Unsold TV Pilots: The Greatest Shows You Never Saw

by Lee Goldberg

  UNSOLD TV PILOTS

  The Greatest Shows You Never Saw

  By Lee Goldberg

  Copyright 1991 & 2009 by Lee Goldberg

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form except by a newspaper or magazine reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review.

  This book, originally published in 1991 by Citadel Press, is an abridgement and partial revision of Lee Goldberg’s book Unsold Television Pilots, 1955-1989, which was originally published by McFarland & Co.

  CONTENTS

  How To Read This Book

  Acknowledgements

  You Know It’s a Pilot When…

  Introduction

  High Concepts

  Dramas

  Sitcoms

  Ghosts, Angels and Devils

  Real Dogs

  Johnny

  Big Screen to Small Screen – Pilots Based on Movies

  Star Vehicles – Shows Created for a Name

  The New Old – Television Series Revivals

  Bibliography

  HOW TO READ THIS BOOK

  Here are the three hundred best and worst of what never was – the strangest and most unusual TV series ideas out of the thousands discarded by the networks over the years.

  To qualify for the dubious honor of being included in this volume, the first criterion is failure. If a pilot sold and became a series, it is not included in this book. However, if the idea was for a prime-time network dramatic series or situation comedy, and it was given the thumbs down, it could be included here.

  The entries contained in these pages were culled from my book Unsold Television Pilots 1955-1989, a chronological listing of the 2269 rejected ideas for prime-time series. The listings in this book, however, are arranged alphabetically within several sections-"High Concepts," "Sitcoms," "Big Screen to Small Screen," "The New Old," "Star Vehicles," "Real Dogs," “Johnny," and "Ghosts, Angels and Devils"-and were selected because, even among the failures, they were unique.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book would not have been possible without the help of Gloria Edwards of the Leo Burnett Agency—which has been reviewing pilots for its clients since 1955 and graciously made its files available to me.

  I am indebted to Ms. Edwards, Leonard Reeg, and all the people who have worked in the TV Program Department of the Leo Burnett Agency over the years preparing those invaluable reports.

  The information in this book is culled from the Leo Burnett reports, network press releases, personally conducted interviews, as well as listings, reviews, and articles from the entertainment industry publications TV Guide, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, and Electronic Media.

  All the information in this book was cross-referenced against previously published material whenever possible. A complete list of those books can be found in the bibliography. I'd like to thank authors Vincent Terrace, Alvin H. Marill, James Robert Parish, Jeb Perry, and Larry James Gianakos for their definitive works.

  During the years it took to research and write the original, unabridged edition of this book, many people shared their time, experience, guidance, and patience with me—often more than I deserved. A special thanks to Burl Barer, William Rabkin, Adam Gold, Karen Bender, Stephen J. Cannell, Steven Bochco, Sherwood Schwartz, J. Bret Garwood, Roy Huggins, Harry Ackerman, David Gerber, Kelly Selvidge, Ron Givens, Janet Huck, Ron Alridge, David Klein, Richard Mahler, Morrie Gelman, David McDonnell, Lloyd Friedman, Elisa Williams, Megan Powell, Carol Fowler, Sean Hillier, Michael Carmack, Peter Biskind, and Bill Warren.

  Lee Goldberg

  Los Angeles, CA

  January 1991

  YOU KNOW IT'S A PILOT WHEN...

  Pilots sneak onto the airwaves in many guises----TV movies, anthology stories, or even disguised as episodes of your favorite series. Keep this checklist by your TV and you can quickly identify the pilots lurking on your airwaves.

  You Know It's a Pilot When:

  • the hero has been raised by animals.

  • the hero is a robot created to be the perfect soldier, but decides he'd rather not kill.

  • the hero, in a freak accident, becomes endowed with special powers and becomes either a secret agent, a private eye, or a wanderer helping people in need. '

  • the detective is blind, electric, or quadriplegic.

