Television pilot
A television pilot is a standalone episode of a television series that is used to sell the show to a television network. At the time of its creation, the pilot is meant to be the testing ground to gauge whether a series will be successful. It is, therefore, a test episode for the intended television series, an early step in the series development, much like pilot studies serve as precursors to the start of larger activity.
In the case of a successful television series, the pilot is commonly the first episode that is aired of the particular series under its own name; the episode that gets the series "off the ground". A "backdoor pilot" is an episode of an existing successful series, featuring future tie-in characters of an up-and-coming television series or film. Its purpose is to introduce the characters to an audience before the creators decide on whether or not they intend to pursue a spin-off series with those characters.
Television networks use pilots to determine whether an entertaining concept can be successfully realized and whether the expense of additional episodes is justified. A pilot is best thought of as a prototype of the show that is to follow, because elements often change from pilot to series. Variety estimates that only a little over a quarter of all pilots made for American television proceed to the series stage. Most pilots are never publicly screened if they fail to sell a series.
Pilot season
Each summer, the major American broadcast television networks – including ABC, CBS, The CW, Fox, and NBC – receive about 500 brief elevator pitches each for new shows from writers and producers. That fall, each network requests scripts for about 70 pitches and, the following January, orders about 20 pilot episodes. Actors come to Los Angeles from within the area or elsewhere in the United States and around the world to audition for them. By spring, actors are cast and production crews assembled to produce the pilots.Casting is a lengthy and very competitive process. For the 1994 pilot of Friends, casting director Ellie Kanner reviewed more than 1,000 actors' head shots for each of the six main roles. She summoned 75 actors for each role to audition, then chose some to audition again for the show's creators. Of this group, the creators chose some to audition again for Warner Bros. Television executives, who chose the final group of a few actors to audition for NBC executives; as they decide whether to purchase a pilot, network executives generally have ultimate authority over casting. Since the networks work on the same shared schedule, directors, actors and others, must choose the best pilot to work for with the hopes that the network will choose it. If it is not chosen, they have wasted their time and money and may have missed out on better career opportunities.
Once they have been produced, the pilots are presented to studio and network executives, and in some cases to test audiences; at this point, each pilot receives various degrees of feedback and is gauged on its potential to advance from one pilot to a full-fledged series. Using this feedback, and factoring in the current status and future potential of their existing series, each network chooses about four to eight pilots for series status. The new series are then presented at the networks' annual upfronts in May, where they are added to network schedules for the following season, and at the upfront presentation, the shows are shown to potential advertisers and the networks sell the majority of the advertising for their new pilots. The survival odds for these new series are low, as typically only one or two of them survive for more than one season.
Types of pilots
Premise pilot
A premise pilot introduces the characters and their world to the viewer; it is structured so that it can be run as the first episode of the series if substantial changes are not made between the pilot and greenlighting. In the event the changes being made are so substantial that they would cause confusion to viewers, the pilot is often re-shot, recast, or rewritten to fit the rest of the series.The pilot for Gilligan's Island, for instance, showed the castaways becoming stranded on the island. However, three roles were recast before going to series, with the characters either modified or completely altered to the point where the pilot could no longer be used as a regular episode. As a result, CBS aired Gilligan's second produced episode, which had the characters already stranded on the island, first; the story from the pilot was largely reworked into a flashback episode which aired later. Even Gilligan's theme song, which was originally done as a calypso number, was rewritten and recomposed to be completely different.
Another example was in the original where most of the footage of the original pilot, "The Cage |The Cage," was incorporated into the acclaimed two-part episode, "The Menagerie |The Menagerie," with the story justification that it depicted events that happened several years earlier. Conversely, the second pilot for Star Trek, "Where No Man Has Gone Before", aired as the third episode of the show's first season, even though it included some casting and costuming differences that set it apart from the preceding episodes.
