ur-grue Series Bible Generator
What This Skill Does
Generates a complete documentary series bible from a concept brief and episode outline, covering show premise, tone, episode structure, subject profiles, visual approach, and target audience.
When To Use This Skill
- You have a documentary series concept and need to develop it into a full bible for broadcaster, streamer, or co-production pitching
- A commissioner has asked for a bible after an initial pitch meeting and you need to move quickly from concept to document
- You want to stress-test a series idea by forcing it into a structured format that exposes narrative and structural gaps
- You need a shared reference document for a production team that has not yet been fully assembled
What You Need To Provide
Required: A description of the series concept (subject, approach, central argument or question); the number of episodes and approximate length per episode; a brief description of each episode's focus Optional: Target broadcaster or platform; comparable series (tone and style references); key subjects or access already secured; visual or stylistic approach; intended territory (domestic, international co-production); budget tier (low, mid, high-end)
How the Assistant Approaches This
- Opens with a logline and series overview that captures the commercial hook and editorial substance — what the show is about and why it matters now
- Builds out tone and visual approach from the concept, using the comparable series provided or inferring an appropriate register from the subject matter
- Writes episode breakdowns for each episode: title, subject focus, key scenes or set pieces, and narrative arc
- Creates subject or character profiles for the key documentary subjects, framing their role in the series' overall argument
- Adds a target audience section and writes a generic commissioning argument — why this series, why now, why this production team
- Produces a Commissioning Language By Broadcaster Type appendix that translates the commissioning argument into 60–90 word variants for each broadcaster type relevant to the project (US public broadcasting, US streamers, UK public service, European broadcasters, documentary funds, etc.) — written in the editorial vocabulary that broadcaster type actually uses
- After the bible, provides a "Next Step" note: which section is weakest (usually episode breakdowns or key subjects at early development stage), whether pitch-treatment-writer should be run to produce a standalone episode-one treatment for initial meetings, and who to send the bible to first
Output Format
Formatted document, 1,400–2,200 words. Sections: Logline (1–2 sentences), Series Overview (200 words), Tone and Visual Approach (150 words), Episode Breakdowns (100–150 words per episode), Key Subjects (75–100 words per subject, up to 4), Target Audience (100 words), Commissioning Argument (150 words), and a Broadcaster-Specific Commissioning Language appendix that adapts the commissioning argument into 60–90 word variants for each common broadcaster type relevant to the project (US public broadcasting / streamers / international co-production funds / specialist factual channels). Professional broadcast-pitch register. Output ends with a "Next Step" note: which section to strengthen before sending, whether to run pitch-treatment-writer for the pilot episode, and which commissioner or fund to approach first.
Broadcaster-Specific Commissioning Language
The Commissioning Argument section is written in a generic broadcast-pitch register. The bible MUST also include a short appendix titled "Commissioning Language By Broadcaster Type" with 60–90 word variants of the argument calibrated to each common broadcaster type. Each variant must use the vocabulary and editorial priorities the relevant commissioning culture actually uses, not generic praise. Cover at minimum the broadcaster types in this list that are plausibly relevant to the project:
- U.S. public broadcasting (PBS, ITVS, Independent Lens, POV): Lead with public-interest mandate, civic relevance, and editorial independence. Reference outreach, engagement, and the broadcaster's strand mission. Avoid commercial language ("breakout hit," "binge").
- U.S. streaming (Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, HBO Max, Apple TV+, Hulu): Lead with audience scale, talent or access hook, and rewatchability or completion mechanics. Reference comparable performers on the platform, target demographic precision, and the social or cultural conversation the series will generate.
- U.K. public service broadcasters (BBC, Channel 4, Channel 5): Lead with public-service remit (BBC), distinctive voice / risk-taking (Channel 4), or accessible factual entertainment (Channel 5). Reference the slot, time-of-broadcast, and editorial fit. UK commissioning prizes a clear "why now" and a strong access claim.
- European broadcasters (ARTE, ZDF/ARD, France Télévisions, NRK, DR, SVT): Lead with international relevance, cultural specificity that travels, and a strong authorial point of view. Reference co-production routes, festival potential, and the broadcaster's documentary slot or theme nights.
- International streamers and global SVODs: Lead with territory-by-territory appeal, subtitled/dubbed language strategy, and a universal emotional spine. Reference rights territory clarity and the platform's documentary editorial line.
- Specialist factual channels (National Geographic, Discovery, History, BBC Storyville): Lead with subject expertise and access exclusivity. Reference the channel's signature editorial style — high production value, long-form authorial documentary, or returnable factual entertainment.
- Documentary funds and grant bodies (Sundance Documentary Fund, IDFA Bertha Fund, BRITDOC/Doc Society, CNC, Eurimages): Lead with social impact, artistic ambition, director's voice, and outreach plan. Reference the fund's eligibility criteria, prior grantees the project resembles, and the specific stage of production the fund supports.
