A SCRIPTED ROMANTIC COMEDY SERIES
The pilot is written. The world is ready.
Available for development, representation and production consideration.
AN ORIGINAL SCRIPTED ROMANTIC COMEDY SERIES
DATING for DINNER
Before there were dating apps, there was Gladys.
She wrote down the rules in 1920. More than a century later, they’re finally getting a test run.
When Sadie and Audrey find themselves starting over together, a broken dresser reveals a hidden dating diary from 1920, filled with Gladys’s rules for courtship, standards and navigating the space between meeting someone and falling in love.
Sadie and Audrey decide the fairest thing to do is risk their own love lives first.
If Gladys’s rules can survive them, modern dating might not be beyond saving after all.
Created by Lisa Marie Wilson
HOW IT WORKS
The diary has rules.
Modern dating has commitment issues.
Each episode pulls something new from Gladys’s pages and puts it in the hands of two women navigating a dating world she never could have imagined.
Sometimes the advice lands in Sadie’s lap. Sometimes Audrey’s. Sometimes somebody else walks into their lives with a romantic situation practically begging for a second opinion.
Some ideas may hold up. Some may need a little translation.
And sometimes the only way to know whether a hundred-year-old approach still makes sense is to take it out to dinner.
Every page gives them something new to try.
Every date gives them a different answer.
MEET SADIE & AUDREY
SADIE & AUDREY
They know each other’s patterns better than their own.
SADIE
She can pick a man from across a restaurant.
Real life is harder to swallow.
Sadie understands chemistry, reservations, attraction and exactly which restaurants are worth getting dressed for.
Raised with money, confidence and very few practical expectations, she has spent most of her life assuming somebody else will handle the boring parts.
Then life finally sends her the bill.
For the first time, Sadie has to take responsibility for the life she wants.
She knows how she wants that life to look.
Now she has to figure out how to make it happen on her own.
AUDREY
Audrey has never met a problem she couldn’t organize, rescue or accidentally marry.
Twice divorced and chronically competent, Audrey is the woman people call when something goes wrong.
She knows how to work, help, fix, soothe, organize and keep everybody moving.
Unfortunately, somewhere along the way she started confusing being needed with being loved.
Her challenge isn’t finding another person who needs her.
She’s extremely good at that.
It’s figuring out who she is when nobody does.
THE LOVE STORY
The dates are the plot.
The friendship is the love story.
THE NEIGHBORHOOD
A new address.
A whole new set of complications.
THEN & NOW
A century apart.
The questions are still familiar.
THE WORLD
Hollywood sells the fantasy.
Dating reveals the reality.
UNDERNEATH ALL OF IT
The comedy is in the chaos.
The heart is in what they’re looking for.
THE LOVE STORY
The dates are the plot.
The friendship is the love story.
Men can disappear after dessert.
Sadie and Audrey are the people each other calls from the car, the bathroom, the sidewalk outside the restaurant, or five minutes before doing exactly what the other one told them not to do.
They are each other’s reality check, accomplice, emergency contact and favorite person to tell the whole story to twice.
They know exactly where the other’s blind spots are because they’ve been standing beside them for years.
The dates will come and go.
Gladys’s rules will be tested, debated, bent and occasionally ignored.
The relationship we come back for is already sitting at the table.THE NEIGHBORHOOD
Their new life comes furnished.
Privacy was not included.
Sadie and Audrey’s furnished two-bedroom sits inside the former Hollywood Studio Club, now a YMCA, where Audrey finds housing they can rent one week at a time.
It is a place with its own Hollywood history, and now Sadie and Audrey are adding theirs.
There are people coming and going, lives overlapping, dates arriving, stories unfolding, and hidden inside a piece of furniture that has been there far longer than they have, a diary from 1920.
The place they land becomes part of the story almost as quickly as they do.
Before long, it starts to feel like the first place they actually belong.
THEN & NOW
We can find a date in six seconds.
Figuring out whether it was a date can take three business days.
Gladys’s world came with courtship, categories and rules.
Sadie and Audrey’s comes with apps, read receipts, undefined relationships and people who are “technically separated.”
A hundred years gave us more ways to meet.
It didn’t necessarily give us a better idea of what to do once we do.
Not every old rule deserves a comeback. Some may turn out to be surprisingly useful. Others may belong exactly where Gladys left them.
It’s to see whether anything worth keeping got left behind.
To everyone else, Hollywood is palm trees, movie stars, five-star restaurants and the possibility that anybody can become somebody.
To the people actually dating there, it’s also headshots, canyon hikes, aspiring celebrities, established celebrities, people who once met a celebrity, and men whose careers improve noticeably somewhere between cocktails one and two.
It is a city built on reinvention.
Everybody is selling something:
Love is the pitch Sadie and Audrey are still hoping somebody can deliver on.
UNDERNEATH ALL OF IT
Everybody is looking for love.
Nobody agrees on how to get there.
Dating for Dinner can laugh at bad dates without believing dating is hopeless.
Gladys’s diary gives Sadie and Audrey a reason to slow down, pay attention and reconsider the things they’ve always read as chemistry, commitment or love.
Sometimes the lesson will be about the person across the table.
Sometimes it will be about the woman sitting in the chair.
And sometimes a woman writing in 1920 may have left behind an idea worth reconsidering.
CREATED BY LISA MARIE WILSON
She didn’t invent the point of view.
She earned it.
Lisa Marie Wilson is a writer, actor, producer and author who has spent years turning the unpredictable realities of dating, divorce, reinvention and starting over into stories.
Her memoir, Dating for Dinner: Ordering Love, grew from fifteen years of post-divorce dating and a much longer education in Los Angeles, relationships, self-esteem and the value of laughing before you cry.
The television series takes that perspective into an original fictional world, where a century-old dating diary can complicate one date, clarify the next and make two modern women reconsider what they thought they knew about love.
Lisa previously wrote, acted in and produced the television pilot Over The Hill, starring Robert Wagner and Tim Conway, and has written seven television pilots and three feature films.
FROM PAGE TO SCREEN
It started with a book.
The series is original fiction. The point of view behind it was thoroughly field-tested.
Before Sadie and Audrey began testing Gladys’s century-old rules, Lisa spent years collecting the kind of real dating stories nobody could make up. Dating for Dinner: Ordering Love is the memoir behind the perspective, filled with true stories of dating, divorce, reinvention and refusing to give up on love.
New rules?
IF YOU KNOW, YOU KNOW
Everyone has one friend whose dating life should probably have a writers’ room.
Maybe it’s you.
Maybe it’s the friend whose texts require screenshots, follow-up calls and a full briefing over brunch.
Maybe you’re happily married and watching the whole thing from the safety of your couch.
Either way, you’ve probably listened to a dating story and thought:
There has to be a better way to do this.
Sadie and Audrey are wondering the same thing.
They just happen to have Gladys’s diary.
Different dates.Same dream.
WANT TO SEE IT ON SCREEN?
Good. So do we.
Dating for Dinner is waiting for its chance to make the jump from page to screen.
If Sadie, Audrey, Gladys and a century of dating advice sound like a show you’d watch, Lisa would love to hear it.
Think this deserves a seat at the table? Tell her.
JOIN THE CONVERSATION
Would you watch Dating for Dinner?
Send Lisa a note about what caught your attention, which character you already recognize, or why you want to see the series on screen.
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FOR DEVELOPMENT & INDUSTRY INQUIRIES
Read the pilot.
Meet Sadie and Audrey.
The Dating for Dinner pilot is available for representation, development, production and other professional industry consideration.
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