Musanna Ahmed is a development executive at Pure Fiction Television, one of the UK's leading independent drama companies. In this Mriia Mentors session, he broke down how development really works from the inside: what happens to a project after it lands on a desk, what a strong pitch deck actually needs, and how to approach the industry as a filmmaker without an agent.
"The shows that resonate are the ones where you understand the writer is the best person to tell this story because they have a real connection to the material."
A development executive's job is to find stories to tell. That means scouting for IP: books, articles, real events, short films, documentaries, as well as writers, directors, and any other source of a good story. Musanna described how anything can be a starting point, including a single article that sparks an original way into a topic.
The role has become more pressurised in recent years for a clear reason: broadcasters and streaming services don't want to take unnecessary risks. They want proof of concept. A book that already has an audience, a short film that demonstrates a tone, a documentary that proves there's a real story there. This is why IP, existing material has become so central to development, and why original stories face a steeper climb.
"Because everyone's asking the same questions to ChatGPT, there's pressure to find ideas that feel genuinely different. It still requires human creativity and thinking outside the box."
— Musanna AhmedMusanna also noted the pressure AI is creating in the role itself: if everyone is using the same tools to research and generate ideas, the development executive's job becomes even more about having genuine taste and the ability to recognise something original when they see it.
This is the part most filmmakers and writers never see and it's exactly the kind of insight that changes how you approach a pitch. Musanna walked through the stages a project goes through from the moment it arrives.
Before any meeting with a writer or director, the development team discusses the project among themselves. Not everyone will love every project, but they need to reach a shared view on how they see it as a TV show and which direction feels most compelling.
Once there's internal alignment, they meet with the writer and begin working through how the story should develop. This is collaborative when the company has a perspective, the writer has a vision, and the conversation shapes the direction of travel.
When everyone is comfortable with the direction, the writer gets commissioned for specific materials. What that means depends entirely on confidence level and the writer's experience.
For a tricky story, they might commission just an episode outline: bullet points of episode one, pure information. For a writer they're very confident in, they might go straight to a full pilot script. It depends on how well the creative conversations have gone.
The typical package a broadcaster needs to make a decision: a full script for episode one, plus a document showing where episodes two through six go. For very experienced writers, sometimes an oral pitch is enough - the track record speaks for itself.
This was one of the most practical parts of the session. Musanna identified the single most common problem he sees in loglines and synopses: an imbalance between internal and external stakes.
"I read a pitch about an alien who falls in love on Earth. All I could understand was the internal stakes: how the alien would feel human emotions. I had no idea what this meant for a TV show. Where are they? What changes around them across seven episodes?"
— Musanna AhmedHis point: a story about internal change alone is a film. A TV show requires an engine that can drive external change across multiple hours of story. Both need to be visible in your logline, not just who your character is and how they'll change, but what the world looks like around them and how that changes too.
How will this character change as a person? What emotional journey are they on? What do they believe at the start that they won't believe by the end?
What changes around the character? What is the story engine that drives external action across six, eight, ten hours? Why is this a show and not a 90-minute film?
Musanna described two approaches, using the same story as an example where a man who wakes up after a car accident and discovers someone tried to kill him:
"A man gets into a car accident and has to wake up and find out who tried to kill him." Clear, plot-based, functional. Tells you what happens.
"A man has to reckon with the fact that his friends are no longer who he thought they were after they're implicated in his attempted murder." Character-driven, asks a moral question, tells you what it means.
Neither is automatically better, it depends on the show. But the one Musanna responds to is the one that tells him what the show is trying to say. Genre and plot have been done before. The loglines that stand out are the ones where he can feel that the writer has something specific to say about the world and that they're the right person to say it.
"Genre and story — we've heard basically every story idea possible. But the ones that have real resonance are the ones where you understand the show is trying to say something about the world. And this writer is the best person to tell it because they have a real connection to the material."
— Musanna AhmedAs a concrete example: one of the best pitches he has read in recent years, now commissioned by a major UK broadcaster, opened not with the story, but with real statistics about survival rates after critical cardiac events in London's leading hospitals. It wasn't telling him the story yet. It was showing him the world, in precise factual terms, so that he understood exactly what kind of show this was going to be. The writer had a personal connection to the material. He believed them immediately.
Musanna was specific about what he looks for and what he doesn't. The two things he considers most important in a pitch deck are ones that many filmmakers either skip or underestimate.
