Finessionals is a build-in-public daily broadcast across Temerarii, Lil Shop of Culture and the Dom Davis Network. Real operators do real work on real brands, live, and the work is graded on air. It is simultaneously the hiring process, the training program, and the content engine — the same hours produce all three.

This page is what a Producer is taking ownership of.

Season one opens Sunday, October 11, 2026; Episode 1 airs Monday, October 12, 2026. Broadcast weeks run Monday–Friday. Add pre-season casting and a pre-recorded contingency bank and the season is roughly 85 episodes / 170 hours.

Who owns what

The boundary that matters: a Producer produces, and does not approve. The person accountable for a brand controls what ships under it. The person accountable for the broadcast controls whether it airs cleanly.

How an episode gets made

Sign-off runs on two axes — brand and show

Every episode clears two different kinds of approval, and they are not the same question. Passing one says nothing about the other.

Brands rotate — so the brand axis is per brand, not per episode

Episodes feature different brands sporadically. There is no fixed one-brand-per-day rotation: a Tuesday tech sprint might run on Temerarii, the Thursday paired sprint on Lil Shop of Culture, and a Monday kickoff might touch three brands in two hours.

That makes "the Executive Manager signs off" ambiguous the moment an episode carries two brands, so the rule is explicit:

Because assignment moves, the routing must be looked up, never remembered. A Producer who signs off with last month's EM has an unapproved episode. Two things follow, and both land on the Producer:

1 · Know the featured brands before the broadcast day. They determine whose sign-off you are waiting on. An episode whose brands are settled on the morning cannot clear its gate in time.

2 · Check current assignment, not your notes. Whoever holds the brand today signs today. If two brands feature, that is two sign-offs — possibly the same person, possibly not.

Two edge cases worth settling before they happen: a cross-brand challenge spanning properties needs every featured brand's current EM; a brand-agnostic episode — a skills swap, a format experiment, a craft deep-dive with no brand work in it — carries no brand sign-off at all, and still needs the show sign-off. If it is unclear which of the two an episode is, that is a question for sign-off, not a judgment call for the Producer.

This implies a live record. Fluid assignment only works if "who owns brand X right now" is written down somewhere the Producer can read without asking. That record is the operational cost of the flexibility, and it belongs with the Executive Managers to keep current.

The two-hour episode

The week

Elimination weeks (4, 8 and 13) run one dedicated episode per track, Monday–Thursday, with Friday for verdicts. Eleven elimination episodes across the season — a three-way needs the full two hours, so tracks are never stacked into one day.

Destinations

One master feed out of OBS, syndicated by Restream. The Producer owns the whole chain — the point of a single master is that local hardware and uplink are never asked to encode six times.

Monetising every channel

Every destination is meant to earn, and most of them have an eligibility gate before they can. A broadcast can be technically flawless and still make nothing, because a setting was never switched on or a threshold was never crossed. That is the Producer's problem, not marketing's.

What the Producer owns: eligibility, the settings being on, VOD and clip pipelines feeding the channels that pay per view, and reporting what each channel actually returned. What the Producer does not own: sponsorship and anything that changes what a brand stands for — that is the Chairman's, and taking a sponsor decision unilaterally is a removal-level mistake, not a judgment call.

Graphics — who designs, who operates

The show has to look like the brand it is broadcasting, and the handoff that decides whether it does is the most easily dropped one on the show — because it sits exactly between two people who each assume the other has it.

The constraint that governs every one of them: the same graphic ships to 16:9 and 9:16. A lower third positioned beautifully in widescreen is cropped off a vertical phone. Every element has to survive both crops, which is a design requirement the Creative Lead needs told before they start — not a bug the Producer discovers on air.

Every participant on air, whatever they own

Nobody is turned away for owning the wrong laptop. Participants use their own computers and phones, so the rig you are handed is whatever twenty-four people happen to have — and getting all of it on air is the highest-volume part of this seat.

