The Art of The (Social) Pilot
How showrunners are selling narrative to a new market
For most of the TV age, the path for a writer to get a 60-page pilot made was clear. They’d outline the characters, the world, the stakes, and package it all up to show to agents around Town. If a studio loved your script, they’d purchase the project and send you a paycheck. Then they’d have to turn this into a hit with characters that people would get behind.
A few of these legacy deals are still getting done. 33 scripts were sold in 2025. But there’s a rapidly expanding market for people who understand how to adapt narrative to social media. Plenty of those deals are hidden in plain sight, although the studios behind them look less like Paramount’s golden historic lots and more like corporate tech and finance offices.
BILT’s Roomies is the best example of a narrative show that has adapted the legacy model to the new landscape. The show centers around Ellie, Griffin, Ovie, and Rain: 4 roommates making a 3 bedroom in NYC work. Cyrus and Brooke, the Roomies’ showrunners, first came up with the idea in 2024. Cyrus had been working with the venture capital firm that incubated BILT since 2020 managing their video operations. After the rewards program company split into its own entity in 2021, Cyrus moved over to BILT to lead social. He began to read the tea leaves: narrative might have a place in social media. BILT could act as the studio.
We caught up with Cyrus and Brooke over drinks to understand how they convinced the unicorn start-up’s leadership to fund their pilot. Cyrus explained,
I’m very lucky that Zoe Oz, our CMO, has always understood the…opportunity of short form video. The process started with an internal pitch where I laid out the ongoing challenges of organically telling Bilt’s story, the current landscape of social…, and what I saw as a way to break through the noise with a scripted narrative show. The answer was ‘go for it’!
Roomies officially launched in June of last year, to massive success. The pilot garnered 1.9M views and its subsequent episodes sustained a 700K average viewcount. The key to Roomies’ success lies in the 3 month runway they had to work out the kinks of the show. Brooke and Cyrus tweaked the writing by gauging audience responses week after week. This allowed them to get the concept off the ground rapidly, converting a marketing ploy into a property that has taken on a life of its own.
BILT isn’t the only company taking on a studio role in the space. CAVA launched a dating show called Bowlmates just 4 months ago via Very Only Agency. Crocs launched Charmed To Meet You via Reel Short. And P&G launched Beyond the Gates. Cyrus told us: “if you have a great concept that you feel passionate about—go make it now! If you can get through that initial stage of iterating and remixing until you find a pilot format that clicks and finds an audience (I.e. gets 100K+ views), you’ll be in a much stronger position to then go out and pitch brands and say ‘I have an idea that will work, let’s partner to bring it fully to life’”.
After a 2-month hiatus, Roomies returned for a season 2 in January of this year. Your pilot could be next.
Girl Room season 1 is over. The wildly popular Gymnasium property hosted by Owen Thiele closed its first season with 110K followers and an all-time viewership peak of 6M across 9 episodes. Submit your girl room here for a chance to be featured on the next season.
Gymnasium started an unemployment hot line. If you dial +1-877-UNM-PLYD and tell them your unemployment story, you can be featured on their IG series. They will call back with a career counselor on the line, free of charge.
Follow-up from last week: The first episode for Mad Realities’s new show, Good Dog, is now live. It features Shorty, a five year-old pitbull. Spoiler alert: he’s now been adopted!
Keep The Meter Running is looking for a post producer. DM Adam Faze if interested.
Fallen Media is launching The Love Network. This new content division will house all of its popular dating shows including Street Hearts, Love Train, and Sketch My Ex. They hope this makes it easier for advertisers to integrate with their content ecosystem.
Untitled, the music collaboration platform, launched a new series called [brackets]. Personalities rank popular artists against each other in a tourney style this-or-that.
Filmology Lab is building a $250 million studio for micro-drama production in New Jersey. This is the first studio for micro-dramas of its kind on the East Coast.
As we mentioned in our first issue, we work on an app for showrunners called Typo*. If you’re tired of duct-taping together iMessage, Slack, Frame, Dropbox and Asana to run your show, we’d love for you to be a design partner. Reach out to Sahil at sahil@typo.inc.
*design partner (n.) — a person or team who gets early access to a product and gives their unfiltered thoughts on it.
* typo (n.) — a messenger that runs your show for you. It knows what’s due, who’s late, where the files are, and what the notes were.