Ella Gale, Writer 

Sloan Grant(s) Received: 2025, Sundance Institute, Episodic Award

Project Type: Pilot

Genre: Comedy

Length: 30 minutes

Field of Science: Engineering

Stage: Development 

Synopsis: 

GREENWASHERS is a half-hour black comedy about a young environmental engineer who begins investigating suspicious activity at a shady consulting company. The show is set in Austin, Texas, a blue-dot city whose artsy culture is being slowly eroded by tech money.

SEASON ONE:

CALLA MCALLEN (23) is a new environmental engineering grad champing at the bit to remake the world in her own image. She’s a committed environmentalist who is stubborn and a little judgmental, but makes up for it by walking the walk. She lives with her hacker mooch roommate, MAGGIE, who believes in climate change but thinks that nuclear winter will probably take care of it.

Calla reluctantly takes a job at GREEN LEAF, an environmental consulting company with a large oil and gas portfolio. She lies about where she works to her love interest ZACH, who she meets at a creek cleanup, where they lock eyes over a dead raccoon carcass.

Calla’s erratic new boss at Green Leaf is LORI, a smart but prickly engineer who would be a fantastic boss if she wasn’t totally evil. Lori’s hobbies are gambling and wildlife rehab, and she always winds up caring for her bookie’s exotic pets after he gets tired of them. Lori puts Calla in charge of process safety at Green Leaf’s refining plant. She’s in way over her head, and she has to deal with jealous undermining from KRISTIN, a more experienced engineer. Kristin’s parents know she’s gay, but they don’t know she married a white woman, and they’re constantly trying to set her up with the three Indian power lesbians they know.

Calla suspects a leak in the plant’s retaining pond was improperly fixed, and bribes MAGGIE to look at the metadata for the pond blueprints, which turn out to have been doctored.

Calla tries to convince Lori something is wrong, but Lori is more interested in nursing a cannibal squirrel back to health than actually doing her job. Calla is about to go to the press with information about the leak when the dam breaks. Literally. Leachate in the retaining pond streams out into a surrounding wetland.

Calla, whose name is conveniently on all the safety plans and signoffs at the chemical plant, is arrested for littering, because the police don’t know what else to charge her with. This sends her on an anti-environmental bender that starts with a cheeseburger in a 90 minute shower.

Kristin jumps on an opportunity to dig for dirt by dating a lawyer from the oil company’s corporate division—less because she wants to help Calla and more because she wants an excuse to date someone who’s not her wife. The lawyer reveals that Calla was hired as a scapegoat because the company knew a leak was about to happen and needed someone to blame the chemical spill on.

Investigating further, Calla discovers that Lori sabotaged the dam. She was working for a rival corporation to pay off her gambling debts. After the catastrophe, they planned to buy the company for pennies in order to get the water rights.

Calla uses this information to extort a huge payout in exchange for her silence. Convinced she can still make a difference, she takes the money and founds a new environmental nonprofit with Zach.