In 1939, on the inaugural night of a new Chicago-based radio network broadcasting from station WBN, the mood is high and the stakes are personal. The station's owner, General Walt Whalen, counting on a tight-knit crew to charm the loudest sponsor, Bernie King, Bernie King, and keep the program afloat. The team includes Roger Henderson, the driven writer; Penny Henderson, his wife and assistant director who is navigating a painful divorce; the page boy Billy Budget; engineer Max Applewhite; conductor Rick Rochester; the quick-tempered announcer Dexter Morris; director Walt Whalen Jr.; and stage manager Herman Katzenback. When the sponsor pushes rewrites on the scripts, the WBN writers growl with discontent, angry that their pay has dried up for weeks.
When trumpet player Ruffles Reedy falls dead from rat poisoning, the night spirals into a tangle of clues and danger. The stylish facade cracks as Walt Whalen Jr. is found dead, seemingly by suicide, and the General’s CPD steps in to keep the show running while they hunt. Shortly after, Katzenback attempts to mend a malfunctioning stage, only to be killed, leaving Penny to step up as both stage manager and director in the wake of these losses. Roger, determined to get to the bottom of the blood-soaked mystery, becomes the target of police suspicion just for existing at every crime scene, a paradox that gnaws at him and fuels the investigation.
The tension thickens as the police, led by Lieutenant Cross, watch Roger with growing exasperation. Yet Roger and Billy Budget refuse to abandon the pursuit, and they quickly deduce that Dexter Morris might be the next casualty. Dexter meets a chilling fate by electrocution, a reminder that this killer plays for keeps. By rummaging through private files in WBN’s archive, Roger uncovers a startling thread: all of the victims had previously worked together at a Peoria, Illinois station, hinting at a covert FCC scandal tied to the network’s past. The revelations escalate when Bernie King and General Whalen themselves die in violent, symbolic ways, deepening the sense that there’s a larger conspiracy at work behind the nightly broadcasts.
Escape from custody becomes a turning point as Roger uses Billy Budget to communicate with Penny, feeding her updated scripts. In a pivotal rewrite of the program, the self-referential script, the production of [Gork: Son of Fire], pulls back the curtain on the killer’s identity. The revelation is dramatic: the mastermind is Max Applewhite, the quiet sound engineer whose killings mask a calculated revenge tied to stockholders and patent wars, and who claims to have sparked television’s birth—an invention he asserts others have copied. Confronted at the radio tower, Max is cornered, and a dramatic firearm exchange ends with a biplane appearing and silencing him for good. The show’s backers respond to the sensational ending by resuming funding for WBN, and Roger and Penny finally choose a path toward reconciliation rather than divorce, concluding the night with a tempered hope for the network’s future.
