The network and its sister channel TMC2 announce a slate of 90-minute event TV Films shot across Italy and Europe, with the score by MGM Records and international production by Carolco Pictures
of Maurizio Mazzarella
It isn’t often that a mainstream network decides to bet an entire TV Film season on a single name. But TMC, together with its sister channel TMC2, has chosen to do exactly that: nine titles, nine different stories, one common thread. That of Giovanni Di Stefano, the writer and creator who over the past months has built, piece by piece, an entire narrative universe made of stolen identities, blackmail, uncomfortable dossiers and destinies that collide in some of the most striking — and most shadowy — locations across Italy and Europe.
The announcement, made yesterday at a press conference, has the feel of a publishing event as much as a television one. Filming won’t begin before next spring, but the pre-production on all nine projects will officially get underway in the early months of 2027, with casting, location scouting and final script drafts unfolding throughout the year. It’s a major investment made possible by the international partnership with Carolco Pictures, the historic production house returning to the scene with a new division dedicated to the European television market, and by the orchestral score, which will carry the signature of MGM Records, a label specializing in music for the small screen.
The format chosen for all nine titles is the classic prime-time TV Film: 90 minutes overall, of which 12 minutes are reserved for advertising breaks, for a total of 78 minutes of pure storytelling split into network-standard blocks. A structure designed to guarantee pace, regular twists, and that sense of urgency that has, over the years, made the best international thrillers so memorable.
“We didn’t want nine random episodes just to fill a schedule,” TMC’s artistic director said yesterday during the presentation. “We wanted nine worlds. Nine different ways of telling the same Italian obsession: the discovery that behind every seemingly ordinary life a secret capable of destroying it can be hiding. That is exactly what Giovanni Di Stefano has written for us.”
Below, in an exclusive first look for our readers, are the complete storylines of the nine TV Films that will make up the new TMC and TMC2 season.
1. CROSSING INTO SHADOWS
A marriage, a crossing, a man who never existed.
In 2027 the luxury cruise ship MS Imperium sails from Monte Carlo bound for New York on an exclusive transatlantic voyage reserved for entrepreneurs, celebrities and wealthy passengers. Among them is Elena Moretti, an Italian investigative journalist who has just married Richard Kane, a charming British businessman she met only months earlier in Dubai. On the third night of the crossing, after the gala dinner, Richard vanishes without a trace. But when Elena asks for help, she discovers something impossible: according to the ship’s records, she boarded alone. No booking, no camera footage, no crew member remembers Richard Kane. Even the wedding photos disappear from her phone. As the crew begins to doubt her sanity, Elena will find one lone ally — former investigator Daniel Mercer, now the ship’s head of security — in order to discover that her husband’s name may be an artificial identity built from scratch, and that the truth is rooted in an investigation Elena herself had published years earlier.
2. THE ELENA FERRI FILE
She says she is a daughter no one ever acknowledged. He is the prosecutor who should expose her. Neither of them truly knows who the other is.
Milan, today. Public Prosecutor Alessandro Conti, one of the most respected magistrates in the District Attorney’s office, meets a woman named Elena Ferri at a charity reception on Lake Como. She claims to be the unacknowledged daughter of the brother of powerful industrialist Vittorio Bellandi. An intense relationship develops between the two, even as the evidence Elena presents grows increasingly ambiguous. When Vittorio Bellandi is found dead, poisoned, every clue begins to point at Alessandro: the affair becomes public, Elena disappears, and forged documents, cash and a weapon are found in her apartment — while more evidence mysteriously turns up in the magistrate’s own office. Suspended and put under investigation, Alessandro will find one ally, Commissioner Ricci, in order to discover that for fifteen years a woman with ever-changing identities has been drawing close to great family fortunes, leaving behind suspicious deaths and contested inheritances. Across Milan, Portofino, Rome and the French Riviera, the hunt for the truth becomes a reckoning with one of the most sophisticated manipulators ever told in an Italian TV Film.
3. THE GHOST OF TURIN
A professor dies. But someone keeps living in his place.