Tell him what happens in episode one and how it ends, with a clear sense of where episode two goes. This doesn't need to be detailed. It just needs to make him understand why this is ten hours of story, not ninety minutes.
Every person who puts money into a show will ask: why this, and why now? The answer can be topical: a war, a social issue or purely formal: audience appetite for a certain genre, a gap in the market. But you need one, and it needs to be yours.
The other familiar elements are good characters, visual references, mood that he takes for granted in any reasonable pitch deck. They matter, but they're not what separates the pitches that get attention from the ones that don't. What separates them is the clarity of the episodic structure and the conviction of the "why now."
This is the honest, difficult answer, and Musanna gave it directly. The UK industry operates largely through agents. They are the gatekeepers between writers and production companies. Cold emails to companies usually go nowhere, not because companies are indifferent to new talent, but because the volume makes it impossible to respond to everything.
"Cold emailing is pretty difficult. People will just say: we don't really do things without an agent. But if you can find ways to engage with people directly in person, that is massively helpful. People are much more willing to connect when they can actually see you."
— Musanna AhmedHis recommended path: find the events and forums where production companies are specifically trying to connect with talent beyond their existing pool. These exist — and they're more accessible than most filmmakers realise.
Musanna also mentioned that some of these events don't need to be in person: webinars and online events work too, particularly for connecting with agents. The key is finding the spaces where companies are specifically looking outward, rather than approaching them in a context where you're simply one of thousands of emails.
Musanna was asked directly: what behaviours from writers and directors make him think a collaboration won't work, even if the material is strong? He gave two clear answers.
Missing deadlines. Taking a very long time to get back to people. This travels fast in a small industry. If a production company asks about working with a writer and hears "they're unreliable, very slow" — that's extremely hard to come back from.
Everyone has notes: channels, actors, production companies. A writer who isn't open to notes is extremely difficult to work with. In TV especially, where you're building hours of story collaboratively, the ability to receive and respond to notes isn't optional.
He acknowledged there are famous exceptions: established writers who are slow or refuse notes and still get hired. But that happens because they're already successful enough that productions will absorb the difficulty. For emerging writers, those same behaviours close doors permanently.
Musanna was honest about the difficulty of answering this question, market appetite shifts constantly, and what's true now may not be true in two years. But he described what she's seeing in conversations with buyers and in the shows currently getting commissioned.
Fast-paced, high-stakes, real-time. Shows like Bodyguard, Hijack, Red Eye. European buyers, including French financiers who own UK labels, are actively looking for more of this.
Off the back of Rivals and the gay hockey romance series Heated Rivalry, there's clear appetite for romance across streaming platforms. Netflix are already commissioning more.
Families with secrets. Marriages under pressure. Shows like The Girlfriend Experience, All Her Fault, His and Hers, The Perfect Couple. A huge amount of this material comes from books, publishers are a rich source of IP for this genre.
Across genres, what connects successful shows is a strong moral question at the centre — something an audience genuinely asks themselves. Harlan Coben's Runaway: what would you do if your child fell in with the wrong crowd? Simple, primal, universal.
On the state of the industry: the UK went through a very difficult contraction in 2023 and 2024 — teams were cut, some independent companies closed, there was significant turbulence at Channel 4 and Paramount UK. Musanna felt the market has stabilised. The most reliable places to pitch right now are Netflix, BBC, and ITV — they have stable teams and clear long-term goals.
Musanna had a considered, non-alarmist view on AI. He expects it to become a standard tool: for research, for checking whether a scene is working, for accelerating parts of the process. But he does not believe it will replace the fundamental work of development, for one clear reason.
"Our entire industry is built on human judgment, taste, and intuition. We're going to look at an AI script or an AI pitch and make a decision on whether it's to our taste. And so far, I've not seen AI art that has connected with audiences the way real storytelling does."
— Musanna AhmedHis observation: the AI content that generates the most reaction does so as spectacle, people are impressed by the technology, not moved by the story. Nobody is asking what happens in the sequel to an AI film. Nobody is emotionally invested in AI characters. The audience response is "how did they do that?" rather than "I need to watch this again."
For filmmakers worried about AI displacing them: Musanna's view is that the human connection in storytelling where the writer, who has lived something, who has a specific angle on a specific world is precisely what AI cannot replicate. That's exactly what makes a pitch land.
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