Do you remember getting home from school, turning on the TV, and watching your favorite sitcom? Those 30 minutes of laughter, that was my escape from reality. Growing up in Puerto Rico, sitcoms didn't just make me laugh. They taught me English. My brother once caught me watching an American sitcom and said, "Why are you laughing? You don't even know what they're saying!" I replied, "I don't. But I know when to laugh." That feeling of laughter connecting us before we even understand the words, is the reason I'm making this show.

A few years ago, I worked at a traveling dinosaur museum. Day after day, I watched families wander through, kids losing their minds over fossils, staff quietly surviving the chaos. And somewhere between the dinosaurs and the espresso, the stories started coming to me. What if there was a café inside a museum like this? Who would work there? What would it take to survive?

That question became Fossil Fuel Café.

Fossil Fuel Café is a 24-minute multicam sitcom, filmed in a studio, in front of a live audience. It follows a quirky crew of baristas working inside a café in a natural history museum, grand, busy, full of strange artifacts (and the occasional dinosaur emergency).

But the museum is losing money. Budget cuts are coming. And corporate wants to replace the café staff with automated kiosks. Our crew has one fiscal year to prove that human baristas are worth keeping or get replaced by robots.

Between high-class customers, unpredictable coworkers, dinosaur chaos, and fighting for their jobs, keeping this café alive is an art form in itself.

It's the silly chaos of I Love Lucy, the workplace survival of Superstore, and the friendship and heart of Friends.

It's for everyone who's survived customer service and found their people in unexpected places, and it's for families, the kind of show you can actually watch together and all laugh at the same jokes. If you've ever wondered how you're still employed... this is your show.

So, if a dinosaur doesn't cause chaos that day... one of them will.

The café's fighting extinction, so they launch a brand-new matcha drink to prove they're worth keeping. James gets stuck in traffic. Alondra's left in charge. And everything that can go wrong… does. That's the rhythm of the show: Start small. Spiral into chaos. Land with a laugh.

Fossil Fuel Café fills that gap with a proven format, and a fresh, multicultural voice.

And here's the proof: at our staged readings, 80% of attendees are non-Latino. The universal appeal is immediate. Laughter crosses every demographic.

I stopped waiting to be cast and started writing the room myself. Since being named a finalist at the 2025 Pitch-A-Thon, I've written a complete series bible, 22 episodes across 8 seasons. I've done staged readings across the city, testing the script and building our audience. We even recorded one with three cameras. And the audience keeps telling us the same thing:

"We can see this on TV."

Everything we've built has led to this moment.

• Produce the Pilot (Spring 2027): shoot a broadcast-quality pilot right here in Atlanta.
• Festival Circuit: submit, build buzz, gain industry recognition.
• Streaming & Network Meetings: use the finished pilot to sit down with platforms and networks.
• Land a Deal: secure distribution to produce the first season and bring FFC to screens.

A finished pilot is the key that unlocks every opportunity.

We're raising $24,000 to fund the development of Fossil Fuel Café, so we can take everything we've built and get one real step closer to shooting our pilot.

We're not starting from scratch. We've secured a production space through a partnership with a respected Atlanta theater, and we're producing through lean, sustainable indie practices, with much of our team working on a deferred basis. That means your contribution goes straight to the essentials of making the pilot real. We have the plan, the team, and the momentum. We're ready now.

Your contribution is what turns "we can see this on TV" into actually putting it there.

If you were one of the first to see this show on its feet, or if you're just meeting us now, I’d be honored to have you be part of bringing it to the screen.

This show gets made because of people like you. Here's how to be part of it:

💛 PLEDGE - Every contribution, from $15 to $2,000, gets us closer. Pick your tier and join the herd.

👀 FOLLOW - Follow our campaign right here on Seed & Spark to get updates and be part of the journey.

📣 SHARE - Even if you can't pledge, sharing costs nothing and means everything. Send this to one person who loves a good sitcom.

Copy, paste, and share:

My friend is making the first Latino-created multicam sitcom in Georgia, a comedy about baristas in a dinosaur museum fighting to save their café. Help bring Fossil Fuel Café to life! https://seedandspark.com/fund/fossilfuelcafe #FossilFuelCafe

Sitcoms connect us. They make us laugh at the end of a stressful day. They give us people to love when we feel alone. They remind us we're not the only ones barely keeping it together.

And we need that laugh now. Not later. Now.

That's Fossil Fuel Café.

Where dinosaurs never go extinct. ☕🦖

TAX-DEDUCTIBLE DONATION

Your donation is tax-deductible! Fossil Fuel Café is a fiscally sponsored project of A-Story Entertainment, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Contributions in support of Fossil Fuel Café are payable to A-Story Entertainment and are tax-deductible, less the value of any goods or services received, as allowed by law. The value of goods and services offered is noted under each donation level. If you would like to deduct the entire donation, decline the reward at checkout.