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2021 ScreenCraft TV Pilot Screenplay Competition Winners

by ScreenCraft on January 13, 2021

We are very excited to announce the winners of the 2021 ScreenCraft TV Pilot Screenplay Competition.

American Alligator by James King & Chris Webster has been selected from nearly 5000 entries as the Grand Prize Winner. Debbie by Matt Thomas has been selected as the One-Hour category Winner, Type Cast by Laura Winters has been selected as the Half-Hour category Winner, and All Mixed Up by Chelsea Rivera has been selected as the Short Episodic category Winner.

American Alligator is a one-hour crime drama set in 1928, where a black FBI agent is sent down from New York to investigate a string of gruesome murders in the Louisiana swamplands, and he must team up with an old Creole sheriff and his witch-doctor daughter to hunt down the killer before it strikes again: a giant American alligator.

Debbie is a one-hour drama about a high-flying defense attorney loses her job at a prestigious law firm and becomes a public defender.

Type Cast is a single-cam, half-hour comedy, about two disabled aspiring actresses who are pitted against each other in the 1980's NYC theatre-scene that has room for neither of them, let alone accessible f***ing toilets.

All Mixed Up is a short episodic series about Marcia, a mixed, bi-cultural woman, who navigates two different ethnic identities - leaning into her whiteness at her techy day job and leaning into her Latinx side when she moonlights as a stand-up comic. That is...until her two worlds start to collide, closing the curtain on her performance for good.

The following projects have also received a special mention:

American Panic: The McMartin Preschool Trial by Jason Kohl
Coal by William Fowler
DI by Brooke Buffington & Maddy Curley
Diblings by Pete Simmons-Hayes
Echoes by Lewis Mackie
Fire Camp by Steven Holleran
Lucy’s Law by Laurie Silverstein
No Rest for the Wicked by Alison Weaverdyck
Siren by Michael Burnet
Terminal by Dan Ast

In addition to the ScreenCraft team, this year's jury included Betsy Beers (Exec. Producer and Chief Content Officer, Shondaland), David Knoller (Executive Producer, TV Writer & Director), Crystal Holt (Director of Development & Scripted Programming at AMC Networks), Naren Shanker (Exec. Producer & Showrunner on Amazon's THE EXPANSE), and Alena Smith (Showrunner / Creator of DICKINSON on Apple TV+).

Congratulations to these winning writers and finalists, and thank you to our judges, and to everyone who submitted projects; we read a number of remarkable submissions.

View the QuarterfinalistsSemifinalists, and Finalists here.  The Grand Prize Winners will receive a cash prize and circulation of their materials to top literary managers and agents.

And if you’d like to receive a notification when this contest re-opens for entries in 2021, you can subscribe for updates via Coverfly here.

And be sure to check out more of ScreenCraft’s recent success stories here.


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