TIME: "10 Greatest TV Pilots"

[JamesG]

Ready for Takeoff
by Gary Susman
Sept. 08, 2013


Hope springs eternal in the TV executive’s breast. With the beginning of the fall TV season this week, the networks and cable channels will launch dozens of new series, with the hope that maybe one or two of them will be the next "Modern Family" or "The Good Wife".

Given our short attention spans (and the even shorter attention spans of those panicky execs), many of those new shows will sink or swim based on the quality of their pilot episodes.



A pilot episode has one immediate requirement: it should intrigue you enough to make you want to come back for the next installment. An entertaining pilot doesn’t guarantee a great series ("Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip"), nor does a weak pilot mean the series won’t become a classic ("Seinfeld", "Parks and Recreation").

The pilots we remember best drew us into their series, but they also stand on their own today as great singular TV events. Here are ten of the most watchable pilots in TV history, episodes that, even though we know now what was to follow, still make us laugh or gasp or scream.









"The Mary Tyler Moore Show"
September 19, 1970 (CBS)


How many TV pilots feature dialogue that we remember 43 years later? The "Mary Tyler Moore" pilot contains the most famous job interview in TV history, with WJM-TV news producer Lou Grant (Edward Asner) sizing up applicant Mary Richards (Moore) and telling her, “You’ve got spunk!… I hate spunk!”

Of course, Lou hires her anyway, a moment that marks the birth of the workplace-as-family sitcom. (Mary’s new WJM family includes sardonic writer Murray Slaughter, played by Gavin McLeod, and magnificent idiot anchorman Ted Baxter, played by Ted Knight.)



The pilot also sets up Mary’s home life, introducing us to her jaded landlady Phyllis Lindstrom (Cloris Leachman) and her fellow single-gal neighbor, brassy Rhoda Morgenstern (Valerie Harper).

Most of all, it makes clear that Mary herself is a new kind of TV character, a woman who is single but not dependent on a man nor looking for one (indeed, she kicks her old beau to the curb here), a woman who’s determined to find her own place in the world and live up to that joyful hat toss in the opening credits.









"Cheers"
September 30, 1982 (NBC)


In that other classic workplace-as-family sitcom, the bar really is the star of the show. In the pilot, there’s little need for exposition or explanation, as the characters are introduced one by one, first bartender/owner Sam (Ted Danson), self-styled intellectual Diane (Shelley Long), dotty old bartender Coach (Nicholas Colasanto), acid-tongued waitress Carla (Rhea Perlman), and regulars Norm (George Wendt) and Cliff (John Ratzenberger).

What little plot there is sees Sam hiring the jilted and abandoned Diane as a waitress, much to Carla’s consternation. The characters are pretty much fully realized, with their chemistry for the most part already established through the show’s rapid-fire banter. (Norm and Cliff’s friendship isn’t apparent yet, and the conversational sparks between Sam and Diane barely hint at the long, cataclysmic romance to come.)

Clearest of all is the level of craftsmanship involved – the cast, writers Glen and Les Charles, and director James Burrows – that will set a high bar for sitcom execution for the next three decades.









"The Cosby Show"
September 20, 1984 (NBC)


The revolutionary thing about "The Cosby Show" was always how ordinary it was… with one little twist. Here, after all, was the same family sitcom we’d been watching for 30 years, since "Father Knows Best", The fact that the Huxtables were black was of no importance, and of supreme importance. We were supposed to notice, and not to notice.

What helped on the latter end was that the jokes were impeccably constructed, having come largely from Cosby’s road-tested, time-honored stand-up comedy act. Or drawn from Cosby’s own life; the pilot’s centerpiece, in which Cliff (Cosby) demonstrates to teenage son Theo (Malcolm Jamal Warner) how much it would cost him to live on his own, using Monopoly money, is something Bill Cosby did with his own son, Ennis.

As for Cliff’s warning to Theo, “I brought you into this world, and I can take you out,” that was from his act (and not, let’s hope, from his life).



Everything fired on all cylinders, and that, after all, is why America would make the series a top hit for eight seasons – not for the subtle social messages, but because it was just plain funny, and because it hit home for everyone.









