2025 TV WRITER MENTORSHIP PROGRAM WINNERS

WE ARE HONORED TO ANNOUNCE THE WINNERS AND FINALISTS OF OUR 2025 TV WRITER MENTORSHIP PROGRAM

It has been a pleasure to immerse ourselves in these fantastic stories and proudly share them with our award-winning industry Judges.

And now the Judges have spoken! We are very excited to invite six writers to our very first TV Writer Mentorship Program, where they will receive mentorship, take meetings, and celebrate their work over eight weeks of programming.

We want to congratulate all the writers who have graciously shared their work with us this year. With so many great stories from talented writers, we are in no doubt that a large number of this year’s entrants will go on to have successful careers in the industry.

For full details of what happens next, check out our post-contest timeline.

Learn more about our TV Pilot alumni and how we can help move your career forward by checking out the TV Pilot Success Stories.

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 WINNERS – TV PILOT 1 HR | TV PILOT 1/2 HR

TOP 5 FINALISTS – TV PILOT 1 HR | TV PILOT 1/2 HR 

SEMI-FINALISTS – TV PILOT 1 HR | TV PILOT 1/2 HR

QUARTER-FINALISTS – TV PILOT 1 HR | TV PILOT 1/2 HR

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TV PILOT 1 HOUR GRAND PRIZE WINNERS – WINNING SPOTS IN THE MENTORSHIP PROGRAM

	Joanna Dack	How To Sell Sex	In the throes of London’s sexual revolution, an abused housewife battles to revolutionise the world of lingerie, clashing with political figures, societal norms and a conservative businesswoman determined to maintain the status quo.
	Pete Sailer	The Five Burrows	Rockefeller Rabbit is the corrupt robber-baron leader of The Five Burrows, a Gilded Age underground city for prey animals. Faced with warring political parties, union strikes, economic inequality, and overpopulation, Rockefeller struggles to maintain control of a city on the verge of collapse while something sinister slithers in the shadows.
	Ryan R. Cunningham	The Young Ones	A team of rebels fight to expose the corporation that determines life and death, in a world where immortality can be found in the medicine cabinet.

TV PILOT 1/2 HOUR GRAND PRIZE WINNERS – WINNING SPOTS IN THE MENTORSHIP PROGRAM

	Damian Barray	Living Between	A dark comedy about a woman who moves in with her sister’s dysfunctional family after a suicide attempt, only to discover she can now communicate with the dead. Can she confront her ongoing battle with her mental health and adapt to a complex new family dynamic all while secretly helping the departed find peace in the afterlife? If only she were better at multitasking.
	Ryan Luong	The Tam Show	After a near-death experience, a socially awkward yet endearing Vietnamese immigrant says goodbye to her life in the shadows by auditioning for the trashiest reality show in America.
	Sierra DuCharme-Hansen	The Book of Bourbon	After Mickey is blindsided by a marriage proposal, she hides from her Mormon family in a local Salt Lake City dive bar, where she is confronted with a whole world she’s never seen and a chance to discover who she is outside of the church.

TV 1-HOUR FINALISTS – Winning mentorship with our Writer Development Manager
(5 Finalists – in alphabetical order by writer first name)

	Chris Knauer	Eureka Springs	Following a mental breakdown and subsequent dismissal from the FBI, detective Lance Carver is forced to return to his hometown of Eureka Springs, Arkansas to restart his law-enforcement career as a lowly Sheriff’s Deputy. In this exciting, small-town supernatural thriller, not only will Lance dredge up past family trauma, he’ll also have to confront a new, monstrous threat borne from the darkest of Ozarks folklore.
	Christian Canterbury	Terminal Island	In a dystopian Los Angeles where happiness is commodified and sold as currency, a disillusioned woman trapped in an abusive marriage begins to question the system—until one quiet act of defiance sparks a chain reaction she can’t undo.
	Henry Harper	Prussian Blue	Hoping to get a leg up in the cutthroat New York City art world, the gallerist daughter of a legendary art thief finds herself reaching out to his former partner in crime for help.
	Mariyam Mahbub	SCRAMBLED	Desperate to keep custody of her kids, an overworked and underpaid fertility nurse is pulled into the international underworld of reproductive crime and must decide how far she’s willing to go to protect and provide for her family.
	Tamara Stratton	Wintercount	An ancient house with cryptic etchings emerges on Native land, drawing indigenous archeologist, Kiana Powell, into a race to decipher a supernatural mystery and determine what the house threatens to unleash.

TV ½ HOUR FINALISTS – Winning mentorship with our Writer Development Manager
(5 Finalists – in alphabetical order by writer first name)

	Ari Donnelly	Power Couple	A supervillain and superhero have happily fought each other since high school. But when their devotion starts to damage their careers, they are forced to start fighting other people.
	Caroline Mabey	Not Drowning But Waving	Viv (49, hormones raging) lives for her weekly cold water swim, but when she finds a body at the lake her life is turned upside down. Who was the dead man? Why does nobody else care? And how can she stop treading water and make her own life count?
	Janelle Lee Austin	B.B. y Gordo	A hard-drinking, pill-pushing 50-year-old Latina, caught up in wild nights and younger men, is forced to reckon with her past when her troubled grandson lands on her doorstep. In a gritty fight for redemption, she must decide if she’s too far gone or ready to grab the second chance she never saw coming.
	Katie Northlich	Let There Be (The) Light	Living within her Old Order conservative religious community’s patriarchal oppression and secrets, an unusually headstrong woman finds relief in an unlikely place.
	Melanie Zoey Weinstein	FAKE RABBI	When a kink-forward Jewish artist can’t pay the bills, she moonlights as a rabbi and reinvents the answers to life’s biggest questions for teens and their families.

OUR 2025 TV WRITER MENTORSHIP ONE-HOUR SEMI-FINALISTS

(in alphabetical order by writer’s first name)

OUR 2025 TV WRITER MENTORSHIP PROGRAM HALF-HOUR SEMI-FINALISTS

(in alphabetical order by writer’s first name)

OUR 2025 TV WRITER MENTORSHIP ONE-HOUR QUARTER-FINALISTS

(in alphabetical order by writer’s first name)

OUR 2025 TV WRITER MENTORSHIP PROGRAM HALF-HOUR QUARTER-FINALISTS

(in alphabetical order by writer’s first name)