Stealth Pilots, Bombing
At the AV Club, Todd VanDerWerff and Noel Murray have an “inventory” on a subject that is near and dear to my heart: failed backdoor pilots (or as I prefer to call them, “stealth pilots”) from successful shows .
You know the kind of episode they mean; a show presents an episode that is mostly about characters we’ve never seen before, because this episode is going to be shown to the network as a pilot for a proposed series. When the series gets picked up, it’s still mildly weird to find an episode of All in the Family where Archie disappears early on, and we spend the rest of the episode getting to know the Jeffersons’ new neighbours. But it becomes a truly surreal and confusing experience when the pilot was rejected, as most pilots are. That’s probably one reason why the practice became less common as time went on. The reason for making a backdoor pilot is that it defrays the cost: instead of needing to raise the money to make a separate pilot, it’s covered by the budget of the existing series, and if the pilot fails, its costs are recouped in syndication. But “who the hell are these people?” episodes can hurt the show’s value in syndication, which loses the production company much of what it gained, financially, from the backdoor-pilot process.



