We were 2 days away from pitching our crime mystery drama series.
Our team? An entrepreneur-turned-actor. A director-writer hybrid. A fresh screenwriter with a media studies degree.
And me—an actor-writer-marketer who'd spent years juggling scripts, music videos, and digital marketing campaigns.
NONE OF US had ever sold a TV show before.
We'd oversold the concept. Promised a finished pilot to our producer-investor. And now the clock was ticking… toward our doom.
The pitch deck looked sharp.
The actors were interested.
We had a pilot script sitting on the table.
There was just one catastrophic problem: the script was absolute garbage.
That script nearly killed the entire deal.
We'd started with a horror-thriller true crime angle.
Then pivoted hard into crime drama mystery territory—something grounded, realistic, less stylized.
The shift left our structure in ruins.
Scenes that once built tension now deflated it. Character arcs collapsed into incoherence. Dialogue that should've crackled with urgency just sat there, lifeless on the page.
We didn't have a plot problem—the story beats were solid.