Backed by Y CombinatorFive documents and three sheets that classify every engine your pilot sets up as renewable or depleting, then count the stock behind each one.
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What you get
Pack of 8 files: 5 documents, 3 spreadsheets
TV Series Pitch Document TemplateSeries Engine Audit
Every engine the pilot sets up, classified before a page of the bible gets written.
| Engine | Type | Stock |
|---|---|---|
| Rescue of the week | Renewable | Unlimited |
| Leadership friction | Renewable | Unlimited |
| Hollis's disappearance | Depleting | 9 clues |
| The land offer | Depleting | 4 beats |
Season one spends six of nine clues and all four beats. Three clues remain, worth six more episodes at the same pace, heading into season two.
Every TV pitch template says the premise has to sustain beyond the pilot. None of them says how to check that against an actual concept rather than assert it in an overview paragraph. Final Draft's own guidance names the mechanism directly: the series engine is the central conflict that drives stories across episodes without being resolved until the very end, if ever. Naming the engine is not the same as counting it, and an overview that only asserts the premise sustains has nothing to check that claim against.
This pack runs the check a naming exercise cannot. Every engine a pilot sets up gets classified renewable or depleting. Renewable means it regenerates by construction, the way a procedural's case of the week always has a next case. Depleting means it draws down a finite, countable stock, the way a mystery holds a fixed number of clues before the truth is known. Every depleting engine then gets its stock counted and its refuel named: the event that hands it new material, or the point where it folds into a different engine instead of dead-ending.
A worked pitch here, Signal Peak, a Sierra Nevada search-and-rescue drama, audits to five engines: three renewable, two depleting, with nine clues in one and four beats in the other. Season one spends six clues and all four beats, and the negotiation's resolution hands the mystery a sixth clue instead of closing clean. MY Entertainment's own annotated deck labels a slide "proof the format sustains" and leaves it a blank bullet list. A beat sheet or coverage pass checks a draft the same way this audit checks a concept.
Series Engine AuditIllustrative, for a fictional Sierra Nevada search-and-rescue drama, Signal Peak. All five engines the pilot sets up.
| Engine | Type | Stock | Episodes remaining after S1 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rescue of the week | Renewable | Not applicable | Unlimited |
| Leadership friction | Renewable | Not applicable | Unlimited |
| Rookie competency | Renewable | Not applicable | Unlimited |
| Hollis's disappearance | Depleting | 9 clues | 6 episodes |
| The land offer | Depleting | 4 beats | 0 alone; folds in |
Season one spends six of the mystery's nine clues and all four negotiation beats. The negotiation's own resolution hands the mystery its sixth clue instead of closing clean.
Character RegisterWant and need for three of the six logged characters, and which engine each one feeds.
| Character | Want | Need | Feeds |
|---|---|---|---|
| Maren Voss | Run the team her own way, learn what happened to her father | Stop leaving before things get hard | Leadership friction; the mystery |
| Del Aranda | Keep the team run the way Hollis ran it | Let someone else be right sometimes | Leadership friction; the mystery |
| June Okafor | Get past probation, a real search | Accept that competence takes longer than she wants | Rookie competency |
Every row already passed a resolved-by-pilot check. None of these three leads' arcs close in episode one.
Episode OutlineFour of ten episodes, showing how the depleting engines land on the calendar.
| Ep | Rescue of the week | Engines advanced |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Two skiers caught in a slide | Leadership friction; clue 1 of 9; land beat 1 of 4 |
| 5 | Overturned kayaker on the Fork River | Land beat 2 of 4; clue 3 of 9 |
| 8 | Missing trail crew after a rockslide | Land beat 3 of 4 |
| 10 | Search for the buyer's own rep | Land beat 4 of 4, folds in; clue 6 of 9, fold-in |
The land offer's four beats land at episodes 1, 5, 8 and 10. Its own finale beat is what hands the mystery its sixth clue.
Every lead's want, need and paradox, tied to the engine their arc feeds, with a resolved-by-pilot check that catches an arc closing too early.
Every engine the pilot sets up, classified renewable or depleting, with the stock counted behind each depleting one and its refuel named.
The season mapped from the audit episode by episode, so every placed beat or clue is traceable back to a specific engine advancing.
States the engine first, the way Final Draft's own template asks for, then the world, the tone, and every character's want and need.
The pilot and the season told in prose, agreeing with the audit's numbers exactly, down to which engine is spent and which one folds in.
The logline and the pitch compressed to what gets forwarded before anyone reads the bible, holding up read alone on a phone in a minute.
Two real, currently known titles, named by the specific engine each one runs on rather than by genre, with what your pitch combines that neither does alone.
The words for a pitch deck, not a rendered file, with the engine slide stating the audit's count directly instead of asserting the show sustains.
Open the pack in River and let the agent build the audit from your concept, or download the blank Word and CSV files instantly.
In River, the agent reads your logline, treatment or script pages directly and logs every character's want and need into the register itself.
The register groups character wants into engines, classifies each one renewable or depleting, and counts the stock behind every depleting engine.
Fill in the bible, treatment, one-pager, comparable analysis and deck from what the audit found. In River, the agent drafts all five and checks every number against the sheet it traces to, the same discipline a pitch narrative built from a metric backup sheet applies to a fundraising deck.
Yes, the whole pack downloads free as Word documents and CSV sheets, no signup and no card required. "Edit with AI" is a separate, optional path for writers who want River to build the audit directly from a concept they send in. Every other pack lives in the template library.
No, and nothing could. It does not option anything, and it is not a substitute for a manager or an entertainment lawyer reviewing a deal. What it produces is the documents buyers expect, built from an audit rather than an assertion, so the sustainability question gets a number instead of a promise. For a book or true story, pair it with rights research.
Word documents (.docx) for the Series Bible, Treatment, One-pager, Comparable Analysis and Deck, and CSV (.csv) for the three tracking sheets, zipped into one file. They open natively in Word, Pages, Google Docs, Excel, Numbers and Sheets, nothing to convert.
Storydoc's deck template and MY Entertainment's annotated PDF both give you slide order: a cover, a synopsis, characters, comparables. Neither one classifies what actually repeats every episode or counts how many episodes of story it holds, which is the specific question a buyer asking "what's season two" is asking.
It creates a free River account and installs this exact pack as a private workspace. It opens with the agent ready to read whatever concept, logline or script pages you send, build the register and the audit, and write the sell documents from them. Nothing is written until you send something.
A logline works. The Character Register needs people with a want and a need, not finished scenes, so a concept with characters in it is enough to classify engines against. A beat sheet is the better tool once pages actually exist to check structure against.
Written by
Co-founder & CEO, River
Chandler has spent the last six years working in AI, building tools for millions of users and Fortune 100 companies. In 2025, he co-founded River to build a new kind of operating system for AI agents.
Send the concept. The audit comes back with every engine classified, the stock counted behind each depleting one, and the sell documents written from it.
Edit with AI