Pilot Season

by Michael Taylor

This column is dedicated to explaining aspects of the media industry. It is written by Michael Taylor who has worked as a juicer (set lighting technician) in Hollywood for over 30 years, and has the battle scars to prove it. This month is the first in a four-part series on television pilots.

Part I: How it Works

With all due respect to T.S. Eliot, I’m not so sure April really is the cruelest month – not in Hollywood, anyway.  Here, April represents the frenzied peak of pilot season, when single episodes of brand new television dramas and comedies are cranked out at a furious pace on sound stages all over town.  April certainly is the craziest month, as writers, producers, and crews work very long hours preparing these fledgling shows to spread their wings and fly, everyone hoping their project will be chosen by the networks to crack the lineup of the new fall season.

The results of all this feverish work are announced at the annual “upfronts” in New York during the first two weeks of May, when the networks trot out their new shows – the winners of pilot season.  In the television industry, April is all about hope, while May wears the bloody crown of thorns as the cruelest month of all.

A typical sit-com pilot takes eight to ten days to rig and light, followed by a one or two day shoot, then three more days to dismantle the sets and take all that equipment down. For the set lighting crew (those who hang, power, and adjust the two hundred and fifty or so lamps required to light a typical sit-com), this usually amounts to three solid weeks of work – and it’s all work, all the time, pushing that big rock uphill the whole way. Waiting at the top is the promise – implied or explicit – that should the pilot get “picked up” by the network; the crew that did the heavy lifting will go along for the ride. For those of us who prefer the cozy world of multi-camera sit-coms over other forms of Media Industry slavery, working a pilot represents the first rung on the ladder to fully employed nirvana.

The next step is for the pilot to get picked up – and if that happens, you’ve got yourself a show, at which point you start praying this show can step up to the next plateau and become a hit. The chances of all this happening grow slimmer and slimmer all the way up – but when a show captures that certain special magic, the payoff is be very sweet indeed. The lighting and grip crews who worked on Cheers, Frazier, All about Raymond, Will and Grace, and Seinfeld all enjoyed a fat, eight-to-ten year run. For that whole time, those crews didn’t have to worry about day-playing, jumping from one job to the next, or calling around looking for work.  They never had to wonder when the next paycheck might come along.  If you can land a hit show, you’re cruising on the smooth side of Easy Street.

Until your big hit show finally runs out of steam, or its suddenly swollen-headed stars price themselves into the stratosphere – at which point you’re right back at Square One, and extremely unemployed.  Then again, all good things come to an end in this veil of tears we call life – dust to dust, as the Good Book says.  Ashes to ashes. 

Much like baseball, pilot season is mostly about failure.  Every spring begins with boundless hope, but ends with most of the participants shrugging their shoulders and muttering something about maybe-next-year.  Back in the good old days (which ended a few years ago), sit-coms more or less ruled the television earth. Every spring, the networks would order something like five hundred scripts for pilot season. Of those, ninety might survive the winnowing process to be filmed as pilots, of which twenty would land a slot in the new fall TV lineup, or as mid-season replacements. Sit-coms have fallen on hard times since then, drastically reducing those numbers, but I doubt the ratio of success to failure has changed all that much. With only one in five filmed pilots going the distance, navigating pilot season remains a barefoot sprint across a minefield.  Over the last ten years, very few of the pilots I worked on managed to run this brutal gantlet – and of those, none survived past their first season.

Television has always been a rough business, and never more so than now, as the old ways and business models crumble in the face of an internet technology nobody yet fully understands how to control.  The times may be a changin’, but exactly how – and to what – remains decidedly murky. 

Next Month: What it means to be “Hot”.