Budgeting a television series is fundamentally different from budgeting a feature film. Costs must be tracked at two levels simultaneously: the series-level budget covering development, showrunner fees, writers room, production overhead, and post-production pipeline, and the per-episode budget covering the crew days, locations, and production expenses that vary week to week. The TV Series Budget Template in Saturation is structured to handle both.
The template accounts for the recurring cost patterns that define episodic production: series regular cast fees, standing set maintenance, the ongoing costs of department heads retained across the full run, and the episodic overhead of weekly production staff. Union scale rates for SAG-AFTRA performers and IATSE crew are factored into fringe calculations, so labor costs reflect real above-the-line and below-the-line obligations rather than rough estimates.
As a cloud-based tool, Saturation is built for the collaborative reality of television production, where the showrunner, line producer, production accountant, and studio business affairs team all need visibility into the same numbers. Department heads can submit costs, the production accountant can track actuals against the episodic budget, and the line producer can monitor the series-level picture, all without emailing spreadsheet versions back and forth. One budget, one source of truth, accessible from anywhere.
