ABOUT THE ARCHIVE

Our Editorial Charter & Research Mandate

The Blueprints & Cons Television Study Group was established in 2014 by a working collective of screenwriters, television dramaturgs, and narrative analysts headquartered in Portland, Oregon. Our physical archive is located at 422 NW 8th Avenue in the historic Pearl District—three blocks from the actual exterior building utilized as Nathan Ford's loft during the production of Leverage Seasons Two through Four.

While contemporary television scholarship frequently obsesses over prestige serialized antiheroes—the solitary detectives, self-destructive crime bosses, and tragic sociopaths of the cable boom—our research collective is dedicated to a far more demanding and mathematically disciplined narrative craft: the high-velocity, 42-minute episodic ensemble engine. In an era where streaming video platforms regularly churn out bloated, eight-hour serialized miniseries plagued by agonizing second-act drift, the structural economy of classic commercial broadcast television remains the absolute pinnacle of narrative engineering.

The Senior Editor: Devon Hayes

Devon Hayes has served as script analyst and story consultant for episodic caper, procedural, and serialized drama television since 2011. He holds an MFA in Dramatic Writing and directs the archival curriculum at the Blueprints & Cons Television Study Group in Portland, Oregon.

Hayes has lectured at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles, the Austin Film Festival screenwriters conference, the Northwest Film Center, and the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication. His analytical monograph, The Geometry of the Honest Thief, serves as the primary curriculum foundation for our group's annual summer television workshop, where emerging dramatic writers dissect the mechanical engineering of five-act commercial breaks, A/B plot counterpoints, and the delicate ethical boundaries of Robin Hood narratives.

Physical & Digital Holdings

Our non-circulating research collection in the Pearl District maintains comprehensive materials relating to the production and writing of Leverage and its television forebears:

• Original Production Script Drafts: Complete writer's drafts, table-read whites, and multi-color production revision sets (blue, pink, green, yellow, goldenrod) across all 77 broadcast episodes of the original series run, complete with excised dialogue and scene timing annotations.
• Location Scouting Dossiers: 120+ binders documenting Portland architectural sites, municipal permits, set redressing schematics, and camera floor plans generated by the Electric Entertainment production department between 2008 and 2011.
• Classical Con Reference Library: Rare first editions and annotated working copies of seminal underworld texts, including David W. Maurer's 1940 The Big Con, Edward H. Smith's 1923 Confessions of a Confidence Man, and David Mamet's annotated stage drafts of House of Games and Glengarry Glen Ross.
• Editorial Timing Ledgers: Frame-accurate timecode breakdowns of every commercial cliffhanger, musical cue, and non-linear Act V flashback transition across the complete five-season run.

Visiting & Collaboration Inquiries

Access to our physical reading room in Portland is available by advance appointment to credentialed screenwriters, academics, film historians, and Writers Guild members. We also provide pro-bono script breakdown workshops for independent writers drafting caper, heist, and procedural television pilots.

Our goal is simple: to ensure that the hard-won structural wisdom of John Rogers, Chris Downey, and the golden age of American episodic television is preserved, illuminated, and transmitted to the next generation of visual storytellers.