by Chris Harris
If you’re an independent writer trying to get your work read, you quickly discover a truth that feels almost comically unfair: the barrier isn’t always talent or effort. It’s access. Not access to money, or equipment, or even contacts. Just access to a pair of eyes.
Let’s draw an analogy with football. If you have the ability to be a top footballer, the way to become one is littered with people out scouting for you, which is why when you take the greed out of football you have across the board a vast talent pool.
Paradoxically, with so many 5-star players, why in TV, film and radio are the reviews littered with 1-3-star reviews? Because, like football, there is a huge talent pool out there, but unlike football, the route to getting discovered is not huge systems to encourage a stream of hot talent, but a huge dam put in place to contain it.
You can spend a year writing something exceptional, polishing it, shaping it, rewriting it until it sings, and it still won’t get read. Not because it isn’t good, but because it arrives through the wrong door. Or through no door at all.
The industry talks constantly about new voices. Fresh talent. Originality. But in practice, it has built a system where the hardest thing for a new voice to achieve is the most basic step: being taken seriously enough for someone to read page one in the first place.
“We Don’t Have Time to Read Unsolicited Scripts” — But Why Not?
This is the line that gets rolled out everywhere. Production companies and commissioners say they don’t accept unsolicited material because they don’t have the time to read it. On the surface, it makes sense. They’re busy. They get flooded. Most of what comes in isn’t ready. They have legal concerns. They’re protecting themselves.
But there’s a question hiding in plain sight here, and it’s the one nobody wants to answer. Why don’t they have the time? Football clubs have academies to discover and nurture talent, hence the quality.
Television is an industry that burns money at an extraordinary rate. Hundreds of thousands of pounds a day can disappear on a set, and sometimes that’s before you’ve even made anything that’s actually good. Entire series are commissioned, shot, edited and marketed, only to land with a thud. Two stars. Three stars. A week in the charts and then it vanishes like it never existed.
Yet when it comes to discovering a vast pool of potential ideas, suddenly the industry becomes a model of austerity.
You’re telling me you can’t afford to pay someone £150 a day to sit and do nothing but read promising submissions? You can’t afford a small team whose whole job is to hunt for new material? You can’t build a proper intake system that filters and triages original work, rather than ignoring it completely?
You can spend millions making mediocre television, but you can’t spend a few thousand a That is absurd.
The Script Fetish: When the Gatekeepers Confuse Format With Talent
There’s another layer of madness in all this, and it’s the one people avoid admitting because it exposes a deeper flaw. The industry expects independent writers to turn up with polished scripts, perfectly formatted, structured, paced, and written like a professional screenwriter. That sounds reasonable until you remember one simple thing: some of the most original people don’t write like that.
Some of the most imaginative storytellers don’t know how to write a screenplay. They don’t understand the rules. They don’t naturally think in scene headings, slug lines, beats and act structures. They work in prose, in voice, in atmosphere, in character. Their talent is vision, not formatting. Their skill is the ability to create worlds and emotional truths, not to obey Final Draft conventions. It’s like having a Lionel Messi aching to join your club, and he needs to work on his fitness, which you can do to get the best player in the world, but you have no trainers or fitness coaches to achieve that end, so you let the greatest talent go, because you will not nurture it.
And yet the industry treats script-writing as the entry ticket, as if it’s the same thing as having an idea. It’s not. A good script is the execution. A good idea is the raw material. And the two often don’t come in the same person, especially early on.
Surely the entire point of production companies, especially boutique ones that claim to be creative led, is to develop talent. To take raw brilliance and turn it into something workable. To match people with the right collaborators. To build a team around a vision.
If you want only polished scripts, you’re not developing anything. You’re just shopping in the finished goods aisle.
Production companies are constantly talking about the shortage of good writing, the shortage of new ideas, the difficulty of finding original material. They’ll tell you good scripts are rare, and that’s why they stick with safe names and safe structures, the conveyor belt of mediocre reviews.
So why would you build a system that excludes the very people most likely to bring originality, simply because they don’t have the specialised technical skill of screenwriting yet? Why wont you work with them to develop those skills.It’s like saying you’re desperate to find the next great band, then refusing to listen unless they arrive already mixed, mastered, and radio-ready, with a label manager and touring strategy.
That isn’t scouting talent. That’s expecting the talent to have already become a product.
The Music Industry Analogy: Talent Needs Development, Not Gatekeeping.
With writers, the expectation is you tip up with the finished product.
Think about how the music world works when it’s working properly.
You find a band with something electric, a voice, a style, a swagger, a new sound. They might be rough. The songs might be too long or short. The drummer might be too loud and the singer might not even know what key they’re in. But there’s a spark. What does a decent record label do?
They don’t say: “Come back when you’ve already recorded an album, built a fanbase, produced a hit single, and proved the market.”
They bring them in. They develop them. They put them in studios. They surround them with producers. They help them shape the sound without crushing what makes it unique.
Now imagine if record labels behaved like TV commissioning.
Imagine they said: “We only sign bands who already have a full polished album, industry standard mixing, and a successful tour under their belt.”
By the time that happens, the moment has passed. Somebody else has already taken them. The energy has dissipated. The band has burnt out. Or worse, they’ve become generic because they had to self-produce into a safe shape just to be taken seriously.
If They Read More, They’d Commission Better: Jumping Through Hoops.
This is why independent writers feel blocked not by their own limitations, but by the sheer closed nature of the system. It isn’t that nobody wants new material. It’s that the process for finding new material has become lazy, defensive and risk-averse. It’s designed to protect the industry from being overwhelmed, but it also protects it from being surprised.
The surprise is the thing that makes great television. So the tragedy here is this: the industry is capable of funding extraordinary work. It has the budgets, the platforms, the audiences. What it lacks is the willingness to properly look, and the confidence to develop something raw rather than demand it arrive fully packaged.
It would rather spend hundreds of thousands a day filming something average than spend a tiny amount creating the infrastructure to find brilliance early and nurture it properly. Until that changes, independent writers will continue to be locked outside the gates, while television keeps serving up safe, polished, three-star work and acting baffled when audiences grow bored.
Sure, I get you can get swamped with scripts, but lower the bar. You don’t need to sit and read them all. There is something called a CV, and clearly, there are people who are genuinely capable of producing the content. Every other industry seems capable of sifting out the not good enough via a CV, but TV and Film seemingly unattainable entry point bucks the reliable, tried and tested method that sees the best people for the job put in place by severely restricting entry in the first place.
Anyway, consider the above as you watch another crap Channel 5 series or film and wonder why!
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