Yusuf Gad – 2024 Pilot Finalist (Half-Hour)
Saladin Quick
After dropping out of college, a Muslim stoner with a detective’s sixth sense and his transgressive Jewish best friend juggle dead-end jobs while trying to solve a string of workplace murders without getting fired or losing their high.
Surviving Toronto, Canada’s wild and unforgiving tundra, is no easy feat.
Raised in a tribe of fur trappers, I spent my youth hunting caribou to endure the punishing winters of ice and darkness. I even had to make the difficult decision to end my father’s suffering after a freak beaver accident.
Despite the challenges of my upbringing, I was just an average kid with a not-so-average passion for storytelling. Like many boys my age, I was captivated by comic books and movies. I penned my first script before I turned 20, which was later adapted into a cartoon for a local TV station.
After university, I found a career in marketing, launched an ad agency, and turned my creativity into profit for clients.
Between my brutal, grinding quest for food and shelter here in Canada, I have had some modest success with my writing and won a few awards.
My first successful piece of writing, a feature called BROWSER WARS, told how a kid from Wisconsin in the 1990s created the world’s first internet browser and went to war with Bill Gates over control of the World Wide Web. Shortly after hitting “save,” it won the Fade In Award for Biopics and was placed under a few sales agreements.
My first stab at TV pilot writing was my police procedural RESTLESS, about a Native American FBI agent, shunned by his community, who must solve the murder of a young Native girl when her body is found on the site of a controversial pipeline. It also found its way to a couple of sales agreements.
Since then, I haven’t stopped writing. This year, I recently completed TV pilots for DRIP and THE HOLY – two very different scripts that showcase my ability to reinvent genres.
Recently, my comedy/mystery TV pilot, SALADIN QUICK, managed to be a finalist in the 2024 Half-Hour BlueCat TV Writing Competition. It is a story about two best friends, one Muslim and the other Jewish, who solve crimes while smoking pot, inspired by my youth and relationships. They say it was a good read, but the beaver pelt bribes didn’t hurt.
I aim to get repped, get produced, get paid, or die trying.
But, hush, now. I hear the calls of the caribou once more. I must return to the hunt.
Yusuf Gad
Email: me@yusufgad.com