"Twin Peaks"
April 8, 1990 (ABC)


Nothing like David Lynch’s feature-length pilot for "Twin Peaks" had ever been seen on network TV. The premise was simple enough: popular small-town teen Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) is found murdered and wrapped in plastic, and her death draws the attention of FBI Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan).

As in Lynch’s Blue Velvet, "Twin Peaks" is a town full of dark, squirmy secrets suppressed beneath a placid, all-American façade. Certainly, something is weirdly off in the dreamy, sleepwalking rhythms of town life.



Agent Cooper, for all his boyish enthusiasm over the local pie and coffee, is surprisingly open to the notion that there’s more to the mystery than forensic science can explain. (Even so, the pilot hardly hints at just how strange things are going to get, just how deep the rabbit hole goes.)

Much of the focus, wisely, is on Laura’s fellow teens, who already live in a world of heightened drama, where every romance is Romeo and Juliet and every rivalry is a life-or-death game of chicken from Rebel Without a Cause.



But the sense of heightened drama extends to the adults, too. It’s rare for TV (or any medium) to plumb the depths of grief as thoroughly as "Twin Peaks" does with Laura’s parents.

The combination of raw emotional melodrama and surreal murder mystery would make the series irresistible (at least as long as Laura’s killer remained at large).









"The Sopranos"
January 10, 1999 (HBO)


For all of mob boss Tony Soprano’s (James Gandolfini) depression and panic attacks, and for all the attendant violence on display, this first episode is a lot funnier than you probably remember.

David Chase’s staging of Tony’s first visits to his shrink, Dr. Melfi (Lorraine Bracco) happened the same winter that Billy Crystal and Robert De Niro released Analyze This in theaters, and the TV version of the mobster-in-therapy plot turned out to be a lot more wickedly absurd and cleverly executed.



The first episode also introduced us to Tony’s two families (professional and personal), both of them hilariously foul-mouthed and crude, and both full of potentially lethal adversaries.

The shakedown of a debtor is played as much for laughs as for menace, and Tony’s solution to a vexing problem (he blows up his friend Artie’s restaurant to prevent Uncle Junior from staging a hit there that would ruin Artie’s business) is both bluntly effective and ridiculously excessive.



Sure, there’s also densely-packed symbolism (ducks in the pool, grilled sausages) that will become more resonant over the course of the series, but mostly, this episode is a comic tour-de-force that barely hints at the shocking violence, moral compromises, and sheer epic visions to come.









"Lost"
September 22, 2004 (ABC)


Maybe the most cinematic pilot ever made, and almost certainly the most expensive (at a reported $10 to 14 million). The first few minutes alone are some of the most gripping and tense moments in TV history, starting with Jack’s (Matthew Fox) eye opening in silence (an image the series will return to often), and gradually increasing n scope to encompass the full horror of a recent jetliner crash on a tropical beach, with bloodied survivors screaming in panic.

We’re quickly introduced to more than a dozen major characters and what looks like a simple premise: Survivor: The Scripted Series.



But nothing in J.J. Abrams-land is ever straightforward, as we discover early on, with the unseen monster that kills the pilot, or the French distress call that’s been playing over and over for 16 years.

There’s little hint of what’s to come – the grand leaps into mythology and metaphysics, the Mobius-strip narrative structure – just two hours of breathless suspense, summed up with some final words from Charlie (Dominic Monaghan): “Guys, where are we?”

It was a question that hooked "Lost" fans and kept them coming back in search of answers for six seasons.









"Mad Men"
July 17, 2007 (AMC)


Matthew Weiner wrote this pilot back in 2000, and it marinated, fully formed in his head, over seven years before he got to film it. Which is good because, any sooner and he might not have been fortunate enough to cast Jon Hamm as Don Draper. Or, for that matter, Elisabeth Moss as Peggy Olson.

The pilot is chiefly remembered as a typical day in the life of adman Don Draper circa 1960, filled with tobacco smoke, martinis, a brilliantly improvised pitch to a restless client (Lucky Strikes cigarettes), a visit to the mistress, and a return home to the suburban wife and kids that marks the first sign of Draper’s mysterious double life.



