Sink or Swim 📺
The forgotten period in which the broadcast networks would air “anthology” 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 didn’t work, there would always be another option.
Which meant that there were always new pilots being made. Now, pilots aren’t 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 failures—universes 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 didn’t 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 we’d go for it if we just saw it.
The networks haven’t 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 1–900–220–2311; if you didn’t, dial 1–900–220–2322.
The idea of an anthology show built around unsold pilots didn’t 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 series—Seinfeld 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.