In this hour-long TV pilot, Annie, a tightly wrapped accountant with an empty nest and a husband losing interest, and her new best friend Brian, a gay N.Y. playwright forced back to L.A. to escort his wacko aging parents into oblivion, belly up in a legendary Hollywood bar with a colorful assortment of drinking buddies coping with their own deferred dreams and absurd new realities.

SYNOPSIS:

FROM THE BLACK LIST WEBSITE: “Designated Drinker has some great character development both in the leads and in the supporting characters. There aren’t a lot of good roles out there for women in their forties, but Annie isn’t just a mother or a wife--she actually gets to be a person. Brian, her gay best friend, is the comedic high point of the script. Overall, the concept reads like MEN OF A CERTAIN AGE meets HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER--people who are approaching middle age who are still cool, and there definitely seems to be an audience for that.” “The authors have created possibly one of the most thought-out series bibles out there, a compelling and complex character drama that explores the lives of middle-aged adults."

Midlife crisis?! How the heck did that happen? Must be something in the Irish coffee. In this hour-long romantic dramedy, Annie, a tightly wrapped accountant with an empty nest and a husband losing interest, and her new best friend Brian, a gay NYC playwright forced back to L.A. to escort his wacko aging parents into oblivion, belly up in a legendary Hollywood bar with a colorful assortment of drinking buddies coping with their own deferred dreams and absurd new realities.

Sure, they might still look good, but everything’s crashing in on Annie and Brian, and filled with midlife’s niggling doubt, they commiserate nightly at Flanagan’s. There they’ll attempt to forge the second half of their lives, but how, and with whom?

Does Mike, the baffling, bedroom-eyed bar manager with a shady New York past, really love Annie or is he just another Angeleno slinging lines? Will her wayward husband Matt ever hit bottom, and will he take her down with him? Will Edward, the gay actor/bartender with a body built for shining armor, ever give up trying to win Brian's affection? And will Brian ever escape back to New York City, away from his father’s demented love affair with Old Hollywood and his mother’s increasingly destructive alcoholism, and admit that was the fourth martini he just downed, not the third?

And what about the rest of the room? Can the homicide cops really solve a serial killer case on cocktail napkins, and will divorce attorney Diana and her Vietnamese marriage counselor boyfriend, Hung, ever crack the code of romantic bliss over nightly highballs?

And will they all ever stop drinking? Unlikely – the world of Designated Drinker is one in which drinks may be counted and AA meetings occasionally attended, but for the most part everyone enjoys his or her cocktails . . . until the next hangover.

A teaser each week will introduce the theme and main action of the episode and will be followed by three acts that take place outside the bar. Acts IV and V are then set inside Flanagan’s, at the end of the day, “happy hour,” when the external dramas escalate and/or clarify but are not necessarily resolved, as the bar play is more chaotic, romantic, and heightened. “Last call” will be a scene to bookend the theme introduced in the teaser.

Tears, laughter, love, and booze take our characters full circle with coincidental and unexpected twists. Their goal becomes not perfection but wholeness, the biggest life that includes the most.