Turin, wrapped in winter fog. A respected university professor is found dead in his apartment with no sign of forced entry. The case seems closed, but Inspector Marco Bellandi isn’t convinced: in the following days, bank transactions, digitally signed contracts and even video calls emerge in which the man appears alive and perfectly lucid — yet the professor has been dead all along. The investigation leads Bellandi into a sophisticated criminal network that manufactures false identities on an industrial scale, run by a legendary figure known only as “The Notary.” When Bellandi gets too close to the truth, he becomes a target himself: security cameras stop recognizing him, his personal records are altered, his passport turns out to belong to someone else. Within forty-eight hours, as far as the Italian state is concerned, Marco Bellandi will cease to exist. With the help of police IT specialist Elena Ferrero, he will uncover a hidden factory of digital identities beneath an old industrial plant — and the most unsettling secret of all: “The Notary” is not one man, but a name passed down for more than forty years.
4. GHOST IN THE NETWORK
Ten years ago he was declared dead. Today he’s the only one who can save her.
A former British intelligence officer, Gabriel Stone, declared dead ten years earlier during a mission in Istanbul, lives hidden under a false name between Monaco, Belgrade and Dubai. Everything changes when he receives an encrypted message from investigative journalist Elena Voss, a Pulitzer Prize winner, who is working on an investigation capable of bringing down some of the most powerful people on the planet. When her informants begin dying one after another, Gabriel recognizes the signature of a clandestine organization he believed had been dismantled years before: “The Circle,” an invisible network of investment funds, private security firms and media manipulation capable of steering governments and world markets. From London to Zurich, from Rome to Singapore, Gabriel and Elena will discover that the Circle is about to launch an unprecedented operation, using generative artificial intelligence to alter the outcome of elections and global economic decisions — and that the betrayal Gabriel suffered years earlier is tied, thread by thread, to today’s events.
5. THE PRICE OF CHOICES
A successful architect. A wife tired of being perfect. A neighborhood no one wants to save — except those who grew up there.
Rome, today. Angelo Paganiere, an accomplished architect, lands the most important commission of his career: the luxury redevelopment of a former working-class neighborhood near the Tiburtina district. As the project brings money and power but also evictions and protests, his wife Luisa begins an affair with Luca Ferri, a journalist investigating that very project. Around them, other lives hang in the balance: Sofia Rinaldi, a young lawyer torn between her own roots and a lucrative offer; Matteo, Angelo and Luisa’s twenty-two-year-old son, who discovers his mother’s affair while shooting a documentary about the evictions; Roberto Valli, a corrupt city councilman cornered by his own teenage daughter; and Elvira Santori, an elderly former seamstress who refuses to be reduced to a victim and asks only for justice. A choral portrait of the true cost of every moral choice, which explodes when a journalistic exposé sweeps up every protagonist, leaving no one a winner.
6. THE BUS OF DESTINIES
Eleven strangers. A bus stranded by the storm. Two days to find out who they really are.
Year 2026. A violent climate storm paralyzes central Italy, shutting down highways and rail lines. An old tourist coach traveling from Rome to Milan becomes the only way out for a diverse group of passengers: Marco Ferri, the driver carrying the grief of losing his wife during the pandemic; Elena Rinaldi, the owner of the coach company fighting to keep the family business from going under; an influencer on the verge of financial collapse; a young journalist carrying explosive documents; a former magistrate haunted by his own past mistakes; a student fleeing a toxic relationship; a Syrian doctor hiding the trauma of war; an actress forgotten by the public; a couple on the brink of separation; a young hacker with a laptop full of secrets; a priest doubting his own faith; a sixteen-year-old girl on her way to the father she hasn’t seen in ten years. When a landslide blocks the main highway for good, the seven-hour trip turns into a two-day odyssey through isolated mountains — and with no signal, no hotels and no way out, everyone’s masks slowly begin to fall.
7. THE LAST RUN
“A man who wanted out of the game. A world that would never let him leave.”
