By Sarah Chaisson-Warner
Lauriel Marger has seen much success in her writing career. A television writer now living in Los Angeles, Lauriel began her writing career with a treatment for a music video. Since then, she has written an award-winning TV pilot, written for shows on FOX and the CW, and was most recently an honoree at the WGA’s 2022 TV Writers Access Project.
Her first TV pilot, Peaches, was a dark comedy centered on two teen girls who become roommates at an all-girls psych ward. “It bothered me that these gritty, sexy, fast-paced shows and films I loved were about older dudes…I wanted to do something for and about girls that felt like Snatch,” she said.
“I’m fascinated by the teen starlet to rehab pipeline. How society eats young women it perceives to ‘have it all’ and spits them back out. And in my experience, being a teenage girl was violent, absurd, and chaotic. But at the same time, I wouldn’t change a thing, so I wanted to explore all of that in a way that felt triumphant and real.”
Lauriel entered Peaches in Shore Scripts’ annual TV pilot competition in 2016. “I was searching on the web for competitions that I qualified for as a new writer. I love the fact that Shore Scripts is about emerging talent and that the prize is getting your work seen by people who can actually do something with it.”
Since winning the Shore Scripts competition, Lauriel has gained representation with our Industry Roster company Sugar23 and joined the writing team on several television shows, including Prodigal Son starring Tom Payne and Lou Diamond Phillips on FOX. “I had a meeting with the production company a year earlier, but I was developing at the time, so my manager followed up the next staffing season to make sure they knew I was available,” she said.
The executive she met with advocated for her, and the showrunners’ assistant read her sample and pushed for her too.
“In my experience, getting your first gig in a writers’ room takes a village. And assistants! People don’t realize how many scripts assistants read, and it’s really their boost that gets you out of the stack and on a showrunner’s radar.”
As she looks toward her next projects, Lauriel has a few nuggets of advice for new writers looking to emulate her career’s trajectory.