Pilot Week! The Oddities of TV Land

The saddest fact about pilots is that the vast majority of them will never see the light of day. The networks receive thousands of scripts each year. They buy options on hundreds of them, produce about 25 or 30 and purchase 10-15 of them. It’s a struggle for any project to make it air, much less get renewed. Even if the show does get picked up, there are few guarantees that it will last long. Typically new shows will get a 10-15 episode order for a first season with an option for what is called the “Back 9” which fills out a full season order. The competition to get a role in a pilot can be pretty fierce. Sometimes, even if one gets a role on a pilot they might not go much further even if their show gets picked up.

The most visible case of this was Empty Nest. The show was originally supposed to star Rita Moreno and Paul Dooley as a married couple who lived next door to The Golden Girls. They were introduced in a back door pilot, though when it got picked up the next season, only David Leisure and the set returned. Richard Mulligan took up residence in the house and its previous occupants were never spoken about again.

Growing Pains originally featured a different actress in the role of Carol Seaver- Elizabeth Ward. When ABC picked up the show, it held a viewing of the pilot before a test audience. After evaluating the feedback, the network chose to replace Elizabeth Ward with Tracey Gold, who had originally been rejected for the role. To save money, the network only reshot Carol Seaver’s scenes. Eagle-eyed viewers can still catch a glimpse of Elizabeth Ward in the background of one scene.

Most of the time a show whose pilot was rejected is, for the most part, dead. The networks typically won’t revisit a project they’ve rejected. In the case of ABC’s The Middle, the original pilot starring Ricki Lake as Frankie Heck was rejected in 2007. Two years later, ABC would revisit the show with a mostly new cast. The only actor who was asked back was Atticus Shaffer.

Pilot Week! Backdoor Pilots

Backdoor Pilots are episodes of existing television shows that double as pilots of new spinoff shows. These types of pilots allow a network to hedge its bets by producing a pilot that it knows will actually get broadcasted and produce revenue. While most other types of pilots will never see the light of day, these pilots typically always get a broadcast. The added benefit of this type of pilot is that it typically gets a larger audience than it might normally attract. An example of this type of pilot was NCIS, which was a Backdoor pilot spun off from Jag.

NCIS, in turn, provided a launching point for NCIS: Los Angeles, which had its own Backdoor pilot episode of NCIS.

NCIS also launched NCIS: New Orleans in a Backdoor pilot episode.

Not every Backdoor pilot results in a successful launch, however. One of the most notorious Backdoor pilots that didn’t get a pickup was Kelly’s Kids, which concerned a couple who lived next door to the Bradys of The Brady Bunch. The never before seen neighbors adopted three kids and the show would have followed their lives as they dealt with their newly expanded family. The show didn’t get picked up and the neighbors were never seen again.

Pilot Week! The Unairable Air

As the cost to make just about any television programming skyrocketed, so did the cost of making a pilot. The costs became less tenable considering that most of these pilots would never see the light of day. (Even a show that got picked up might not have a usable pilot.) The television networks were literally throwing away millions of dollars on programming that was not intended for broadcast. 

How could the networks try to recoup some of their losses? By airing the shows in the summer offseason. CBS introduced a show called Summer Playhouse where it could burn off its unused pilots to at least make something from them. ABC actually tried to do something greater with its unused pilots- it ran many of them during the regular season as Love, American Style. While most of the episodes were comedic pilots, some non-pilots were mixed in. Despite being a place where failed pilots were supposed to die, it gave a very famous, hugely successful show a second chance. Happy Days was originally rejected by ABC and its pilot was burned off as an episode of Love, American Style. This successful airing would result in the show getting picked up.

It was easy to string together half hour sitcom pilots and find a place for them on the schedule. It was often difficult to do this for hour long dramas. It soon became common for networks to produce dramatic pilots as made for television movies. During the heyday of the Movie of the Week, it was easy to find room for a two hour pilot. Such was the case in 1987 when NBC aired Bates Motel, a planned spinoff of the Psycho franchise. After the costly pilot was rejected by NBC, it recouped some of its investment by airing the pilot as a film.

Pilot Week! An Industry Standard

Pilots have been around since the early days of television. Early television executives felt that the only way to tell if a show was viable was to see a sample of it on the screen. This was seen as being a strange method for determining the viability of a project by the legacy Hollywood studios who saw these pilots as a waste of money. While Walt Disney was one of the first studio chiefs who “defected” to television as a way to finance DISNEYLAND, he chafed at ABC’s insistence that he make a Pilot. In the end, he didn’t have to make a pilot, but that was still the exception and not the rule.

Part of the reason why the legacy studios were reluctant to produce pilots was because it was considered to be a waste of time and resources to produce something that might never air on television. Even if a show was picked up, the network would often request drastic changes which made the pilots obsolete. Characters would get recast, sets changed, and premises altered. Sometimes these changes were so drastic they required extensive reshoots. Many times the pilot had to be completely reshot; the original discarded or forgotten.

One of the most famous shows of the 1950’s was I Love Lucy. It became synonymous with early television and was one of the first shows to record on film. At the time, most shows went out live and were not recorded for posterity. Desi Arnaz, co-producer of I Love Lucy, anticipated a future in which reruns of television shows would be aired by local affiliates for a fee, providing a future revenue stream. Despite this visionary thinking, the I Love Lucy pilot had been discarded and was lost for decades until a copy of it was discovered under a bed.

Pilot Week! - “Pilot Season”

While most people look fondly on this time of year as the beginning of Spring, in Hollywood it is Pilot Season. Pilot Season is when the television networks produce sample episodes of programs they’re considering for Fall. From the thousands of scripts the network receives each year, hundreds get evaluated and a handful actually get produced as pilots. Despite spending millions of dollars on these pilots, only a fraction of them will ever air. This week, we take a look at the crazy world of pilots.

The original ‘Empty Nest’ Pilot did not feature Richard Mulligan.