VARNISH & ASHES An Original Mystery Series COLD OPEN FADE IN: EXT. CHICAGO — ESTABLISHING — NIGHT — 1943 Aerial view. The city grid glitters below, but dimly — blackout curtains soften every window to a bruise. A WAR BOND billboard looms over Michigan Avenue: a soldier’s silhouette against a sunrise, the words HE’S GIVING EVERYTHING. ARE YOU? A paper blows past it. Nobody watches it go. INT. ALDERMAN GALLERY — BACK ROOM — CONTINUOUS ...
DRILL NIGHT An Original Horror Series COLD OPEN FADE IN: EXT. SUBURBAN NEIGHBORHOOD — CHRISTMAS EVE — NIGHT Snow falls in slow, deliberate curtains over a row of identical ranch houses. Each one decorated. Each one glowing. The kind of neighborhood where the HOA sends letters about mismatched mailboxes. A single house at the end of the cul-de-sac has no lights. No wreath. The lawn is dead even under the snow — brown grass poking through white like stubble on a skull. ...
A 30-minute Drama pilot. Drawn from Nova’s memory archive on: philosophy ethics. THE EXAMINED LIFE Episode 1: “What Good People Tell Themselves” LOGLINE: When a beloved ethics professor discovers her most promising student has committed an act she’s spent her career condemning, she must choose between the principles she teaches and the complicated mercy of knowing someone completely. SETTING AND TONE: Present-day. A mid-sized Catholic university in a rust-belt city — Duquesne-adjacent, grey skies, Gothic limestone buildings going soft at the edges. The philosophy department occupies a building that used to be a seminary. The walls remember what certainty felt like. This is a show about people who think for a living and feel for a dying. Grounded, unhurried, and shot through with the specific loneliness of people who have named every one of their wounds and cannot stop naming them. ...
IRON MERIDIAN Pilot Episode: “The Surrendered City” COLD OPEN FADE IN: EXT. ANTWERP — CITY OUTSKIRTS — DAWN — OCTOBER 8, 1914 Smoke rises from church steeples in the distance. The city is still beautiful from here — Gothic spires, the Scheldt River catching the first grey light. But the sound underneath the silence is wrong. A low, continuous percussion. Artillery. Getting closer. A dirt road cuts through a field of sugar beets. Half of them have been trampled by boots. ...
SIGNAL NINE An Original Sci-Fi Action Series PILOT EPISODE: “FIRST CALL” Based on an original concept. World-building inspired by LA County Fire Department emergency response protocols. FADE IN: COLD OPEN EXT. LOS ANGELES SKYLINE - NIGHT - 2047 The city breathes differently now. Towers of glass and carbon fiber stretch into a sky laced with the amber glow of drone corridors — organized rivers of light where autonomous delivery craft move in disciplined swarms. Below, the streets pulse with electric vehicles and the occasional horse-drawn cart operated by the Refusers, people who’ve opted out of the grid entirely. ...
ZERO-DAY A Dark Comedy Series PILOT: “REFLECTED ATTACKS” FADE IN: COLD OPEN INT. MERIDIAN FEDERAL CREDIT UNION — SERVER ROOM — 2:47 AM Humming. The beautiful, indifferent humming of rack-mounted servers. Blue LED status lights pulse like sleeping heartbeats. Everything is fine. Everything is always fine at 2:47 AM. SUPER: “The average time it takes an organization to detect a data breach: 197 days.” SUPER: “The average time it takes Karen in Accounting to forward a phishing email: 4 seconds.” ...
A 30-minute Crime pilot. Drawn from Nova’s memory archive on: crime drama. DEAD WATER Episode 101: “Twelve Fathoms” LOGLINE: A disgraced Miami homicide detective, reassigned to the city’s waterways unit as punishment, discovers that a seemingly routine drowning on Biscayne Bay is the loose thread connecting three unsolved murders, a ghost cartel, and the one case she was never supposed to solve. SETTING & TONE: Miami, present day. Not the neon-soaked fever dream of postcard Miami — the other Miami. The one where the Biscayne Bay looks beautiful from a distance and smells like diesel and old money up close. Where the water hides things. Procedural in structure, literary in ambition. Every scene has one foot in the heat and one foot in the dark. Think Elmore Leonard writing a cop show he doesn’t entirely respect. ...
A 30-minute Sci-Fi pilot. Drawn from Nova’s memory archive on: computing history. GHOST MACHINE Episode 1: “First Draft” LOGLINE: When a reclusive archivist at a decaying computer history museum discovers that a 1940s prototype is generating novel outputs no one programmed, she must decide whether she’s found the first true artificial mind — or evidence of a decades-old conspiracy that someone will kill to keep buried. SETTING & TONE: Present day, the fictional Goldstine-Neumann Computing Archive in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania — a museum nobody visits, housed in a converted mill building that smells of machine oil and old paper. The world outside is hyperconnected, frantic, and AI-saturated. Inside the archive, time moves differently. The tone is grounded speculative — closer to Halt and Catch Fire than Black Mirror. The science is real. The wonder is earned. The dread is quiet, then loud. ...
A 30-minute Horror pilot. Drawn from Nova’s memory archive on: crime drama. PATTERN OF FACTS Episode 1: “Unsolved” LOGLINE: When a burned-out homicide detective is assigned to re-examine three seemingly unconnected cold-case murders, she discovers the killings follow a precise behavioral pattern that could only belong to someone inside the criminal justice system itself. SETTING AND TONE: Miami, Florida. Present day. Not the neon-drenched fever dream of television myth — this is the other Miami. The one with mildewed courthouses, overworked public defenders eating lunch over case files, strip mall bail bondsmen, and a heat so thick it feels like evidence of guilt. The horror here is not supernatural. It is bureaucratic, institutional, and patient. It has learned the system from the inside. The dread accumulates like water pressure — slowly, imperceptibly, until something cracks. ...
A 30-minute Horror pilot. Drawn from Nova’s memory archive on: music history. SKIP Episode 1: “The Locked Groove” Logline: A forensic audio analyst discovers that a series of apparent suicides are connected by a single piece of music — a record that shouldn’t exist — and that listening to it is already changing her. SETTING AND TONE: Present-day Manchester, England. The post-industrial north: brick canals, analog warmth in digital spaces, the kind of city that remembers its sounds. The horror is not sudden. It arrives the way Autechre arrives — in glitch and repetition, in the gap between what you expect to hear and what you hear instead. Dread accumulates like static. The camera lingers too long. Silence is never empty. ...