If a network orders a two-hour pilot, it will usually broadcast it as a television film to recoup some of the costs even if the network chooses to not order the show. Sometimes, a made-for-TV-movie is filmed as the pilot, but because of actors not being available, the series intro is reshot and the first reshot episode is considered the pilot. The original Cagney & Lacey movie co-starred Loretta Swit as Chris Cagney, but when she could not get out of her contract, they reshot it with Meg Foster, who after the first season was replaced with Sharon Gless; therefore, the original movie is not considered a pilot, and is not included in the series collections on DVD. In some cases, this does not hamper broadcast, such as Jackie Cooper playing the role of Walter Carlson in the TV movie pilot of the 1975 series The Invisible Man, but replaced by Craig Stevens for the remainder of the series; the pilot is still considered part of the series and released to DVD as such. Likewise, The Homecoming: A Christmas Story had an almost entirely different cast than the series it was intended to pilot, but both have been rerun for many years.
Proof of concept
A proof of concept pilot usually takes place chronologically further into a series run than a premise pilot, to give network executives a better feel for how a typical episode would appear. Remington Steele used both a proof of concept and a premise pilot. Proofs of concept were particularly common for game shows; in such cases, the pilot may be entirely or partially scripted and use fake contestants and "returning champions" to demonstrate those concepts.Backdoor pilot
A backdoor pilot is a film or miniseries that serves as a proof of concept for a full series, but may be broadcast on its own even if the full series is not picked up. The term may also be used for an episode of a currently running show that serves to introduce a spin-off. Such backdoor pilots commonly focus on an existing character or characters from the parent series who are to be given their own show.For example, to introduce A Different World, built around Cosby Show character Denise Huxtable, the Cosby Show episode "Hillman" was devoted to Denise's visit to the college that would become the new show's setting, and her encounters with some of the new show's supporting characters. A 2018 episode of ABC's 1980s-set sitcom The Goldbergs, titled "1990-Something", heavily featured teachers who were recurring characters on the series and served as the backdoor pilot to Schooled, which debuted in early 2019.
In other cases, however, an episode of the parent show may also focus on one or more guest characters who have not previously appeared in the show; for example, the JAG season eight episodes "Ice Queen" and "Meltdown" introduced the characters for what would become NCIS, while the NCIS season six "Legend Part 1" and "Legend Part 2", two-part episode introduced the characters for what would become the NCIS spin-off series, ' and the NCIS season 11 two-part episode, "Crescent City", introduced the characters for what would become '. NCIS: Los Angeles itself also included a backdoor pilot for a potential further spin-off - NCIS: Red - but the series was not picked up.
Similarly, the backdoor pilot for the television sitcom Empty Nest was an episode of The Golden Girls, which relegated that show's regular stars to supporting characters in an episode devoted to new characters who were introduced as their neighbors. Feedback on the episode resulted in Empty Nest being extensively reworked before its debut; while the concept and the "living next to the Golden Girls" setting was retained, the series ended up featuring different characters from those in the original Golden Girls episode.
In a 2011 episode of the TV Land original sitcom Hot in Cleveland focused on the wedding of the Elka character. Boyce Ballentine, an R&B singer-turned-preacher, was introduced as the pastor for the wedding, with the intention to give the Boyce character his own series on the network. That came to fruition in 2012, when TV Land introduced The Soul Man.
Not all backdoor pilots lead to a series. In 1968, the ' episode "" was intended as the pilot for a spin-off of the same name, featuring a human named Gary Seven, taken from Earth's far past and raised by aliens to be sent to watch over Earth in the 1960s; while the series was not picked up, its characters have appeared in numerous non-canon Trek productions set in the 20th century.
ABC attempted to create a spin-off of Charlie's Angels in 1980 called Toni's Boys. The backdoor pilot that aired near the end of season four was simply titled "Toni's Boys" and guest starred Barbara Stanwyck as Antonia "Toni" Blake, a wealthy widow and friend of Charlie Townsend's who ran a detective agency. The agency was staffed by three handsome male detectives—Cotton Harper, Matt Parrish, and Bob Sorensen —who took direction from Toni and solved crimes in a manner similar to the Angels. The show was not picked up as a regular series for the following season.
