlled life.

Digital Reflux is a razor-sharp psychological drama about what we outsource to machines when we can no longer bear to face each other — and the physical courage it takes to truly show up — a raw three-generation reckoning no algorithm can heal.

02Three Generations

Three women.
Three ways of surviving.

Nan, Claire and Jess have each learned very different ways of negotiating love, vulnerability and the world around them. Now illness, pregnancy and an unfinished family history force all three into a proximity none of them is prepared for.

Jess returns from Oxford with a PhD — and a baby only weeks away.
03The Storyworld

A world we already recognise.

More and more of life is mediated through screens, platforms and algorithms. Relationships can be managed at a distance; presence is increasingly optional. Claire appears perfectly adapted to this world — and Mavis, her AI relationship agent, is its logical expression.

Then life becomes brutally physical.

Illness.   Death.   Birth.

The things that cannot be mediated, outsourced or experienced at a safe distance.

04What We Inherit

What passes between generations is more than memory.

Digital Reflux explores transgenerational trauma as lived inheritance — the love, silence, shame and emotional defences that can travel through a family without ever being consciously chosen.

Can we ever stop passing it on?
05 · The Experience
“A six-part drama about the human cost of avoiding presence — and the difficult, visceral act of finally showing up.”

Digital Reflux moves between the precision of Claire’s corporate world and the unruly intimacy of family life. Glass, screens, reflections and controlled space give way to bodies, breath, touch, hospital light, domestic chaos and the physical facts no technology can soften. Humour and absurdity live beside grief; control is repeatedly interrupted by the mess of being alive — through pregnancy, illness, sex, birth, death... and, ultimately, love.

Created / Written
John Swindells
Format
Six-Part Drama Series
Status
In Development
More Than Illusion Media

Digital Reflux

Three generations. A world increasingly lived at a distance. And the primal events that make presence unavoidable.

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