Zöey
The kid · series lead
Being taught properly, and experimenting anyway. She is not a chosen one and she has no destiny. She is a kid whose grandmother knows how, and who found a book besides. Anyone could have found it. That is the point.
Wet Nose Films · Family series · Ages 7 to 11 · Working title · In early development
A family show that happens to have magic, not a magic show that happens to have a family.
Her parents are on the space station. Her grandmother is teaching her how to stop time. And the book she was not supposed to find has a hundred pages, each one a different thing she can do exactly once.
Zöey’s grandmother is teaching her how to stop time. It is a skill, not a gift: practised at the kitchen table, corrected, and done badly a great many times before it is done well.
The book is the other thing, and Grandma does not know about it. Zöey found it where she was not supposed to be looking, and it works nothing like the lessons: every page does something different, and nothing in it can be done twice. One page, one use, gone.
So she has one power she is being taught slowly and safely, and a hundred she can only spend. That is the whole engine, and it is a moral one, for exactly one reason: everything done in stopped time is unwitnessed.
She freezes time, does something she shouldn’t, and the advice arrives ninety seconds late.
Both her parents are astronauts on the space station. Zöey lives with her grandmother, and the nearest either parent can get to her is a laptop on the kitchen table.
Every call home has lag on it. Every piece of parental guidance is technically available and practically useless in the moment it is needed. The kid is not abandoned. She is loved, from a distance, with latency.
It is also the cheapest reliable comedy engine in the format. She asks. She acts. The answer arrives. The answer was no.
The kid · series lead
Being taught properly, and experimenting anyway. She is not a chosen one and she has no destiny. She is a kid whose grandmother knows how, and who found a book besides. Anyone could have found it. That is the point.
The one who already knows
She teaches the thing she will not do herself. She stopped because she caused an accident that left someone very seriously injured. Injured, not dead: no clean grief and no tidy lesson, because the consequence is still living, somewhere, now. She would rather Zöey learn it properly from her than work it out alone. The book is hers too, and she thinks it is still hidden.
Both astronauts · in orbit
Present, competent, loving, and permanently ninety seconds away. They are not written as absent. They are written as delayed, which is a different and much funnier problem.
The show runs on the gap between them, and a kid will understand the difference immediately.
Taught by Grandma. Repeatable, improvable, supervised, and therefore deeply annoying. Zöey can practise it, get it wrong, and try again tomorrow.
Every page does something different, and nothing in it can be done twice. She cannot rehearse it, cannot test it, and cannot take it back. Reading ahead tells her nothing about what it will actually do.
The book is the only thing in her life she cannot do over, which is what makes it worth the episode. Stopping time still has to cost her something she notices (the minutes are spent out of her own life, and the stop is genuinely lonely), or the show is a toy.
Grandma works out that Zöey has found the book. That is the turn of the season. Not you have magic, which Grandma handed her herself, but you have been spending something that does not come back.
Grandma’s objection is not that magic is dangerous. It is that she knows exactly what a thing you cannot undo costs, and she has been carrying that alone for fifty years.
What follows is training beyond what Grandma can give. Which opens the world up: if there is training, there are teachers, and if there are teachers, there are others.
Disney-shaped: a contained domestic first season that ends by revealing a much larger world, without having promised one.
Warm, funny, generational friction, and the arguments are the affection. A better version of Family Ties: three generations who genuinely like each other and are constantly, articulately wrong about each other.
Magic serves the household. Never the reverse. If an episode could be resolved by the family talking, the magic does not get to solve it.
Aimed at roughly 7 to 11, the age where you can still get away with something genuinely strange.
Nobody saw it. It still happened, and it still counts. The whole moral spine in one line.
From the outside, the wisest person in the house looks like the dullest one.
Good parents, real distance. The gap is not neglect, but the kid still has to fill it.
No prophecy, no bloodline. One power she is taught, and a hundred she can only spend once.
Alongside the broadcast version, the show works as short web episodes of five to eight minutes, where the power has to pay off fast every time: one freeze, one consequence, out.
That format is genuinely cheap to make: a kid, a bedroom, and a laptop with a parent on it. Which makes a proof of concept achievable now rather than after development.
The injured person is still alive, and still out there. Whether Zöey has already met them without knowing is the series in one scene, and it is the card the first season is holding. Alongside it: which parent, if either, is foregrounded, and whether the book talks back.
Wet Nose Films
Daniela Barbosa · Creator and Producer
Twenty years as a 1st Assistant Director · DGC and DGA
info@wetnosefilms.ca