But it’s also the first day on the job for Peggy, her first lessons on how to navigate this unabashedly sexist workplace as a woman (from Christina Hendricks’ veteran sexual warrior Joan, of course), her first steps toward sexual independence, and her first fateful encounter with caddish Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser).

As much as the pilot whets our appetite for the show’s meticulously recreated styles of the 1960s or for the confident cool of Don’s breezy, boozy existence, it also puts forth notice that this is going to be Peggy’s story, too, one with a decidedly different arc from Don’s.









"Breaking Bad"
January 20, 2008 (AMC)


The pilot plunges you into the craziness of Walter White’s (Bryan Cranston) new life in its very first images – the runaway pair of pants, billowing in the wind; the RV hurtling through the desert, with two apparent corpses on the floor and a third person unconscious in the passenger seat; and a pantsless Walter stopping to make a confessional videotape, then cocking his gun as sirens approach.

You might think it would take a whole season to explain how Walter transformed from mild-mannered high-school teacher to fugitive desperado, but it’s all there in this first episode. (The big shocker, as is apparent from Cranston’s grounded performance, is that it wasn’t that big a leap.)

The real message for Walt, his new partner-in-crime Jesse (Aaron Paul), and the audience is: As awful as the situation looks right now, it can get a whole lot worse, and it will.



The show’s signature tonal blend of the absurdly comical and the horrifically violent is already on display, as are its multilayered ironies, demonstrated by the episode-ending question from Walt’s wife, Skylar (Anna Gunn): “Walt, is that you?”

Who knew it would take five seasons to answer that question?









"Glee"
May 19, 2009 (Fox)


If the "Lost" pilot promised a scripted version of "Survivor", the "Glee" pilot promised a scripted version of "American Idol". Amid all the drama surrounding the creation of a student show choir at an Ohio high school, the producers found time to stage a dozen musical numbers, mixing contemporary Top 40 hits, Broadway show tunes, and classic rock and pop chestnuts.

The misfit kids were refreshingly unique and non-stereotypical; it was the adults who were cartoonish, from hiss-worthy villain Sue Sylvester (Jane Lynch) to doe-eyed Emma (Jayma Mays) to earnest, square-jawed Will Schuester (Matthew Morrison).



Granted, it was pretty hard to identify with Will when he extorted jock Finn (the late Cory Monteith) into joining the singing group by planting marijuana in his locker, but as would so often be the case on this series, you couldn’t argue with the results.

That final rendition of Journey’s 'Don’t Stop Believin’' (an ’80s song viewers should already have been tired of, after its revival in "The Sopranos" and Rock of Ages) justified all the silliness that had come before. (It also became a much-downloaded chart hit around the world.)



You could tell that, given the right coaching and the right material, these young singers could become huge stars.









"Game of Thrones"
April 17, 2011 (HBO)


Given how complicated the plotting of George R.R. Martin’s civil-war-in-a-medieval-fantasy-world is, and given how many dozens of characters there are to keep track of, the pilot lays out the big picture with surprising economy and clarity.

We’re introduced to the Night’s Watch rangers and the mysterious menace north of the ice wall, to the self-righteous Stark clan, to the snooty Lannisters, to the hard-living King Robert Baratheon, and (overseas) to the fiery young Daenerys Targaryen, about to be pimped out by her brother to a barbarian warlord to further his own long-shot bid at reclaiming Robert’s throne for his own exiled clan.



The episode is full of omens from nature (a dead stag, a dead direwolf, and dragon eggs hint at future deaths in the Baratheon and Stark clans and rebirth for the Targaryens), though they’re apparent only in retrospect.

Still, the episode ends with one of the all-time great pilot shockers: Ten-year-old Bran Stark, climbing the castle towers of his home, looks through a window and sees Queen Cersei Lannister and her twin brother Jaime committing incest, and Jaime, to protect the siblings’ secret affair, casually pushes the boy out the high window.



Viewers suddenly learn (not for the last time) that shocking violence can happen any time, and that no one is safe.

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