The series finale of One Day at a Time in May 1984 was supposed to serve as a backdoor pilot to a spin-off featuring Pat Harrington, Jr.'s character of Dwayne Schneider in a new setting, but CBS ultimately passed on the potential series. Similarly, the 1988 two-part series finale of The Facts of Life also served as a backdoor pilot that focused on the decision Blair Warner made in using her trust fund to purchase the financially troubled Eastland Academy. Blair became headmistress and opened enrollment to male students for the first time in Eastland history. Up-and-coming actors Juliette Lewis, Mayim Bialik, Seth Green, and Meredith Scott Lynn were featured as some of Eastland's new students. NBC did not pick up the new series.
The Dukes of Hazzard aired two episodes, named "Jude Emery" and "Mason Dixon's Girls", which served as a backdoor pilot complete with the Dukes cast interacting with the new characters. Ultimately, CBS passed on the two series in favor of a series starring Hazzard County deputy Enos Strate. Another example within sitcoms would be a season 2 episode of The Nanny called "The Chatterbox", which centered around a struggling actress who gets a job at a barbershop owned by a single father.
In an example from June 2010, Lifetime pursued a spinoff procedural drama of Army Wives featuring Brigid Brannagh's character, police officer Pamela Moran. The fourth-season episode "Murder in Charleston" was intended to serve as a backdoor pilot for the proposed spin-off. The episode sees Moran teaming up with an Atlanta-based detective on a murder that is related to a case she has been working on for the past three years. At the end of the episode, the detective encourages Moran to take a detective's exam, and to look for her if she is in Atlanta. In September 2010, however, Lifetime declined to pick up the project to series.
In 2013, The CW announced there was a spin-off of their genre hit Supernatural in the works. The 20th episode of season nine titled "Bloodlines", served as a back-door pilot, revealed in January 2014 to have been titled '. The series was set to explore the "clashing hunter and monster cultures in Chicago". The show was not picked up by the CW for the 2014–2015 season due to dismal overall reception by viewers.
The Gossip Girl episode "Valley Girls" was supposed to be a backdoor pilot for a prequel spin-off series starring Brittany Snow as a young Lily van der Woodsen, however the show was not picked up. "The Farm" was an episode of NBC's The Office that was supposed to act as a backdoor pilot for a spin-off series starring Rainn Wilson and focusing on his character, Dwight Schrute. Upon review, the spin-off was not picked up by NBC and the original version was never aired; instead it was reworked with additional material shot later, as the original version contained "certain aspects that were appropriate for a pilot of a new show".
A historically important venue for backdoor pilots has been the anthology series. They have variously been used as a place to show work still being actively considered for pickup, and as a venue for completed work already rejected by the network. With the decline of anthology series, backdoor pilots have increasingly been seen as episodes of existing series, one-off television films, and miniseries. As backdoor pilots have either failed to sell or are awaiting audience reception from its one-time broadcast, networks will not advertise them as pilots, only promoting them as a "special" or "movie". It is thus often unclear to initial viewers of backdoor pilots that they are seeing a pilot of any kind, unless they have been privy to knowledgeable media coverage of the piece.
In one extraordinary case, an unsold pilot was released as a theatrical film. A 1956 attempt to create a television vehicle for film and radio stars Lum and Abner was not picked up as a series, but the three pilot episodes produced as proof of concept for the series were strung together and released as a theatrical film titled Lum and Abner Abroad.
