A couple production companies recently expressed some interest to me in regard to a pilot I wrote. They liked it, but didn’t get a strong enough sense of where the series goes (or how continuing seasons might unfold). So, they asked for a series document - if I had one. Well, I just finished writing it! It’s the first one I’ve written in a while — not since I put together a doc for my sample pilot Harpoon (this is a link to the series document, the pilot can be found in the TV sample section of this website).
To me, a series document should feel like a mix of pitch doc, series outline, and general passionate diatribe of the writer about his or her show. Interestingly, my doc for this new pilot ended up requiring a much longer series doc (a whopping 18 pages, much longer than Harpoon’s). The most important part, I gather, is the episode beats - which confirm to the executives that you actually know how you want the show to unfold. Now, I’ve seen a ton of series docs or bibles or whatever you want to call them - and many of them don’t have these episode beats. My general feeling is maybe I’ll get to a point one day in my career where, as part of the pitch process, I won’t need episode beats — they’ll just try that I have the story-telling chops and get a general sense of where the show goes otherwise. For now, it actually serves as a really interesting exercise. If in some absurd dream scenario, this show were to get made — well, what comes out on the other end would look nothing like the episode beats I just put down. I can say that confidently, having now seen two series documents and then worked on the actual shows that followed. So really, it’s just an audition.
But for me, as long as someone is taking the time to read your series document - to dive headlong into the world of your show, your dream version of the world of your show - you should pour all your passion into it and make it apparent. So, I include histories, setting description, character arcs, backstories of the characters, etc. etc. One day maybe I’ll be able to share this new one and you can compare and contrast! I certainly will do that to try and understand why they turned out so differently from one another.