Seeking Sasquatch "Pilot"

Genre: Half-hour comedy, single-cam mockumentary
Status: Pilot and 5-season roadmap complete
Created by: Ryan Lis & Thomas Thomas

Logline: A self-declared “Squatchologist,” a hostile academic, a bright-eyed research analyst, a survivalist with stage dreams, and a morally flexible bankrupt reality producer must navigate field investigations, budget cuts, and each other while filming a cryptid-hunting show.

The Story: Jack Patterson has devoted his life (and life savings) to proving Bigfoot is real. He’s charming, confident, and completely unqualified. Thanks to a vision quest and a camera crew, he now leads the Bigfoot Investigation Bureau (BIB). They’re a scrappy, underfunded wilderness docuseries that’s trying (and failing) to become the next Tiger King-style breakout.

Enter Stephen Kepler, an evolutionary biologist forcibly attached to the show by contract and strong-armed by his Lab at Berkeley. Stephen is determined to tank the program, salvage his career, and avoid getting stabbed by Abner, the BIB’s unsettling wilderness tracker whose secret acting dreams are buried beneath layers of flannel, creepy method acting, and trauma.

Their only hope might just be Christina Meldrum, a brilliant data analyst with an encyclopedic knowledge of cryptid lore, a hopeless crush on Jack, and a pathological need to be taken seriously.
And watching it all from the shadows is Katherine Carter, their cutthroat showrunner who will manipulate, sabotage, and squatch-bait her way to Emmy gold, even if it kills them... or makes them kill each other.

Each week, the BIB follows dubious leads, interviews fringe witnesses, and investigates “hot spots” across the country. Whether it’s vision-quest weresquatches, haunted rest stops, or turf wars with rival cryptid crews like something out of Anchorman, the team must survive increasingly ridiculous assignments, their own dysfunction, and the growing possibility that just maybe they’re the real joke.

But finding a “‘Squatch” was never the point. The BIB may not believe the same things, or even like each other, but together they form an accidental family chasing a truth bigger than any one of them: belief is a hell of a drug.

Why Now?: In an age where truth is subjective, conspiracy theories go viral, and anyone with a camera can be famous for the wrong reasons, Seeking Sasquatch mines comedy from the chaos of belief, misinformation, and the lengths people will go to chase their “truth.” It’s both escapist fun and a sharp send-up of reality TV, influencer culture, and the cult of personality.