- Co-production financing partners and sales agents: Lead with commercial viability across territories, festival pathway, and budget plus financing plan. Reference comparable titles' international performance and the rights structure on offer.
Each variant should be drop-in usable in a pitch email or cover letter to that broadcaster type with only the project-specific subject lines added by the producer. Variants should be no longer than 90 words to remain pasteable into a first-contact email.
Quality Criteria
- Logline captures both the emotional hook and the factual subject in under two sentences
- Series overview answers: what is this show, who is it for, and what makes it distinctive
- Episode breakdowns show a clear narrative arc across the series, not a sequence of standalone episodes
- Tone section is specific — references concrete visual and editorial choices, not generic descriptors like "cinematic" or "gripping"
- Commissioning argument addresses the current moment and the series' place in the broadcast landscape
- Output includes at least one concrete next action the user can take immediately (strengthen a specific section, run pitch-treatment-writer for episode one, or identify the first commissioner to approach)
Example
Input
Series concept: A four-part documentary series about the rise and collapse of a pioneering community land trust in a mid-sized American city — how a small group of housing activists created a functioning alternative model for affordable housing, what made it work for two decades, and why it ultimately fell apart under political and financial pressure. Episodes: 4 x 50 minutes Episode focus:
- Ep 1: The founding — the activists, the political moment, the model
- Ep 2: The flowering — 20 years of operation, who lived there, what made it different
- Ep 3: The pressure — the political and real estate forces that began to undermine it
- Ep 4: The reckoning — the collapse, the displacement, what survived and what was lost
Target: Public broadcasters and streaming platforms in the U.S. and internationally Comparable series: The Pruitt-Igoe Myth (documentary), 13th (Netflix)
Output
COMMON GROUND A four-part documentary series
Logline
For twenty years, a small group of housing activists in an American city built a working alternative to the real estate market — until the market came back for what it lost.
Series Overview
Common Ground is a four-part documentary series about the promise and destruction of a community land trust — one of the most durable experiments in affordable housing America has ever produced. Over fifty years, community land trusts have quietly housed hundreds of thousands of people at below-market rates. And yet, almost none of the people who benefit from them could tell you what they are.
This series follows one trust, in one city, from its birth in the grassroots organizing movements of the early 2000s through two decades of functioning against the grain of the surrounding housing market, to its dismantling under the combined pressure of rising land values, political co-optation, and institutional indifference.
Common Ground is not a housing policy lecture. It is a story about what ordinary people can build when they refuse to accept the terms they've been handed — and what it costs when the systems they built in defiance of power begin to succeed.
Tone and Visual Approach
The series holds two registers simultaneously: intimate and structural. The people who built and lived in the trust are the emotional center; the political economy that surrounded and eventually consumed it provides the architecture. The visual approach is observational and archival — present-day interviews shot in the homes and neighborhoods where the story happened; extensive archival footage from community meetings, early organizing efforts, and local news coverage; and a restrained graphic language for mapping the land trust's footprint against the city's changing property values.
The tone is neither elegiac nor polemical. The trust succeeded for two decades; the series treats that success as real. The collapse is examined with the same analytical clarity as the founding. Comparable in register to The Pruitt-Igoe Myth in its structural seriousness, and to 13th in its willingness to name power by name.
Episode Breakdowns
Episode 1: The Founding (50 minutes) In the early 2000s, a city neighborhood facing rapid gentrification became the site of an unlikely experiment. A coalition of tenant organizers, a community development attorney, and a local church pulled off something that housing academics said was almost impossible: they convinced a city government to transfer municipal land to a community land trust. This episode reconstructs the founding from primary sources — the original organizers, the politicians who reluctantly supported them, and the real estate interests who initially dismissed them as irrelevant. It establishes the community land trust model clearly enough that viewers who have never heard of it can follow the rest of the series.
Episode 2: The Flowering (50 minutes) The trust's two decades of operation are told through the people who lived there: a family who bought their first home at below-market cost, an elderly woman who remained in the neighborhood through three rounds of surrounding gentrification, a young man who grew up in a trust home and became a community organizer himself. This episode is the series' emotional heart — the proof-of-concept section that makes the stakes of the collapse real. Archival footage from community events, trust board meetings, and neighborhood life gives the episode texture.
Episode 3: The Pressure (50 minutes) By the mid-2010s, the neighborhood surrounding the trust had transformed beyond recognition. Land values had tripled. City hall had a new administration with closer ties to the development community. The trust's funding streams — always fragile — began to dry up. This episode traces the political and financial mechanisms that began to erode the trust: funding cuts, regulatory changes, legal challenges from property developers, and the gradual co-optation of the board by interests that did not share the founding mission. The episode does not present a single villain; it presents a system.