Put pilot
A put pilot is a pilot that the network has agreed to air either as a special or series. If the network does not air the pilot episode, the network will owe substantial monetary penalties to the studio. Generally, this guarantees that the pilot will be picked up by the network.Unsold pilot
Unsold television pilots are pilots developed by a company that is unable to sell to a network for showing.There have been numerous pilots for game shows that have been rejected by American television networks or syndicators:
- Boggle
- PokerFace
- The Cube
- The Exit List
- TriBond
- Trivial Pursuit
- The Whole 19 Yards
10/90
As distinguished from "first episode"
A pilot episode is generally the first episode of a new show, shown to the heads of the studio to whom it is marketed.The television industry uses the term differently from most viewers. Viewers frequently consider the first episode available for their viewing to be the pilot. They therefore assume that the first episode broadcast is also the episode that sold the series to the network. This is not always true, however, in part because of the factors mentioned above. For instance, the episode "Invasion of the Bane" was not a pilot for The Sarah Jane Adventures because the BBC had committed to the first series before seeing any filmed content – yet it is routinely referred to as a pilot. In the Canadian supernatural drama Lost Girl, the pilot that sold the series to Showcase, "Vexed", was used as the eighth episode of the first series. In the case of Firefly, the original pilot which was intended to serve as the series premiere was rejected by the network, and a new first episode, Train Job, was shot specifically for broadcast.
Sometimes, too, viewers will assign the word "pilot" to a work that represented the first appearances of characters and situations later employed by a series – even if the work was not initially intended as a pilot for the series. A good example of this is "Love and the Television Set", an episode of Love, American Style that featured a version of the Cunningham family. It was in fact a failed pilot for the proposed 1972 series New Family in Town, but was a successful pilot for 1974's Happy Days. So firmly embedded is the notion of it as a Happy Days pilot, however, that even series actress Erin Moran viewed it as such, as well as its creator, Garry Marshall.
On other occasions, the pilot is never broadcast on television at all. Viewers of Temple Houston, for example, would likely have considered "The Twisted Rope" its pilot because "The Man from Galveston" was only publicly exhibited in cinemas four months later. Even then, "The Man from Galveston" had an almost entirely different cast, and its main character was renamed to avoid confusion with the then-ongoing series.
Ratings
List of highest rated television pilots which attracted 28 million or more viewers in America:| Rank | Show | Viewers ' | Rating | Date | Network |
| 1 | A Different World | 38.9 | 31.3% | September 24, 1987 | NBC |
| 2 | Undercover Boss | 38.7 | 19.1% | February 7, 2010 | CBS |
| 2 | Lead in: Super Bowl XLIV Post Game | 75.5 | 33% | February 7, 2010 | CBS |
| 3 | The Last Precinct | 39.7 | January 26, 1986 | NBC | |
| 4 | Dolly | 37.4 | 24.7% | September 27, 1987 | ABC |
| 5 | Veronica's Closet | 35.07 | 23.3% | September 25, 1997 | NBC |
| 6 | Twin Peaks | 34.6 | 21.7% | April 8, 1990 ' | ABC |
| 7 | Brothers and Sisters | 31.722 | January 21, 1979 | NBC | |
| 8 | Full House | 31.3 | 21.7% | September 22, 1987 | ABC |
| 9 | Roseanne | 30.8 | 23.7% | October 18, 1988 | ABC |
| 10 | Grand Slam | 30.765 | January 28, 1990 | CBS | |
| 11 | seaQuest DSV | 30.4 | 17.8 rating | September 12, 1993 | NBC |
| 12 | Chicken Soup | 30.2 | 21.8% | September 12, 1989 | ABC |
| 13 | Suddenly Susan | 30.1 | 20.4% | September 19, 1996 | NBC |
| 14 | Caroline in the City | 30.0 | 20.5% | September 21, 1995 | NBC |
| 15 | Delta | 30.0 | 20.5% | September 15, 1992 | ABC |
| 16 | Dear John | 30.0 | 19.8% | October 6, 1988 | NBC |
| 17 | The Single Guy | 29.1 | 19.2 | September 21, 1995 | NBC |
| 18 | Frasier | 28.1 | 19.3% | September 16, 1993 | NBC |