Pilot season craziness

It’s pilot season.   This is the time pilots for the fall season are shot.  Invariably a few implode, or there is frantic re-casting and rewriting.  As someone who has made numerous pilots and gotten series orders for most of them, I don’t understand this.  

Unless…

The show was miscast.  Often that means being forced to take an actor the network or studio wanted but you didn’t.

The premise and/or writing was bad and never should have been picked up in the first place.  

The pilot notes sucked the life out of it.  

But otherwise, consider these factors:

You’ve had months to write this episode, not just a few days.

You’ve had weeks and sometimes months to find the people who have demonstrated they’ve made THIS material work better than any other actor.  Normally you tailor the material to the actor.  In a pilot’s case, it’s the opposite.  You find actors who can maximize the script.   You'll never hear an actor say, "My character wouldn't say this" when auditioning.  He'll bend himself into a pretzel to make work what's on the page.

There are always changes during the week of production.  When things get on their feet they sometimes don’t work or need to be adjusted.   Once you have solid actors in place you can start to write more to their voice and behavior.  Frequently, first production drafts are too long and overwritten and you see what needs to be pruned.  

But the basic script and structure should work.  

The production process always begins with a table-read.  The cast reads the script aloud, and it’s your first real indication of what you’ve got.   Those used to be intimate affairs done in a conference room around a big table.  Maybe twenty people besides the actors were in attendance — staff and a network and studio rep.  

Today, as many as 150 attend these things.  Every executive west of La Brea.  And they’re now held in huge halls with the actors sitting on a dais instead of around a table relating to each other.  It’s utterly insane.

And since the TV industry operates out of fear, to hedge their bets that the table reading will go relatively well, most studios insist on a pre-table read with only a slightly smaller number of attendees.  

I never feared table readings.  I never feared moments that didn’t work in table reading.  So what?  We’d fix them.  But our table readings always went well.  We stacked the deck with the best possible cast.  We knew what we had going in.

We did do one trick that helped, however.  Actors have to be approved by the studio and network.  So depending, these execs can hear the same scene six or eight times.  By the time they get to the table reading it’s no longer funny to them.  So we always wrote separate audition scenes that highlighted the strengths of the actors.  That way, the network was hearing the pilot for the first time at the table reading and all the jokes were fresh.  

Good luck to everyone making a pilot.  Some will come out great.  Hopefully yours.


from By Ken Levine