How To Hook Your Audience When Pitching Your Script (pt 6)
Ep #6 of how to pitch your pilot script
You have introduced yourself. You have given the key info. You have told the story, talked about the characters and what you envision the full season to look like.
One last thing is now fundamental to really leave a mark with your audience and make them remember your project: answer the question why this, why now?
Why should a broadcaster invest in your story? What makes it special?
In case you missed the previous episode, here is part 5:
The TV industry is crazy competitive, and if I had to guess I’d say around 2% of the projects I review get picked up in the end. 2%. That’s one every 50 scripts I read. And that’s even lower for other broadcasters and streamers. Just imagine how many people try to sell a series to Netflix!
How to stand out amongst such competition?
As we discussed before… there really isn’t a univocal way to tell a story in the best way. There is no secret formula to ensure success. That’s the magic and the frustrating thing about storytelling. It’s about sticking a nerve at the right time, having the right tune when the world is open to it.
But there are a couple things you can do in your pitch that will increase the chances of being memorable and feeling special. A pattern that seems to help:
Sum up the core message of the show
Does your story touch current themes? Will it resonate? Is there an audience for it?
You will be asked what, essentially, this is about. Where does the drama fit and why should we care. It’s essentially a humane message, the pillar your idea is based on that encapsulates the entire thing.
Drama is based on emotional conflict, and your story, however complex and detailed it may be, needs to answer a fundamental human need to cut through and spark interest. What is it, truly, deeply, intrinsically about, in a nutshell?
Here some examples we used before:
Breaking Bad
A man’s need for control and significance slowly destroys his soul.Finding Nemo
A parent learning to let go in order to truly love.Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
A boy discovering identity, belonging, and the power of love over fear.Mad Men
A man running from himself in a world built on illusion.
Remind them of the personal connection
By reminding them of your personal connection to the story, you instantly make the show relatable, because it is based on a real person’s thoughts and feelings - sometimes even life experiences.
This addition makes it less theoretical and more grounded with reality. And if that’s so for you, it might be for many more. And that’s what a broadcaster looks for: something that will resonate with others. Many, many others.
Continuing from last week’s Step 3, here an example for Step 4: why this, why now.
Our WIP pitch now looks like this and wow it’s getting longer! Although when you say it out loud it really is only a few minutes:
Step 1: Introduce Yourself
Hi my name is Sarah, I’m an environmental engineer and I’m new to the TV world. I wrote this as a passion project, but when my producer friend Jane read it, she thought it had something special that would resonate with people and that’s thanks to her that I’m telling my story to you today.
Step 2: Key Info
This is The Chemistry of Love, an 8x30’ romantic comedy which tries to answer the question: what if love wasn’t something you fell into… but something you could test, measure, and prove?
Set in present-day London, this is Fleabag meets The Big Bang Theory, with a grounded, modern twist. Smart, awkward and emotionally charged, this is the story of how a data-driven scientist tries to engineer the perfect relationship, only to find her carefully controlled theory of love unravelled by an unpredictable connection she can’t explain.
Step 3: What the story is about
Our protagonist is Dr. Maya Patel, a brilliant but emotionally guarded environmental chemist who believes everything in life can be explained through data, patterns, and controlled experiments. Passionate about saving the planet but deeply skeptical about love, she sees relationships as chaotic variables—messy, unreliable, and ultimately inefficient. Maya is witty, endearing, and occasionally blunt to a fault. She prides herself on her rationality, but beneath her composed exterior is someone who has quietly ruled herself out of romance, convinced that love simply doesn’t “work” for her.
Our story begins at a science conference where Maya presents her research on the brain’s chemical reactions explaining love, arguing that attraction is nothing more than biological coincidence. When Leo, a charming but disorganized documentary filmmaker, challenges her theory in front of the entire audience - she finds her stubborn match… and opposite. He believes love is irrational, unpredictable, and exactly what makes life meaningful. Their clash is immediate, public—and unexpectedly explosive like a chemical reaction.
At the later drinks, Maya and her boss and sucking up looking for investors, one of the ventures she has reluctantly agreed to is for a documentary crew to follow her in her research. Her boss introduces her to the filmmaker who is… Leo, the guy from the Q&A! The same man who publicly dismantled her argument just hours earlier is now smiling, camera in hand, ready to document her every move.
Maya is trapped: if she wants the funding, she has to accept him… if only he wasn’t EVERYTHING she distrusts! Instinctive, chaotic, driven by feeling rather than fact—and now she’s stuck with him for the foreseeable future. The pilot ends on that uneasy, electric note—two complete opposites forced into close proximity, neither willing to back down, both convinced they’re right.
Over the series, what begins as a professional nightmare evolves into something far more complicated. As Maya conducts her “love experiment,” applying scientific methodology to dating, Leo documents it all—questioning her process, provoking her assumptions, and, unintentionally, becoming the variable she can’t control. Their dynamic is combative, funny, and charged with an undeniable chemistry that refuses to fit into Maya’s models.
But as her research gains traction and the stakes rise, so does the pressure to prove her theory—to deliver results that are clean, certain, and fundable. Leo, on the other hand, pushes her toward something messier: embracing uncertainty, vulnerability, and the possibility that not everything meaningful can be measured.
In a final cliff-hanger, Maya is forced to choose: publish the findings that validate her worldview and secure her future… or risk everything by admitting that the one variable she couldn’t quantify—her connection with Leo—might be the only result that actually matters
Step 4: Why this, why now
As Maya’s experiment begins to unravel, so does her certainty as Leo keeps questioning everything she thinks she knows. And the more she tries to control love… the more she’s confronted with the possibility that the most meaningful connections can’t be engineered.
Inspired by my personal journey and real life experiences, this series is first and foremost a romantic comedy about letting go of certainty, embracing vulnerability, and discovering that sometimes the strongest reactions are the ones you never saw coming and can never fully explain.
We are almost at the end of the course. In the next episode we will put together everything we have done so far and write the conclusions.
This way you will have a full comprehensive example of what a pitch should sound like and a template to model yours after!
See ya soon,
Sofi🌻
It all begins here:
London based Acquisitions TV Exec, I watch movies and I love to write. In this newsletter I tell you what going to movie premieres is like, review the movies I watch and share practical guides on storytelling & scriptwriting. If this sounds good you know what to do :)