TCA: FOX says killing off pilot season

At the Television Critics Association’s Winter Press Tour FOX chairman of entertainment Kevin Reilly took the stage and announced that he’s finally doing it — he’s killing off pilot season. The jumbo screen showcased a graphic of a tombstone that read “RIP Pilot Season” and listed the years 1986 to 2013.

“R.I.P.  Pilot Season,” Reilly said. “I’ve been trying to do this for a long time on FOX. We collectively have been trying to do this on FOX for a long time.  Many of you heard from Damon Lindelof last week in his HBO session … and he said something about ‘Cable is far superior to network.’  He said, ‘When you slow down the conveyor belt, the quality goes up.’  And I agree with him, and that’s what we want to do on FOX. He’s referring to cable’s ongoing success record of developing hit shows in a scheduling format that allows for more flexibility and more time to finesse a show to get it right. The current frenzy involved in pushing out sometimes 10-plus new shows over the course of a 6 to 8-week Fall TV time period is not a playground FOX wishes to continue trying to build their sandcastle around. This year, officially for the first time, we are going to be bypassing pilot season.  “The broadcast, development, and scheduling system was built for a different era,” Reilly explained. “It was built in a three‑network monopoly when we had all the talent and all of the audience.  It’s highly inefficient.”

“Every first-season show, whether it’s great or whether it’s in trouble, needs course-correction,” says Reilly.

With a lot of shows that “live in the middle” and have “potential” the thought process is the extra time and nurturing given up front could yield better quality TV.  FOX believes the new direction will afford them that opportunity and allow for more flexibility, in addition to making them more talent friendly.

“Every first‑season show, whether it’s great or whether it’s in trouble, needs course correction and needs further cooking,” Reilly said. “So here’s what we are going to do:  I think we can create a better, more talent‑friendly, more consistently creative way to do this. We have, in fact, been ordering series throughout the year and are currently in some stage of series production on 9 projects as I sit here today.  That’s before I order one new pilot in this pilot season.”

FOX has nine shows already in production, which is months in advance of where they normally would be, some of those being:
• Wayward Pines, the Matt Dillon and Terrence Howard event series
• Gotham, which the net describes as an “operatic soap” with larger than life qualities, a storyline that features all of the classic Batman characters and how they came to be
• Backstrom, the comedy featuring Rainn Wilson (The Office) as a cranky detective. The series comes from Bones creator Hart Hanson.
• Hieroglyph, an action-adventure set in Ancient Egypt following a notorious thief.
• Middle Man, a crime drama about 1960s Boston mob, where Ben Affleck will make his TV directing debut.
• Fatrick, a pilot with Nanatchka Khan and Corey Nickerson