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The forgotten period in which the broadcast networks would air âanthologyâ shows of failed pilots in the middle of the summer.
Hey all, welcome back to Lesser Tedium, the pilot anthology version of Tedium. Wanna see what actually went to series? Subscribe over this way.
In a world of Netflix and Hulu and Paramount+ and Peacock, it can feel weird to consider that television was once something of a bloodsport. There were only so many slots on the dial, and if your show didnât work, there would always be another option.
Which meant that there were always new pilots being made. Now, pilots arenât cheap. You are basically doing all the work to set up a potential show, with the bet that it might be successful enough to revisit. The problem was, most pilots are generally failuresâuniverses created for the sake of a handful of executives, only to be seen once.
But did it really have to be that way? For a time, the networks didnât think so. At various periods throughout their histories, ABC, NBC, and CBS created faux-anthology shows that would do nothing but play these pilots to audiences to see if they might take to them. These pilots would get dumped in the middle of the summer, when people were usually not watching TV, in the hopes that, hey, maybe weâd go for it if we just saw it.
The networks havenât done this in quite a while, but the most recent network to do so was CBS, whose CBS Summer Playhouse brought us the Jim Henson-created Puppetman (which presumably was autobiographical) and a pilot for a television version of Coming to America.
The public was actually tasked with voting on the different series; if you liked the show, dial 1â900â220â2311; if you didnât, dial 1â900â220â2322.
The idea of an anthology show built around unsold pilots didnât work, but another network tried a slightly different tactic and got much better results: Around the same period as the CBS Summer Playhouse was losing steam, NBC just put promising-but-uncommitted pilots on the air as specials, no extra fluff, as a test. The result was at least two major hits for the network that went to seriesâSeinfeld and Blossom.
» Wanna learn more? We wrote about this as a part of a whole post about ways major networks have attempted to recoup their investments from pilots.