[objclxt]

Although it's more expensive to do a separate pilot, it's not always a waste of time or money. In many cases, ideas that on paper are very good don't translate well. A pilot lets you catch these problems and remedy them. If you go straight to series you may end up only finding out about these issues when it's too late to fix them.

A few good examples of this: the (unaired) pilot for BBC's Sherlock is a not fantastic 60 minutes with significant pacing problems, which was subsequently reshot and turned into a well received 90 minute miniseries. The US version of Life on Mars got completed re-located and re-cast as the pilot was just bad (...most people wouldn't call what ended up as 'good', but it was a vast improvement on the pilot).

Neither approach is without its problems. Take a show like Game of Thrones, which is very expensive to make. On the one hand, HBO could have saved millions of dollars by not ordering a pilot. On the other, it was pretty clear once it came back from post production that the approach the writers had originally taken wasn't going to work, and a number of changes were made to make the show more accessible to people who hadn't read the books.

So HBO did 'waste' several million dollars on a pilot that never aired, but the ability for the creative team to review the pilot before embarking on a full series commitment meant many changes could be made that resulted in a better show. HBO have easily recouped the lost money.

It's interesting that Amazon have taken the opposite approach to Netflix, and ordered a large number of pilots rather than going straight into series commitments.

[bcrescimanno]

For House of Cards, where known commodities like Kevin Spacey and David Fincher were already attached to a known story (House of Cards is a remake of a British series from the late 80s) it probably doesn't make sense to do a pilot.

It'll be interesting to see how it plays out. None of the Netflix originals so far has done a traditional "pilot" approach and, while I was there at least, there was no desire to start taking that approach.

The Netflix model is really completely different than traditional TV. Take Hemlock Grove as an example. Critically panned and considered by most people in HN circles to be a "bad" show--but (without going into detail) I can absolutely say it has been VERY successful for Netflix.

[cdash]

I have heard this before, and just to inject my own experience while I like House of Cards it took me awhile to get through it. Hemlock Grove though I went on a complete binge, every episode that ended I wanted to watch the next one.

[bcrescimanno]

The thing I've heard most often about Hemlock Grove sounds something like this, "It's really, REALLY bad! Oh man, it was so terrible! I watched the whole thing in like 2 days and it sucked! I can't wait for Season 2--it's gonna be terrible!"

(only slightly exaggerated)

[mythz]

I found Hemlock Grove interesting, the story progressed really slowly, luckily Netflix allows all-you-can-eat watching so I end up watching the whole season in a couple of weeks - where if I had to wait a week in between episodes I likely wouldn't have bothered. Overall I thought the production quality was high with good actors/acting and I liked that it had an unusual story-line even though I don't really like that genre. Will definitely watch next season, tho there are also better things on Netflix.

[bambax]

> the (unaired) pilot for BBC's Sherlock is a not fantastic 60 minutes with significant pacing problems, which was subsequently reshot and turned into a well received 90 minute miniseries

Oh, that's what it was then. I downloaded the first series of Sherlock and was surprised to see the same first story twice.

But I thought the first version was vastly superior to the second one; it had much less money, which, in my opinion, allowed it to be more intense and more "real".

Whatever you think, it's most interesting to watch both!

[seanmcdirmid]

Why not use pilots like kickstarters? Produce a bunch of promising pilots, have consumers "vote" or even "fund" what pilots they want to see made into TV series?

[wildster]

That is what Amazon are trying: http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=10011555...

[kennywinker]

Unfortunately their content is pretty cruddy. I watched the Zombieland pilot and one other and they were both borderline unwatchable. Bad acting / writing / production, etc.