A word on television sitcom pilots, because I finished writing one this week.
First off, a pilot is the first episode of a TV series that does not yet exist. So when you write a pilot, the hope is that you’re creating characters and a situation that eventually will be made into a series. On the face
of it, it seems relatively easy. They wrote a billion episodes of “Friends;” how hard could it be to write one episode of your own show?
It’s much more difficult than it sounds, and here’s why. A sitcom pilot needs to have a story -- with a beginning, middle and end -- like any other TV show. It also has to be funny. But in making it funny, writers can’t rely on the audience knowing the characters; they’ve never met them before.
So, on “Friends,” if Joey walks into a room and finds a beautiful woman and a great-looking sandwich, the audience will laugh because they know that Joey is both a womanizer and always starving. But in a pilot, they know nothing about the characters. Which presents the third challenge: giving the audience all the information they need to know about the characters and the situation they’re in without being boring, explanatory or pedantic, while at the same time telling the story and being funny.
And here’s the other thing. According to conventional wisdom, networks don’t like it when a pilot is too “premisey.” That is, if it spends too much time dealing with how the characters got into the situation in which the audience has found them. They execs prefer if a pilot cold be essentially interchangeable with any other episode, whether it’s No. 2 or No. 200 (and if your show actually makes it to episode 200, you certainly don’t need to be reading this). Then, when you’re done writing it, the hope is a network will buy the thing from you.
They seems to buy over 100 pilots each year (some they commission, others come in from the outside). Of those, only a handful of them are actually filmed. Of the handful filmed, only about five get chosen to be run on TV along with the filming of subsequent episodes. Of those, only a very lucky few survive on the air. So now I just cross my fingers (can I say that on a JTA blog?).