  • you can hear a dog's or baby's thoughts.

  • one of the stars is human, the other animated.

  • the show is a television adaptation of last year's hit movie.

  • the hero is pursued by an obsessed cop, scientist, reporter, or evil organization dedicated to his capture, dissection, or false imprisonment.

  • a man hunts down the murderer or his best friend or immediate family and decides he likes it so much, he becomes a private eye.

  • the stars are trapped in the past or future.

  • the show focuses on a group of people wandering through space, either on a brave new mission, or just for the fun of it.

  • the hero is an alien or a ghost, or was born in a petrie dish.

  • it's a remake of an old series.

  • the main character introduces his entire family and all his friends, and recites the story of his life in the first ten minutes.

  • it stars Dale Robinette, Suzanne Somers, Art Hindle, or Stephanie Faracy.

  • the TV Guide listing reads: PILOT.

  INTRODUCTION

  Do car companies share the new model designs they're thinking about? Does Yves St. Laurent pass out his sketches for everyone to see before unveiling his creations? Does Apple let IBM peek at its newest PC? Only television makes its developmental process available to competitors—and to us. And that's that’s what’s fun about unsold TV pilots.

  By watching and studying flop pilots, we can feel like we “are in on the machinations of television,” says producer David Gerber, president of MGM Television. “There’s a curiosity factor, maybe even a true perversity, in watching these things and asking ‘Why the hell did it ever get made?’”

  A television pilot is a sample episode of a proposed weekly series. An unsold pilot is much, much more.

  A pilot is fresh faces and old favorites lining up for a one-night stand with the viewing public. Its producers, writers, directors, and network executives scrambling to keep up with the changing trends in American taste. It's the betting stub you're left with after your horse has lost the race.

  "When pilots work, they work well," says Perry Simon, NBC's executive vice president of prime-time programs. "And when they flop, they thud pretty loudly. There are a thousand ways it can go wrong and only one way it will go right."

  Pilots sneak onto the airwaves disguised as specials, TV movies, lavish mini-series, or even as an episode of your favorite show: Good or bad, pilots give viewers the rare opportunity to second guess the networks at their own game—judging which ideas have the potential to become hit series.

  But it's more than a game. It's a business that eats up more than $30 million a year—at each network. That doesn't count the $20 million or more a studio invests. Each year a network is bombarded with thousands of ideas--even many times commissioning its. own. From these it may buy 125 scripts, shoot thirty pilots, and pick up six or seven as fall series. Of those series, perhaps two will survive the season. For instance, one hundred and three pilots were made for the 1986-87 schedule, only thirty-six became series, and of those, just thirteen survived to celebrate their first birthdays.

  With odds like that, why bother? Because if a pilot sells, and if the series can make it through a few seasons, untold riches could await the produ
cers in syndication—perhaps well over the hundreds of millions of dollars M*A*S*H, Magnum, P.I., and Cosby have made.

  A pilot is a way for networks to hedge their bets before risking millions of dollars for twenty-two episodes of a show that may look great on paper turn out rotten when made. For producers, pilot making is a multi-million dollar gamble that offers no hedging. Although the networks pay a fee for making the pilot, producers invariably spend more because they want the show to look great—because they want it to sell.

  But unless the pilot evolves into a series, "we've got to absorb substantial deficits," says Dean Hargrove, producer of Matlock. "It's a big gamble and you'll probably never get your money back. Pilots are a waste of time and money. They don't make shows any more successful. At the end of every season, the streets are littered with canceled series."

  Whether pilots are the best way to sell a series can be argued endlessly. The fact is, that's the way series have been sold since television began. What has changed is the buyer.

  In its infancy, television was the bastard child of the entertainment industry. The new medium, modeled after radio, was shunned by the major Hollywood studios, which saw television as a threat to their bottom line. So, the programs came from aggressive, independent producers, and the networks, all of whom pitched their series concepts directly to the advertising agencies, whose clients footed a big chunk of the pilot-production costs and ultimately decided which series would get on the air. Network television became picture radio, adopting many of the same series and carrying on the practice of single-sponsor shows.

