TV Pilot Episodes

As the first post of this blog, it seems fitting to discuss most people's introduction to a TV show—its pilot. Pilots, despite often being later maligned as “not very good” by fans and critics, are the most important episodes that shows produce. Pilot scripts need to convince networks to buy them and shoot them, produced pilots need to convince networks to pick their show up, and aired pilots need to convince viewers to actually watch the show in question. And with networks being much more likely to axe new shows before letting them gain viewership, your pilot better hook people, or your show is likely to disappear.

So what distinguishes a good pilot from a bad one? There are a few obvious pitfalls: heavy-handed exposition, boring characters, unrealistic dialogue, etc. Qualities that make a show bad can be even more overemphasized in pilots because they’re trying to get out a ton of background information. But what a good pilot really needs to do is establish the three P’s of the show: People, Premise, and Plot.

1) People: This is the big one. If the audience doesn’t care about your characters, why should they watch every week? We’ve got enough people in real life who annoy us, why would we turn on the TV to watch more of them? Give us someone to care about, somewhat to root for, someone to root against, someone whose life we’re interested in. Any of the above, really. But the kiss of death is not people disliking your show; it’s people just not giving a damn about it.

2) Premise: Okay, so you’ve got characters we are at least favorably inclined toward, or find somewhat interesting. The premise is why we’re watching them. It’s the one line that describes the entire show. Premise and plot are often intertwined, especially on procedurals, but the premise is what makes the show different. Lost’s premise, for example, was “several people stranded on a mysterious island after a plane crash.” Castle, on the other hand, has the premise “A writer follows around a NYC cop and helps her with cases.”

3) Plot: If the people are “who” and the premise is “why,” the plot is the “what” of the show. What should we as an audience expect to see from week to week? As mentioned in the premise section, this is easy to set up in a procedural, and is generally stated in the premise. Using the Castle example, each episode will be the writer helping the cop with a case. Lost and other dramas and sitcoms aren’t as clear-cut. Still, if a pilot is good, it will give you a hint as to what you should see every week. Veronica Mars’ premise was “An ostracized teen PI works to solve her best friend’s murder,” but even the pilot showed that the plot of each week was likely to be a mystery for her to solve as a PI.

Of course, having the three P’s doesn’t necessarily make for a good pilot, nor a full-season pick-up, but they do certainly start you off ahead of the curve. And with the fickleness of networks and audiences these days, that leg up is one worth having.

Next week: Because many pilots have simply too much to cram into one episode, this first blog is a two-parter! To be continued with Pilots: Part II, or “What Pilots Have Learned From the Movies.”