Chapter 23 · Formats
Series, Seasons, and Episodes
A show is not nine screenplays that happen to share a title. It is one world, one cast, one continuity, and nine scripts drawing on all of it. The Series project type exists so you build that world once. This chapter covers how episodes and seasons are arranged, what they share, and where the arrangement will surprise you.
Choosing Series
The New project form's Type list offers Series (episodic). Choose it for television, streaming, a serialised audio show, or anything where episodes accumulate. The Studio groups those projects under a Series heading, and the project page's top line reads Studio · Series.
Every document inside a Series project opens in the screenplay editor, the same one a Film / Screenplay project uses, so Chapter 16 and Chapter 22 apply to your episodes unchanged. The difference is everything around the page.
The type is fixed once the project exists. There is no conversion setting. If you started nine separate screenplay projects before reading this, export each one and import it into a new Series project. An import there is treated as a screenplay import, so a Final Draft file keeps its elements and a script arriving as flat paragraphs from Word or PDF has its sluglines and cues rebuilt from the text.
The series bible and the one-sheet
Step 1 Develop on the project page carries two buttons a Series project gets and a novel does not:
- ＋ Series bible creates a document called Series Bible, pre-filled with the headings a bible is expected to carry: Logline, Genre & Tone, World, Main Characters, Season Arc, Episode Breakdowns, Themes, Comparables.
- ＋ One-sheet creates a One-Sheet: title, logline, synopsis, tone and comparables, why now and why you, contact.
Both open in the prose editor rather than the screenplay one, because a bible is a document you hand to a producer. That override lives on the document, so it holds while every other document in the project stays a script. Both land at the top level of the binder rather than inside a season, which is where they belong.
Seasons are the binder's folders
The binder in Step 2 Draft groups documents into folders, and in a Series project the word for a folder is Season. That substitution is most of what the type changes here:
| Control | What it says in a Series project |
|---|---|
| The form at the bottom of the binder | New season / folder, with
Season One as the placeholder |
| The ⇄ button on an episode | Move to a season or folder, and the
prompt arrives pre-filled with Season for you to finish |
| The button under a season | ＋ document in Season One, which creates the next episode already inside it |
A season is a name you type, not an object you create first. Typing
Season One into the move prompt makes that season exist; clearing the prompt moves
the episode back out to the top level. Nothing validates the name, so Season One and
Season 1 are two different seasons, and an episode typed into the second sits alone
in a season of its own. Copy the name you already used.
Episode order, and how seasons sort
Inside a season, ↑ and ↓ swap an episode with its neighbour, and a new document is added at the end of the season it was created in. The number down the left of the binder restarts at 1 in each season, so it reads as an episode number rather than a running count across the show.
The seasons themselves sort alphabetically, with any unfoldered documents, your bible and one-sheet among them, listed first. Alphabetical is not numerical, so a show that runs past nine seasons stacks up like this:
| What you named them | The order you get |
|---|---|
| Season 1, Season 2, … Season 10 | Season 1, Season 10, Season 2, Season 3 … |
| Season 01, Season 02, … Season 10 | Season 01, Season 02, Season 03 … Season 10 |
Use the leading zero from the start. Fixing it later means moving every episode of every affected season through the ⇄ prompt one at a time; there is no bulk rename.
What every episode shares
This is the reason to run a show as one project. The five tools in Step 1 belong to the project, so every episode reads and writes the same ones.
- Story Bible: characters, locations, items, factions. Written in the pilot, present in the finale.
- Outline: beat cards and a long-form treatment for the show.
- Research: cited answers, filed against the project.
- Timeline: the story's calendar, where a show's chronology stops being something you hold in your head.
- Lookbook: visual boards built from the Story Bible's characters and locations.
Each carries a chip on the project page showing how much is in it, so an empty Story Bible is visible rather than something you discover in episode six. Part V covers all five.
Another episode, open beside the draft
In the editor, the Reference checkbox on the ribbon opens a pane beside your
draft. Its picker has a Documents in this project group listing every other document in
the show, each labelled with its season, in the form
Season 01 · 1x03 Ashes. A Research shelf group sits below it.
That is how you check what a character said two episodes ago while you write the callback. The pane is owner-only: a collaborator sent one episode gets that episode, not a picker listing the rest of the show.
Findings across the whole show
Step 3 Revise gathers every open fact-check finding, every open continuity finding, and every unresolved comment from every episode into one list, grouped by episode and in binder order. The heading counts open findings, unresolved comments, and flagged documents. Each row opens the right episode with the right rail tab selected and the quoted line located.
Run the checks per episode, then work the show's whole list in one pass. Part VI covers what each member of the staff reads and hands back.
Where episodes land in your storage
Seasons are mirrored into your Dropbox, Google Drive, or local folder as real folders. A new
episode is offered the path /Project title/Season/Episode
title, and if a file already occupies that name Storskarvia offers the next free one
rather than writing over it. Chapter 3 covers storage
in full.
Moving an episode into a different season does not move its file. The path is chosen the first time the document saves, and reorganising the binder afterwards leaves it where it was written. To bring the file across, open the storage button in the status bar, which now proposes the path for the new season, and press Save here. The old file stays put, so tidy the old folder yourself.
Getting the show out
Step 4 Deliver offers two routes:
- ⬇ Download project (.zip) packages the whole show, seasons mirrored as
folders inside the archive, each document written twice: a
.txtto read and a.skarvia.jsonthat keeps everything a restore needs. - The ⭳ Export menu on each row in the binder exports one episode to Word, PDF, Final Draft, Fountain, or plain text. Your Series Bible, being prose, offers Markdown instead of the two screenplay formats.
Compile does not appear for a series. It assembles a novel's chapters into one continuous manuscript, which is not something a show wants done to it. Nine episodes are nine scripts, each delivered as its own file. Part VIII covers export in full.
What it will not do for you
Two limits worth knowing before you rely on the opposite:
- The continuity check reads one episode, plus your Story Bible. It does not read the text of your other episodes. A fact recorded in the Story Bible is checked against every episode you run it on; a detail that only ever existed in episode two's dialogue is invisible when you check episode nine. If it matters across the show, put it in the Story Bible.
- Nothing numbers your episodes for you. There is no episode-number field.
The binder order is the order, and the
1x03in a title is text you typed. Name episodes consistently from the pilot and the sorting looks after itself.
Neither is a gap Storskarvia fills by writing something on your behalf. The bright line holds here as everywhere: the staff checks, questions and files, and the show is yours to write.
Updated 2026-08-30 · Full contents · Something wrong or missing?