Premise pilot or no?

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  • Premise pilot or no?

    Is there a general trend toward premise pilots (here's how we got stuck on Gilligan's Island) vs "just another day stuck on the island" pilots?

    I am starting a new pilot, wrote the premise pilot, but the one person who read it kind of feels like it should start after the premise.

    Does it depend on the story, probably? Maybe this is why we have flashbacks and theme songs?

  • #2
    Re: Premise pilot or no?

    I don't know about the trend, but what would be wrong with a premise pilot in any case?

    "The fact that you have seen professionals write poorly is no reason for you to imitate them." - ComicBent.

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    • #3
      Re: Premise pilot or no?

      The advice given to me by my agent has always been to write a "typical" episode of the series that I envision. I had a script go out to a prodco last summer, and the feedback I had on it was to tweak it in exactly that direction -- the exec wanted to see a normal day in the office, before the incident I had chosen for the pilot.

      That said, I've got at least two premise pilots that have stood me well for getting a few meetings. But even those are written to reflect what the standard series episodes will look like.

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      • #4
        Re: Premise pilot or no?

        Originally posted by ComicBent View Post
        I don't know about the trend, but what would be wrong with a premise pilot in any case?
        so much real estate in a premise pilot is spent on establishing characters and world that it's not entirely representative of what a non-premise episode of the show will ultimately look like. (for a serialized show, it seems essential to start with a premise pilot; something more procedural, maybe not so much)

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        • #5
          Re: Premise pilot or no?

          I've read my fair share of pilots since I started the development service. Nearly all of them have the same exact problem: They are about nothing, just all character set-up. It's like if in the pilot episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David walked around being rude to random people and nothing ever correlated together. No, Larry gets into a specific situation, winds up either talking sh!t to someone he doesn't know or winds up looking like a heel to someone he knows, then this person either re-enters his life in some capacity and now he is embarrassed, or his attempts to make something up to a friend winds up making the situation worse. Things correlate. The Pilot should be episode 1, not a prologue to episode 1.

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          • #6
            Re: Premise pilot or no?

            Hmm ... interesting and persuasive points.

            I suppose that a premise pilot would be unengaging if it spent its time just introducing characters. But maybe it is possible, especially with an hour-long show, to establish some of the world instead of just dropping the audience into a typical day. Just a thought.

            "The fact that you have seen professionals write poorly is no reason for you to imitate them." - ComicBent.

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            • #7
              Re: Premise pilot or no?

              Thanks for all your thoughts.

              A second reader read my pilot and also feels it's better as a "day in a life" rather than a premise pilot.

              Without giving too much away, imagine I was sitting down to write Friends. If you think about the first season (and later think about Grace and Frankie, also by Marta Kaufman) it's easy to see that an early draft might have focused on Ross and the breakup of his marriage. Maybe even in detail.

              Instead, it was better to NOT meet Carol right away. Instead we meet the characters, see that Ross is in crisis over the breakup of his marriage and he says something about wishing he could meet someone and in walks Rachel in a wedding dress.

              (We could've also seen Rachel deciding whether or not to leave Barry, but instead we get the most dramatic elements of each without all the details. Then the details unfold later, throughout the series...)

              So. For me, I'm gonna write it the second way. But that's my particular situation.
              Thanks!

              ("I've grown so much since lunch!" - Wet Hot American Summer)
              Last edited by cvolante; 08-22-2017, 07:32 AM. Reason: because I'm a writer...

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