Perish Flats Show Pitch (Patreon)

Here's the very sad story of a show I've been trying to sell on and off for the past three years or so that knocked the wind out of my sails and was the nail in the coffin on having to put MGDMT on hiatus. Basically I brought this to a development exec as kind of a 9-14 older kids comedy series (Think like Invader Zim or Gravity Falls type age range) back in... probably early 2016? And they were super excited about it and told me "Usually we want people to put together a pitch package, but you have a really clear vision for this, you should start doing some boards as a proof of concept." 

Any animation pro will tell you do NOT put that much work into something if a studio is not signing contracts and giving you money but you know, when you're trying to give your baby a fighting chance in the world sometimes you're willing to go above and beyond and take stupid risks. So I started putting some boards together and it became apparent introducing the core cast and establishing the world was basically going to end up requiring a whole-ass pilot. So I put together this pitch to bring to the development people and told them that the boards they asked for were going to be a LOT of work, and I just wanted to make sure the concept was something they were actually interested in before I sunk all that time and energy into basically making a pilot for free.

They said it was great and they loved it and to absolutely keep working on those boards, with a deadline that they wanted to see them by August. This was also the year that I broke my drawing arm in that motorcycle crash, so at this point I was boarding Ben 10 full time, making MGDMT on a regular weekly basis, and sinking about 200 of hours of free work into this pilot while my broken bones were healing.

Anyway when I finally pitched the pilot I was basically told "this is great! We love it! You knocked it out of the park! We could NEVER put this on TV, no one is making these weird older-kid-horror-shows anymore." 

So I took it to another development exec and was told "We're trying to skew younger right now, but this is GREAT! Have you ever heard of webcomics? Maybe you could make this as a personal project!" and had to spend the meeting smiling through wanting to flip the desk. 

So I brought it to one more development exec and had probably the worst pitch of my life where everything went wrong, right down to the AC in the building going out and the room turning into a literal hotseat. The exec was super rude to me, completely didn't get the concept, and basically told me "There is no audience for this, no one will ever want it".

So that kinda took the wind out of my sails and I took some time to lick my wounds and recover, because at this point I was very sad and very tired and feeling like I was drowning in work in a way I don't think I ever really recovered from. I spent two years telling myself "I'll get out there and try pitching again when I have time". Eventually it became apparent there would never be "time" I would have to give things up if I wanted to make "time". At that point MGDMT was feeling like diminishing returns, the jokes were getting worse, the art was getting worse, I was trying to squeeze it out at the end of every Sunday between everything else and end up staying up all night, I would be too tired to drive myself to work and Brett would basically have to peel me off the floor of my office and carry me to Burbank, I was starting to develop something that felt alarmingly like a heart murmur, so I basically decided "Okay, I'll pause MGDMT and spend some time trying to make this show happen.

And lemme tell you I went hard. I asked every single person I knew for every contact they had. I got great at unapologetically sending out cold emails and asking important people to get lunch with me. I pitched 15 times over the course of three months to probably every network you can think of and the responses ran the gammut of "We love it but it's too old for our target audience", "we love it but it's too serial for our adult animation block", "We love it but we already have too many post-apocalyptic themed things", "We love it but we aren't picking up comedies right now" and "We love it but the characters have too many overlaps with other things we're already making". One place actually told me they loved it and they DID want to pick it up, but ended up changing their mind a couple weeks later because that's just how the "selling your show in Hollywood machine works"

Anyway, here's the pitch package with a pdf of a handful of excerpts from the pilot I did back in 2016 to stand as a lasting monument to The Time Kelly Tried To Get A Show Made And Put Everything She Had Into It And It Still Wasn't Enough. Maybe someone out there will enjoy it, I keep telling myself maybe I'll just dust the whole thing off and redo the pilot so it isn't something I made in 2016 with a broken arm and hire some voice actors out of pocket and just put together a pilot animatic myself to put out into the ether for the People of the Internet to enjoy.