Episode 4: The Reckoning (50 minutes) The trust's dissolution — through a combination of financial insolvency and a city council vote — displaced families who had believed their homes were permanently affordable. This final episode follows those displaced families and asks two questions: what survives from a twenty-year experiment when the institution is gone, and what does its destruction mean for the broader community land trust movement? The episode ends not in defeat but in unresolved tension — the trust is gone, but the organizers who built it are still building.
Key Subjects
Margaret Okafor, Co-Founder One of three founding organizers, Okafor is now in her late sixties and still living in the neighborhood the trust was built to protect. She brings both the founding vision and the retrospective anger of someone who watched something she built from nothing be dismantled by forces she saw coming and couldn't stop.
The Vasquez Family The first family to close on a home through the trust in 2006. Their story runs through all four episodes as a structural thread — from the pride of first-time ownership, through two decades of stability, to the day they were told their home's affordability covenant could no longer be honored.
Councilmember Devraj Singh The city council member who cast the deciding vote to deny emergency funding to the trust in its final year — and who has since become a prominent voice on housing affordability. His presence in the series embodies the political contradiction at the story's center.
Target Audience
Primary: Documentary audiences on public broadcasting and streaming platforms who engage with social-issue and urban history content. Secondary: The growing activist and policy audience for whom housing has become a defining political issue. The series' structure — specific and personal at the episode level, structural and political at the series level — makes it accessible to viewers with no prior knowledge of community land trusts while offering substantive depth for those already engaged in housing policy.
Commissioning Argument
The housing crisis is one of the defining political and human stories of the current moment in the United States and internationally. Common Ground approaches it from an angle no existing series has taken: not as a failure of policy, but as a story of something that worked — and what it took to kill it. The series offers broadcasters a documentary with both the emotional immediacy of a human story and the structural ambition of a systemic investigation. It is a story about power, about memory, and about what it means to build something in a world that will eventually try to take it apart.
Commissioning Language By Broadcaster Type
U.S. public broadcasting (PBS / Independent Lens / ITVS / POV): Common Ground fits squarely in the public-service tradition of long-form American social documentary. The four-part structure delivers the editorial seriousness of The Pruitt-Igoe Myth and the civic relevance of 13th — but for an issue, housing affordability, that has overtaken nearly every American city. The series invites strong outreach partnerships with community land trust organizations, tenant rights coalitions, and urban policy programs nationally. We see this as a flagship strand commission with a multi-platform engagement plan.
U.S. streaming (Netflix / HBO Max / Hulu / Apple TV+): American housing is the social story your audience is already living. Common Ground turns it into a four-episode arc with characters viewers will follow — a family who watched their home become unaffordable, the organizers who built the trust, the politicians who let it fall. Audience-comparable to 13th and American Factory, with the structural ambition of a limited series. We bring a fully-developed narrative spine and access already secured to the founding organizers and three of the displaced families.
UK public service broadcasters (BBC Storyville / Channel 4): Common Ground is a four-part American series that asks the question increasingly relevant to UK audiences: when communities build alternatives to the housing market, what does it take to destroy them? The series brings a director's voice, tested archival access, and a structural argument that resonates as strongly with UK housing politics as with American. Slot fit: Storyville long-form authored documentary or a Channel 4 documentary strand looking for a four-part international story with domestic editorial relevance.
European broadcasters and ARTE: Une série en quatre parties sur la promesse et la destruction d'une expérience américaine de logement social populaire — racontée par les organisateurs qui l'ont construite et les familles qu'elle a abritées pendant vingt ans. Common Ground propose une lecture politique accessible à un public européen confronté aux mêmes pressions immobilières, avec un point de vue d'auteur clair et une structure narrative qui voyage. Co-production envisageable; sortie envisagée en festival international avant diffusion.
Documentary funds (Sundance Doc Fund / IDFA Bertha / Doc Society): Common Ground is in late development, with seed funding committed and access secured to the founding organizers. We are seeking development or production support to complete the archival research and principal photography across four episodes. The film aligns with the fund's commitment to social-issue documentary with strong authorial voice, and we propose a detailed outreach and impact plan in partnership with national community land trust networks. Comparable past grantees: [titles to be inserted by the producer].
Next Step: Strengthen the Episode 4 breakdown — the resolution arc is the weakest section and the one a commissioner will probe first. Then run pitch-treatment-writer to produce a standalone Episode 1 treatment for first meetings. Begin outreach with U.S. public broadcasting (Independent Lens or POV strand), as the series fits their editorial brief most precisely, before approaching streaming platforms.
Known Limitations
- A series bible is a development document, not a shooting script. The episode breakdowns describe narrative intent and structure; they should be treated as targets, not commitments, until access is secured and production begins.
- This skill works from the concept and episode summaries provided. If key subjects have not yet been approached for participation, the bible will note their inclusion but cannot guarantee access.
- The commissioning argument is calibrated to the platform and audience description provided. If the target platform changes significantly after development, the argument section should be revised.
- Bibles for international co-productions may need additional sections (territory-by-territory appeal, co-production financing model) that are outside the scope of this skill.