  That all changed around 1960, when several powerful forces wrestled control of television programming from the advertisers and gave it to the networks. The network chiefs had been anxious to change the power structure of commercial television for years. Sylvester "Pat" Weaver, NBC's then president and a former advertising agency executive, believed networks should control programming and that sponsors should buy advertising time the same way they bought space in a magazine. And like a magazine, which chooses what articles it will print, a network should decide what series it will air.

  Financial realities forced the advertisers to consider Weaver's vision whether they liked it or not. The high cost of production was making it impossible for anyone advertiser to bankroll a program. With Weaver's magazine concept, several advertisers could share the burden and the rewards of sponsoring a show.

  Meanwhile, Mickey Mouse was changing the movie moguls' minds about television. The enormous success of ABC's 1954 series Disneyland, produced for television by Walt Disney's studio, convinced the majors there was money in the medium. The more established, deep-pocketed studios that earlier turned up their collective noses at this upstart medium called television started cranking out programming, and they weren't about to let a bunch of advertisers tell them how to do it.

  But it wasn't the big network honchos, the big price tags, or the big studios that finally forced advertisers out of the programming business. It was the revelation that the advertisers had rigged popular, prime-time game shows, and the subsequent scandal that erupted, that dealt the final blow. The networks canceled the game shows and promised the American people they would control programming from now on.

  The networks became the buyers, and frequently the originators, of series programming. Influential advertising agency executives like Lee Rich and Grant Tinker left their jobs to join the networks or create their own production companies. A new system emerged. Independent producers and studios developed pilots specifically to suit a particular network's needs and personality.

  The key to making any sale is the right product, at the right time, at the right price. A producer with a series idea makes a sales pitch to the networks. Having a major star, a prestigious writer or a well-known director already "attached" to the project can often turn an otherwise so-so concept into a quick sale. If the network likes the idea, it will commission a script, and if programming executives like what they read, they will order a pilot. For a sitcom, that usually means a thirty-minute sample episode. Dramatic series pilots are a different breed altogether.

  By the early 1970s, most dramatic pilots were two-hour or ninety-minute television movies that cost a fortune and were designed to blow the network executives right out of their seats. The problem was, if the pilot sold, the studio had to "duplicate the pilot each week for a lot less money," says David Gerber. Often, the shows not only didn't but probably couldn't fulfill the promise of their multimillion-dollar pilots.

  "If you dazzle 'em in your pilot with fancy footwork, spectacular car crashes, and European locales," says Equalizer producer James McAdams, "and then the first week that you're a series, the hero chases someone through the backlot and tackles him, that's not a pilot, that's deceit."

  That's the major reason the networks currently are saving their pennies and ordering fewer movie-length pilots, opting instead for the so-called typical hour-long episode and other formats that don't cost so much. The networks feel that a sixty-minute pilot is more indicative of a typical episode of the proposed series. That's nice for the networks, but it makes pilots an even bigger risk for the studios. While a TV movie pilot can recoup its production deficits in syndication, foreign theatrical release, and home video sales, "what the hell can be done with a one-hour pilot that doesn't sell?" asks producer Stephanie Kowal, formerly Universal Television's dramatic development executive. "Nothing."

  Producers also complain that the hour-long format forces them to cram too much information into the show, usually at the expense of character. And if the characters don't come across well, the pilot is dead. Greg Maday, formerly CBS's vice president of dramatic development, believes that a sixty-minute pilot can still be "good entertainment if it’s done correctly. "We don't want the pilots to feel like a piece of engineering with no dramatic values, and they don't have to be." But they almost always are.

