Treatment, screener, or pilot? That is the question.

While writing a treatment is a necessary evil, it really isn’t the best way for a first time producer to market their reality series. Robert was friends with Tanya Norman one of the authors of “Pitching Hollywood, How to Sell Your TV and Movie Ideas” and he asked her to meet us at Starbucks to go over our idea. She was fairly convincing in her argument that it would be VERY difficult to sell our show to a network with just a treatment. Tanya was among quite a few people who thought we really had something and she convinced us to think beyond cable and satellite and consider pitching our show to a major network. We had originally planned to shoot a 30 or 60 minute pilot in HD appropriate for cable or satellite, but our estimated $25,000 budget wouldn’t allow for the production quality required by major networks like ABC, NBC or CBS. Tanya suggested we consider cutting a three to five minute screener instead.

The decision came down two options, a short three to five minute screener that would accompany the treatment or a full-scale 30 or 60-minute pilot episode. The advantage of the screener is that it would be cheaper, around $10,000 to produce. The downside is that you can’t air a screener, i.e. it would be worthless if we didn’t sell the program to a major network. The pilot would cost around $25,000 to produce, but we failed to sell the series to a major network we could eventually sell it to a cable or satellite network. If we ended up selling the show to a major network and had a major budget to work with we could either throw away the pilot or sell it internationally. Robert suggested that we could likely sell an hour long pilot for at least $40,000. If we were successful and were able to sell the series Robert estimated that annual revenues could reach $600,000 per year. Ultimately, we decided to product the 60-minute pilot.