hi, i’m rachel brethauer

I grew up in the calming blue glow of the TV screen back in the wilds of southern Ontario (hiding from brutal winters and sticky summers), obsessed with multi-camera sitcoms and shows about working women, and ultimately building an IMDb inside my brain.

My career began where all great Canadian TV success stories do, at the CBC. Audience relations, production assistant, location scout, producer assistant, and talent wrangler were just some of my roles there. I graduated from Ryerson University with a B.A.A. in Radio and Television Arts, spent a few years getting some life experience, and eventually found my way into slinging award-winning print, video, direct marketing, and digital copy and concepts at the largest advertising agency in Canada. An agency jump and an economic crash later, I found myself writing for the biggest tech company you’ve never heard of. Shockingly, I was NOT an ideal fit in a buttoned-up, corporate environment.

Soon after, I packed up and moved to Los Angeles to get my MFA in Writing and Producing for Television at Loyola Marymount University. Since moving to Los Angeles, I wrote about TV (and celebrity birthdays, as one does) for E! Online, and read scripts, did coverage and research, rolled calls and anything else thrown at me at K/O Paper Products (fka Kurtzman/Orci),  Carol Mendelsohn Productions, and Good on Paper.

My pilot, Wonderland Avenue, won the Best Original Teleplay award at the Film Outside the Frame awards. I’ve been a semifinalist for the Sundance Episodic and Fox Writers Labs, NBC’s Writers on the Verge and CineStory’s TV Fellowship. I’ve been a Film Independent/LMU Incubator Lab fellow, where I developed a web series and helped produce a microbudget feature I co-wrote, called An American Zealot, which did the festival circuit and began streaming on a service year you in early 2021.

I currently teach screenwriting and the History of Television at Loyola Marymount University’s School of Film and Television, in addition to working on my first book, about 20th century working women sitcom characters.

Like my original Twitter bio said, I’m a girl with a penchant for whiskey, television, trivia, and the written word. Not necessarily in that order. But sometimes.