The full itinerary — every episode, live and edited

One 4-4-5 runs everything. It is the fiscal calendar the brands' content is planned on, the marketing calendar campaigns are placed and reported on, and the competition — a retail quarter is 4+4+5 weeks and the rounds are 4+4+5.

So a month closing is not three events that happen to coincide. It is one event: a campaign reports, a pay period closes, and someone goes home — same Saturday, same reason. It also means the show cannot drift from the business, because an elimination is judged on the month that just closed, using the numbers that month produced.

Rounds

Standby seats

Behind every seat on the show sits a bench. Three standby per role — twelve people — and standby is unpaid.

Standby stays on the participant channel and is expected to keep a working setup, because activation can happen between a Saturday elimination and a Monday episode. The setup sheets apply to standby exactly as they do to anyone on air.

What every episode yields

Decided once so nobody re-decides it weekly. The live broadcast is the source; these four are the product.

All 65 weekday episodes

Live is what happens in the room. Edited is what post-production takes out of it. Both are planned before the season, because deciding what to clip after the fact is how a two-hour episode becomes nothing.

Week 1 — Cold open

Round 1 · sprint 1 (opens the sprint) · 12 on air · The machine, the brands, and the first authored cell. Everyone says what they think the job is — on the record, to be replayed in week 13.

Week 2 — Everything gets checked

Round 1 · sprint 1 (ships the sprint) · 12 on air · The gates. Twelve people discover that “I think it’s fine” is not a state the system recognises.

Week 3 — Two brands, opposite rules

Round 1 · sprint 2 (opens the sprint) · 12 on air · The same engine on both brands. Copy that is safe for one is a violation for the other, and the room finds out live.

Week 4 — First ship

Round 1 · sprint 2 (ships the sprint) · 12 on air · The first real publish of the season. Whatever goes out, goes out under a real name.

Week 5 — A brand you did not choose

Round 2 · sprint 3 (opens the sprint) · 8 on air · Assignments rotate. Nobody works the brand they got comfortable with.

Week 6 — Something is broken

Round 2 · sprint 3 (ships the sprint) · 8 on air · A defect is introduced into the pipeline before the episode starts. It is not announced.

Week 7 — Volume

Round 2 · sprint 4 (opens the sprint) · 8 on air · A full week authored across every channel — social, long form, podcast, blog, email, SMS. The week that separates fast from fluent.

Week 8 — Outcomes, not output

Round 2 · sprint 4 (ships the sprint) · 8 on air · Stop counting what shipped. Start defending whether it worked.

Week 9 — One brand each

Final · sprint 5 (opens the sprint) · 4 on air · Four people, four brands, sole ownership. No one to hand it to.

Week 10 — A brand nobody has seen

Final · sprint 5 (ships the sprint) · 4 on air · A business is introduced at the top of the episode. By Friday it has rails, a calendar and a published week.

Week 11 — Scale

Final · sprint 6 (opens the sprint) · 4 on air · Multiple brands in one week, on one engine. The claim the whole system rests on, tested in public.

Week 12 — The handoff

Final · sprint 6 (ships the sprint) · 4 on air · Could someone else run what you built? Each finalist documents their work and someone else executes it, unaided.

Week 13 — Finale week

Final · sprint 7 (opens the sprint) · 4 on air · The season’s argument, made once more and settled on Saturday.

The Saturday streams

A different programme from the weekdays — longer, structured, and the only episodes where anything is decided.

Run of show — elimination night

Roughly 2h20m.

Removal, and what it costs

Elimination happens on the 4th Saturday. Removal does not wait for it — a participant can be removed mid-round for the published immediate-removal reasons, or for repeated failure to deliver after a logged note and a written warning.

Why a replacement can start immediately: alternates sign at selection, not at call-up. A substitution is limited by someone's availability, never by their paperwork.

