Overview

During this 18-week online course, fifteen talented writers will each develop an idea for a six-part serial, write a 60-minute pilot episode and evolve a plan for a further five episodes – supported by the expert teaching of celebrated TV-dramatist Colin Teevan (former Professor of Screenwriting and Playwriting at Birkbeck). Each writer will also receive an in-depth one-to-one tutorial from an experienced script editor as well as a series of five masterclasses from leading TV-industry professionals. Curtis Brown’s Theatre, Film and Television agents will deliver a pitching session – and each writer will have the opportunity to share materials with the agent team at the end of the course.

This online course will help students to develop their work to the best of its potential and will also be highly practical – giving a real-world education about what the industry is looking for and how to pitch their work effectively. Across the eighteen weeks, students will work on a range of important materials as well as writing their pilot script and workshopping extracts from it. They’ll be getting advice from top professionals on how to develop their idea, and on how to write pitches, outlines, treatments, character biographies, scenes and sequences, series overviews, and more.

The group will meet online on Monday evenings at 7pm (UK-time) via Zoom, excluding bank holidays where teaching sessions will happen on Tuesday (please see schedule below for details). These sessions are designed to replicate the structure and content of our in-person course as closely as possible, with the lovely group vibe and dynamic discussions with the tutor and agents that you’d get in the classroom. In addition, students will enjoy access to our bespoke online Learn platform, which will enable the sharing of resources, handouts and homework tasks, and provide an opportunity to continue in-depth interaction and discussion of the workshop material with the group outside of the weekly Zoom sessions.

While we don’t guarantee that students will find representation with Curtis Brown, our agents will be on the look-out for exciting new talent and will call in the full scripts of writers whose work they particularly connect with.

In the nine years since we’ve started Curtis Brown Creative, over 100 of our novel-writing students have gone on to get major publishing deals for their novels, including Jane Harper (The Dry), Kate Hamer  (The Girl in the Red Coat), Nicholas Searle (The Good Liar is now a major feature film starring Ian McKellen and Helen Mirren) and Jessie Burton, whose debut The Miniaturist sold more than a million copies and became a BBC mini-serial. Read more about the published authors who’ve studied with us here. Our new course in Writing an Original TV Drama Serial has been in gestation for some time now, and we are thrilled to be running it for the second time with the support of Curtis Brown’s Theatre, Film and Television department.

WHAT DOES THIS COURSE GIVE YOU?

MASTERCLASSES FROM TV PROFESSIONALS

This course will feature a series of five special masterclasses delivered by TV professionals – organised and ordered to reflect the process of real-world television drama development. Students will be asked to prepare a specific piece of work relating to their own project for each of these sessions. The masterclass will start out with the guest TV professional giving the inside track on their role to demystify it for the students, and answering their questions – and will then move on to discussion of the students’ work. Each guest professional will discuss in detail the work of three students – and will do so in such a way as to be educational for the whole group. Each student will have their work specifically considered in one of these masterclasses (see the schedule below for details of the focus of each masterclass and the work to be completed).

Working with other writers

We pride ourselves on the tightly-knit writing communities that are established on our courses. As well as getting feedback on your work-in-progress during the course, we’ll be asking you to read the work of your fourteen fellow students week by week, and provide constructive comments (both in writing and verbally at the group workshop sessions). We find the process of offering feedback to others helps you to reach important conclusions about your own work and sharpen your material. On ten evenings across the course (as detailed in the schedule), three students will have 10–12 pages of their pilot script (up to 2,000 words on each occasion) workshopped by the rest of the group and the tutor. It’ll be your turn to get the group’s dedicated workshop attention twice during the course.