I am so thrilled to announce that I have completed everything for pitching a TV Show: Treatment, Story Bible, and a Pilot Episode Screenplay.

The Persephone Cycle is visualized as a 12 part – 42 to 60 minute episode format limited series.

Tagline: Drawn into a painter’s obsessive vision to become the goddess Persephone, a sheltered young woman discovers that the greatest art she can create is her own self, forcing her to battle the powerful men who believe they have already bought and paid for her soul.

Main Characters:

• Cora Vance: Our protagonist, daughter of Philomelus Vance. She has art at the core of her soul which has been stifled by her grandmother.
• Tristan Corbin Croft: The brilliant and innovative artist most commonly known as T. Corbin Croft. No one gets to call him Tristan… until of course someone does.
• Theresa Vance (The Matron): Cora’s powerful, high-society grandmother, a widow, also addressed as Mother Vance.
• Lord Aleron, Earl of Ashworth: The wealthy, influential patron who commissioned the art in question.
• Melaina : A powerful mover in the Bohemian world, a stage actress.
• Plutus Vance: Cora’s dutiful uncle, the family heir. He controls the family finances.
• Eleanor Vance: Cora’s aunt, wife to Plutus and her greatest ally within her home.

Setting: 

• 1895 London
• Two major art styles at war in the art world:
  • Post-Impressionism
  • Pre-Raphaelite
• Two different visions of a woman’s life as seen in fashion:
  • Uptight society seen in the tight, lobster tail and corset fashions
  • Relaxed and free flowing dress of the Aesthetic movement

A Specific Artistic Vision: 

T. Corbin Croft’s work is a masterful fusion of his world.

• The Luminous World of Alma-Tadema: He builds his settings with Tadema’s meticulous, almost archaeological precision. His canvases are filled with sun-drenched marble, shimmering silks, and historically accurate details. He is obsessed with light and texture. This creates a world so beautiful and tangible that it feels like a perfect, seductive reality.
• The Psychological Intensity of Rossetti: Into these bright, classical worlds, he places figures that have the raw, emotional power of a Rossetti portrait. He is not interested in Tadema’s serene, often detached figures. He zooms in on the face, the hands, the eyes. He wants to capture the soul’s turmoil. The claustrophobic, emotional intensity of Pre-Raphaelitism is trapped within the expansive, sunlit stages of classicism.
• The Lyrical Grace of Botticelli: This is his unique signature. He composes his scenes with the flowing, lyrical lines of the Renaissance masters. Like “The Birth of Venus,” his paintings capture a moment of divine becoming. Cora’s hair doesn’t just hang; it flows in impossible, beautiful lines. The drapery swirls around her. Her poses are not static; they are moments of transformation held in perfect, graceful suspension. This is why he specifically wants Cora to model for him: she has a dancer’s grace and an eye for movement.

Core Concept:

The story follows Cora, the sheltered granddaughter of a powerful matriarch, as she becomes the muse for the brilliant but obsessive artist, T. Corbin Croft. Their relationship, orchestrated by the powerful and manipulative Lord Aleron, becomes the catalyst for Cora’s transformation. The project subverts the traditional “tragic muse” trope; Cora’s journey is not one of corruption, but of reclamation. She rediscovers her own artistic soul—a legacy from her secret mother, the celebrated actress Melaina—and learns to wield her own power, culminating in a battle for her identity, her art, and her substantial hidden inheritance.

Thoughts:

This project started as a simple idea 3 DAYS AGO!! I went through multiple layers of plot revisions until I was please and got the pilot episode completely screenwritten in that time. I have never written a screenplay before. Learning the formatting of a screenplay was a chore. But, I now have that skill too!

We will see what if anything comes of it as I investigate how to get that off to the kinds of people who would need to see it but if we’ve got no bites in 1 to 1.5 years then I’m likely going to write the rest of it and turning it into an audio play or a photo and story slide show. And that’s if tools like VEO 3 or SORA can’t just make it from my script.

This has been an update. Look forward to more very soon as I have been on a creation tsunami!!!