The technical bar — read this before applying

This is not one stream. It is one show delivered to five destinations in two different aspect ratios, five days a week, for thirteen weeks — plus three elimination broadcasts that are the season's tentpoles. If the sentences below describe problems you have solved rather than terms you have heard, this is your seat.

You will never hold a production credential during selection, and the Chairman retains owner-level access to every destination for the whole season. The Producer holds operator-level access. That is not distrust — the person who can end the broadcast must not be someone competing in it.

The Executive Producer track

The systems architects are the show's Executive Producers. Not consultants who hand over a diagram and leave — they design the broadcast, then own it running. Three compete for one seat, on exactly the same terms as every other track: 3 → 2 → 1, judged on the record, cut on the elimination streams.

Round 1 is the blueprint. Q3 is pre-season, no episodes air, and what you produce is the master architecture the season runs on: OBS and syndication, remote-guest routing, the audio bus and its public/private split, the dual-format path, and the archive workflow. Three blueprints are built against the same brief and they are compared.

That brief is this page. The destinations and their two aspect ratios, the monetisation gates, the graphics handoff, the participant-access table and the technical bar below are the requirements — not a separate document. An architecture that ignores any one of them has not been descoped, it has been missed.

If you are applying for the Executive Producer seat

This page is the blueprint for the seat. Everything below is specific to it — other tracks get their own surfaces, and their numbers are not yours.

Someone who holds the seat the whole way earns — across the season. The track costs — in total, which is what three people competing for one seat actually costs — everyone is paid for the rounds they are in, not only the winner.

Rates rise because the work does. Three people hold this seat in Round 1; one holds it at the finale, on roughly three times the rate. Fixed-price milestones against a deliverable — never hourly. Paid biweekly on a published calendar, and payments only ever move earlier, never later.

Qualification is unpaid. Stage 1 is a recording of a stream you have already run, plus four written answers. Nothing you make during qualification is used by us. Everything after selection is paid.

Questions 2 and 3 are the ones that separate people, and they are deliberately not about OBS. Plenty of good operators can run a clean broadcast that is ineligible to earn and leaves a participant stranded. That is the seat failing while every light stays green.

The seat is documented in full. Read these before you apply — they are the actual job, not a summary of it:

Notes and open nuance

This page is generated from engine/lib/season.py, which also generates docs/strategy/SEASON-1-MAP.md. Edit the module and both update — the office page and the written map cannot drift into disagreeing about what airs when.

Still open, and deliberately recorded here rather than assumed settled:

• Guest booking is unassigned. Episodes reference guests; no seat owns finding, briefing or releasing them.
• The Chairman is a single point of failure — host of every episode and the show sign-off on all 65. No named backup for either.
• Week themes are a spine, not a script. They set what each week is for; the specific brands and work come from the registry at the time.
• Featured brands are named T−7 and determine whose sign-off an episode needs. That list does not exist yet for any week.
• A pilot broadcast comes before Episode 1, and its date is not set. It is not a rehearsal of the format — it exists to test the three parts of the broadcast that are not yet built: the audio bus for twelve to twenty-four open microphones, a confidence feed so the Producer can see what they are cutting, and any control over a guest's own device. Named in full on the broadcast architecture page.

What a Producer needs on day one

Signed paperwork

Appearance release, NDA, IP assignment and broadcast conduct clause — before any access. Everything airs live to five platforms; an unsigned participant can later force takedowns of every episode they appear in.

The stack

OBS, Restream, VDO.Ninja, Riverside, and virtual audio routing (VoiceMeeter / Wave Link). You bring fluency; we do not train it on air.

Overlap

3–4 hours daily with US Central for pre-flight and post-show.

The audio discipline

A hard public/private split is a hiring requirement, not a nice-to-have. The private bus carries client names and credentials. A leak is unrecoverable — clips exist within seconds.

Failure rehearsal

Fault-injection drills in weeks 1–2, while the stakes are lowest: a guest feed killed at T+4:00, an audio source at T+9:00. You will have handled both before anything matters.