Script File

Dissolution Studies - Terminal Degree

DISSOLUTION STUDIES -TERMINAL DEGREE
Synopsis

CLAIRE MORRISON (35), a brilliant but obsessive academic at a small Maine college, has turned her grief over her mother's death into an all-consuming study of mortality. What began as legitimate research into "Comparative Mortality Literature" has spiraled into a dangerous fixation where Claire documents celebrity deaths with scientific precision, conducts drowning experiments on herself, and teaches students to calculate their statistical likelihood of dying on campus.

When Claire's morbid curriculum terrifies students into transferring schools and her "death preparation seminars" prompt parental lawsuits, the tenure committee places her on administrative leave pending psychological evaluation. Her only ally is MAX RODRIGUEZ (30), a fellow professor who sees past her macabre obsessions to the brilliant, wounded woman underneath.

As Claire faces the collapse of her academic career, a real death occurs—her elderly neighbor GLADYS dies alone next door while Claire conducts yet another drowning simulation. This proximity to genuine loss forces Claire to confront the difference between studying death and witnessing life. She realizes she's been so focused on documenting endings that she's forgotten to notice beginnings, middles, and the precious ordinary moments that constitute actual living.

With Max's patient guidance, Claire begins to redirect her analytical mind from "death studies" to "life studies"—exploring community events, human connection, and the radical act of choosing presence over data collection. At a local bar's karaoke night, surrounded by imperfect, breathing, beautifully alive people, Claire discovers that the most important research isn't about how we die, but how we choose to live.

Set against the backdrop of academia's ivory tower isolation and small-town Maine's quiet mortality, this dark comedy explores grief, obsession, and the possibility of healing through human connection. Claire's journey from death scholar to life student examines how we process loss, find meaning in chaos, and learn that the most profound research subject is the simple act of saying "good morning" to another person.

The pilot balances sharp academic satire with genuine emotional depth, creating a character study about someone brilliant enough to map mortality but brave enough to choose mystery over certainty, connection over control, and the beautiful unpredictability of being alive.

A dark academic comedy about learning to live after dedicating your life to studying death.

  • Dana Wall
    Writer
  • Project Type:
    Television Script
  • Number of Pages:
    29
  • Language:
    English
  • First-time Screenwriter:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • Digital Cinema Package:
    Unavailable
  • Big Break 2025

    August 21, 2025
    Quarterfinalist 2025
Writer Biography - Dana Wall

DANA WALL - Psychology/MBA/CPA/MFA powerhouse who managed Hollywood chaos before becoming full-time writer in 2022. Daughter of psychiatrist father and PhD English teacher/lawyer mother—basically raised in a think tank where Freud met Shakespeare met legal briefs. Turns industry insider knowledge into sharp fiction, poetry, and TV pilots that audit souls and expose power's true cost.

Add Writer Biography
Writer Statement

I wrote "Dissolution Studies" because I've always been suspicious of people who claim they're "living their best life."

What does that even mean? Are they implying everyone else is living their mediocre life? Their backup life? Their "well, this will have to do" life? The whole concept suggests there's some optimal way to exist that most of us are failing to achieve, which strikes me as both arrogant and statistically improbable.

Claire Morrison is what happens when someone tries to solve this optimization problem by working backward from the ending. If death is the only guaranteed outcome, maybe understanding it completely will reveal how to live properly. It's the ultimate academic approach to existence: reduce life to a research problem with a clearly defined conclusion.

The comedy emerges from Claire's methodical application of scholarly rigor to fundamentally unscholarly material. She's treating death like a dissertation topic—something that can be mastered through sufficient data collection and analysis. The fact that she's completely missing the point is what makes her both hilarious and heartbreaking.

What fascinated me about writing Claire was exploring how grief can disguise itself as intellectual curiosity. She's not studying death because she's morbid; she's studying it because her mother's death felt meaningless, random, unfair. If she can find patterns in how other people die, maybe she can retroactively impose structure on her own loss.

The show operates in that sweet spot between absurdist comedy and genuine emotional truth. Claire's obsession with celebrity death statistics is ridiculous, but her need to find meaning in endings is universal. We've all lost someone and wondered why the universe couldn't have provided better narrative closure.

I was particularly drawn to the academic setting because universities are supposed to be places where people pursue knowledge for its own sake, but they're also institutions obsessed with practical outcomes: graduation rates, employment statistics, return on educational investment. Claire represents the logical extreme of pure research—knowledge so divorced from practical application that it becomes essentially useless.

The supporting characters serve as different models for how to exist without solving the mystery of existence. Max represents the "live in the moment" approach, Dean Henderson embodies institutional pragmatism, and the students reflect various stages of existential panic that most people experience between ages 18-22.

Writing dialogue for someone who approaches casual conversation like a research methodology was both challenging and deeply entertaining. Claire speaks like someone who's read every psychology textbook ever written but has never actually had a normal human interaction. She's academically brilliant but socially remedial, which creates endless opportunities for her to misinterpret basic social cues through the lens of mortality studies.

The bathtub experiments were my attempt to visualize the dangerous endpoint of Claire's research—the moment when studying death starts resembling practicing for it. She's not suicidal; she's conducting what she considers legitimate scientific research on her own dying process. The distinction matters to her, even if it doesn't to anyone else.

The series explores whether it's possible to think your way out of being human. Claire believes that sufficient understanding of death will provide some kind of immunity to its emotional impact. She's wrong, obviously, but the journey toward that wrongness is where the story lives.

Ultimately, this is a show about learning to appreciate the beautiful inefficiency of being alive. Life doesn't yield to academic analysis because it's not designed to make sense—it's designed to be experienced. Claire's character arc involves discovering that some questions are more valuable than their answers.

Also, I wanted to write a comedy where the main character's expertise is completely useless but absolutely fascinating.
There's something deeply funny about someone who can tell you exactly how many celebrities died in bathroom-related incidents but can't figure out how to have a normal conversation about the weather.

It's academia meets existential crisis, with jokes.