NBC has decided the time has come to change the way television shows are created, by eliminating pilots. The New York Times reports:

Networks like NBC have long relied on big-budget pilot episodes of television series in an effort to attract advertiser support for the rest of the season. But Mr. Zucker said the pilots, the first episode of a show and whose production cost has shot up to $7 million for an hour from about $3 million three years ago, were a poor indicator of the future success of a series and many never move beyond the pilot stage.

I agree on the one hand, it makes some sense. They’re spending millions of dollars for something that never gets off the drawing board.

But at the same time, how can you evaluate a tv show and it’s worth if you don’t see it in action? What measurement are you going to use to determine if something is worth your investment? You can’t really tell how good or bad something is going to be from a script alone. Are we going to start relying on creators to make fancy PowerPoint presentations or something?

While the report, and NBC, treat this as just “another cost saving measure,” it occurs to me that this is a huge and fundamental change to television. Pilot season is in it’s death knells, so how are actors going to get hired on for parts? There are plenty of actors I know in hit shows who say they got the job just because they went to L.A. for pilot season and lucked into a project that got picked up.

The article doesn’t really say what NBC will be doing instead, and that worries me. Are they considering scripted tv to be dead, or dying?

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008 at 9:42 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.