  The pilot has to get across the series concept, the backgrounds and relationships of the characters and tell a compelling story, all in one show. That fact alone guarantees the pilot can never be like a typical episode of the proposed series, where the concept is a given, and the characters are already accepted by the viewers.

  "The problem with one-hour pilots is you have to tell such a simple story that it's not interesting," says producer Stephen J. Cannell, the man behind such hits as The Rockford Files and Hunter. "The network says, `Make it like episode five.' Well, I'm sorry, you can't do that."

  One way to avoid that problem has been to shoot the pilot as an episode of an existing series. It's also a lot cheaper, because if the pilot doesn't sell, the costs can be recouped when the host series goes into syndication. Star Trek, Who's the Boss?, Spenser: For Hire, Kojak, Cosby, Golden Girls, Magnum, P.I. , and The Untouchables are just a few of the many series that count unsold pilots among their episodes. Ann Daniel, ABC's vice president of dramatic development, thinks episodes-as-pilots are "a terrific way to do a pilot. It's more economically responsible." But episodes-as-pilots have their own artistic and financial pitfalls.

  "You have to minimize your own protagonists to give the show to the pilot star. It makes for a bad episode of the show," says James McAdams. "A good episode is where the hero of the series is the star, not the guest star. The hero is reduced to a bookend or a bystander." Some feel it's not worth the effort. -

  "They hardly ever work out. It's just a cheap way of knocking off a pilot," says Jeff Sagansky, president of CBS Entertainment.

  And what do the viewers think? "They probably hate it," Sagansky says. "The reason they watch the show is not to see pilots. But, if you do it once a year, I guess it's okay."

  Producers can get away with episodes-as-pilots much more often, and with a lot less grief, in anthology series. On shows like Kraft Suspense Theatre, The Dick Powell Theatre, and more recently with Disney Sunday Movie and The Magical World of Disney, nearly all the self-contained episodes were pilots.

  With program costs and studio deficits sky
rocketing, many producers believe the networks should junk pilots altogether and make series commitments to proven talent instead. "We are great believers that the best way to make the best series is to make commitments with the best possible people," says Stu Erwin, former president of MTM Enterprises, which sold several shows, including St. Elsewhere and Mary, that way.

  "I understand networks wanting to see what the new guys can do," says Stephanie Kowal, "but when you're dealing with an established group, you don't need a pilot."

  That philosophy worked with Cheers, L.A. Law, and Hooperman, but it can backfire, too. When Hill Street Blues producer Steven Bochco pitched NBC on the serialized adventures of a baseball team, it sounded like a great idea. In 1983, the network bought thirteen episodes of Bay City Blues sight unseen but canceled the series with half the episodes unaired. "Life With Lucy, AfterMASH, Jessie, Mr. Smith, Private Eye, Cassie and Company, and Partners in Crime were also commitments—and disasters.

  "It's the kind of deal everyone wants, but it has its flaws," says producer Toni Mankiewicz, who sold Gavilan to NBC in 1982 without a pilot. It was canceled so fast even he has trouble remembering it. "You go on the air right away, and everything that does and doesn't work about your character is rehearsed in front of the audience. But when you do a pilot, you can look at it and say, 'It works great when he does X but it doesn't when he does Y.' You can fix it before the audience sees it."

  Networks want pilots, but producers gripe about the high cost. Producers want commitments, but the networks want to see what they are buying. There's a possible compromise. Both networks and producers have long been experimenting with brief, ten to twenty minute demonstration films rather than shooting a pilot. The practice has yet to take hold, and only a few series, like Knightrider and Emerald Point, NAS, have sold that way_

  "To get the point across, it works well," says Richard Chapman, who produced a demo film for CBS about a Ninja-trained female spy. "The twenty-minute-presentation is more eye-catching and gets the best of a shorter attention span." Chapman wrote an hour-long pilot script and from that culled the demo film, which was made up of three character scenes—one funny, one tense, and one showing warmth—and some Ninja combat. The series didn't sell.