TV Series Pitch Document Template
Five 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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Series Engine Audit
Signal Peak — Series 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.
What is in the pack
Character Register
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.
Series Engine Audit
Every engine the pilot sets up, classified renewable or depleting, with the stock counted behind each depleting one and its refuel named.
Episode or Sequence Outline
The season mapped from the audit episode by episode, so every placed beat or clue is traceable back to a specific engine advancing.
Series Bible
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.
Treatment
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.
One-pager
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.
Comparable Analysis
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.
Deck, Slide by Slide
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.
How it works
- 1
Open in River, or download it
Open the pack in River and let the agent build the audit from your concept, or download the blank Word and CSV files instantly.
- 2
Send the concept
In River, the agent reads your logline, treatment or script pages directly and logs every character's want and need into the register itself.
- 3
Classify and count every engine
The register groups character wants into engines, classifies each one renewable or depleting, and counts the stock behind every depleting engine.
- 4
Write the sell documents from the audit
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.
Frequently asked questions
Is this template free?
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.
Does this guarantee a sale?
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.
What format are the downloaded files?
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.
How is this different from a pitch deck template?
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.
What does 'Edit with AI' actually do?
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.
Does this work from a logline alone, or do I need a full script?
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.
Find out how many episodes your premise actually holds
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