Italy, 2026. Between Rome, Naples, Milan and Monte Carlo lives Andrea Moretti, a sixty-five-year-old former fixer for international organized crime, known in the underworld as “The Pilot”: for more than forty years he moved people, money and compromising documents without ever being arrested, betrayed, or involved in violence. Today he lives in quiet retirement on the Lazio coast, running a small seaside restaurant and leading an apparently peaceful life — until powerful business lawyer Carlo Ventura offers him ten million euros for one last, simple job: make a manager willing to cooperate with international authorities disappear. Andrea refuses, but when his savings are frozen, his restaurant faces bankruptcy, and his daughter Elena needs an expensive operation abroad, the past finally sends him the bill. He takes the job. But the man he’s meant to transport, Matteo Rinaldi, isn’t the criminal he was told about — he’s a man who chose to tell the truth. And “The Pilot” will have to decide, for the first time in a lifetime of silence, which side he’s really on.
8. THE LAST ROUTE
Lampedusa. Crystal-clear water, night-time trafficking, a man who returns for revenge — and discovers someone else was waiting for him.
Lorenzo Serra, a former inspector with Rome’s Flying Squad, walks out of prison after eight years, wrongly convicted over a drug operation that ended in bloodshed. That same night he also lost his wife Giulia and daughter Emma in a bombing meant for him. Free, he isn’t looking for justice — he’s looking for Vittorio Neri, the fixer everyone believes is dead, whom an informant, shortly before being killed, pointed him toward in Lampedusa. On the island, Neri now goes by the name Valerio Nicosia, a respected businessman and local benefactor who in reality controls a new criminal route trafficking stolen military microchips, forged biometric passports and cryptocurrency. Hindered by Coast Guard commander Marta Leone and, against her own will, aided by Sara Neri, Vittorio’s daughter who begins to doubt her father, Lorenzo will discover that his wife was not a random victim: she was about to hand over a dossier capable of exposing protection networks inside the police, politics and the intelligence services — and that he, far from being the hunter, has always been the bait.
9. FLIGHT 914: FINAL WARNING
126 passengers. A device that cannot be defused from the ground. Ninety minutes to save them all.
Rome, today. AeroItalia Flight 914, from Rome Fiumicino to Milan Linate, takes off as an ordinary evening connection carrying 126 passengers, including a minister under armed escort, an investigative journalist, and a silent man no one really seems to know. Twenty minutes after takeoff, air traffic control receives an anonymous call: there’s a device on board that will detonate only if the plane drops below 3,000 meters — unless the Italian government confesses, live on national television, to a long-buried state scandal. As two Eurofighter jets flank the flight and all of Italy follows the crisis live, journalist Elena Rinaldi and Captain Marco De Santis will discover that the real perpetrator is on the ground — a former intelligence officer believed dead for fifteen years — and that the only hope of defusing the device rests with a wrongfully disgraced technician and young co-pilot Giulia Ferri, the only one able to read the flight data for a way to fool the detonator.
One season, one author
Nine stories, different in genre and setting — from a psychological thriller at sea to a legal drama, from a border-town noir to a high-altitude disaster movie — yet united by a distinctive voice, that of Giovanni Di Stefano, whom TMC has moved to lock in with a multi-year exclusive deal. “It’s rare to find a writer able to range so widely while staying so true to himself,” the production added yesterday. “In every one of his stories there’s the same question: who are we, really, when everything we thought we knew is taken away from us?”
The partnership with Carolco Pictures will give all nine TV Films an international production standard, with mixed Italian-European crews and filming at real locations from Monte Carlo to Lampedusa, from Turin to Portofino. The original music, entrusted to MGM Records, will accompany each title with a bespoke orchestral score — an element the network considers “an integral part of TMC’s new visual and sonic identity.”
Pre-production on all nine projects will officially begin in the early months of 2027, with cast announcements expected throughout the year and principal photography anticipated, schedule permitting, in the fall of that same year. TMC and TMC2 promise regular updates on casting, locations and air dates in the coming weeks.
