I'm not saying I like to have dessert first, very clearly. I'm saying I like the appetizer to be appetizing.

Personally, if I find a show to be interesting in its premise, I'm willing to give it a season to figure itself out. Season 2 is put up or shut up time, for me.

I think it's not very much different from the Terminator/Terminator 2 thing. Terminator 2 is awesome, but to get there and have it make much sense you need to see Terminator 1, which isn't that great but it'll be worth it. In a TV season, there may be awesome stuff coming later but it requires the laying of groundwork. "Give it a season" means, I think, give it the groundwork as a time investment, and ideally it'll pay off later. And also, of course, the show needs to proceed to get more interesting even within the season or it's not a good sign.

A lot of shows never make it past the pilot. If a show makes it to the stage that it was picked up for a full run AND multiple people are telling me that it's a worthwhile time investment, then that doesn't guarantee anything obviously but I feel like it's only fair to give it a shot even if the pilot is only meh.

And yeah, I can't think of any show I loved right out of the gate with the pilot.

I think the difference is you define "in the beginning" as just the pilot, whereas most people would give a show at least a few episodes to make its case. But if it doesn't interest you at all then there's not much to be done.

The key word there is "intentions."  The best shows I have loved exceeded their intentions.  I started watching Buffy because I was ok with the premise of a chick fighting vampires with Karate.  But it wasn't until the course of several seasons that you really got the most of the ever changing relationships, show dynamics, and set pieces that all sprout from their evolving intentions over time that I REALLY enjoyed it.  Sometimes it doesn't work, like with Dollhouse.  Sometimes the inverse is true, like with Lost.  Thus is the nature with any kind of serialized story telling.  Everyone's threshld is different, as are the preferences we possess that allow us to tolerate some of more and less of others.  But honestly, I'm glad that I've had friends who have told me to shut up, take my medicine, and stick with a thing because it does indeed pay off sometimes.

Last edited by Eddie (2011-08-11 18:22:47)

I think the problem here, frankly, is one of hype and expectations. If you're watching a show casually then you're likely to give it an episode or two to see where it's going. If you're watching a show because you've heard how great it is and you feel left out of the conversation, then when it's not immediately great it's easy to dismiss it.

But the people who are saying it's great are the ones who went in with no real expectations, gave it a few episodes and watched it unfold. You're going in with expectations that were built by viewer reactions to the run of the show/season. They aren't expectations the pilot was meant to meet.

When people tell you that a show is good, they mean the show, long term, is good, not necessarily the pilot. So to see the good stuff they're talking about, you'll have to go further.

I'm kind of on the fence. I've had the same feeling as Teague—especially with 24 and Lost. But I gave in on Fringe and recently just finished the first season—15 hours later it's getting good.

But I also think that movies are often hampered by the fact that they're trying to cover an awful lot of ground in two hours—making you understand and like all the characters, follow the action, and so on. It's not at all easy. With TV shows, I think we should all WANT them to take their time revealing the characters and unraveling the mysteries. It keeps the shows from being Gilligan's Island: here are seven people from all social strata stranded on an island; enjoy a hundred identical episodes.

Still a TV show needs to really PULL you in with the first two or three episodes. That's its JOB. Set up the characters—leave some mysterious for now, but intriguing. Set up some conflict that isn't going to get resolved immediately.

I'm old enough to be completely with Teague on this. Episode One of any show is the sales pitch to the audience for the rest of it, and needs to be built accordingly.

As with any sales pitch, it needs to grab my attention, then deliver the whole pitch before it loses my attention. That pitch needs to amount to "stick with us, it'll be worth it."

I'm not remotely interested in listening to any show warming up or finding its voice over the course of some indeterminate number of episodes; life's too frigging short, and the writers and producers should have done that already before throwing the monkeys in front of the cameras.

Several of the shows mentioned above have the advantage of having been left on the air long enough to find a voice that we can now talk about, but that's with hindsight. Plenty of other shows remain uninvolving, and I don't think it's my job to pay out a load of attention rope to a show just in case it finally grabs hold of it.

Now, this doesn't always work out: FlashForward's pilot had a bunch of momentum, and then stalled for most of the rest of the season before blowing up the gear box in a panic at the end; Heroes had a stonking beginning, and only really turned to mush in season three.

I've repeatedly heard the claim that it can take a show three seasons to get really good, and the 'evidence' for this is Star Trek: the Next Generation, which does, indeed, have a truly horrible pilot.  (So horrible, that my girlfriend and I literally gave up on it partway through, and didn't see the rest of it until years later, after catching a few season three episodes re-engaged us with the show.) However, I think this claim is as spurious as the claim that it takes Microsoft three goes to make any product good (based on Windows 3.0 being the first non-terrible version).

ST:TNG might have convinced Rick Berman that he deserved three seasons of our attention to get his acts together with DS9 and Voyager and Enterprise, all of which underwent significant changes during their respective seasons three, but that was just a cheap excuse for not being ready at the start, and he was less able to get away with each time as we had more alternatives to just sticking with it.

If you're producing a new show, you need to grab my attention and win it with Episode One, don't just expect that I'll donate literally days of my life to you on the off-chance that you might get your act together once you've learned how to write what you want to say.

But.

So, that. 

Would you at least say it'd be ideal if all showrunners thought they only had one chance to hook an audience, and focused on making the pilot do just that?

Yeah, if a movie sucks, then oh well, no franchise. TV shows automatically get a couple of more shots. This has especially been true since Star Trek—after taking off in syndication, the network ended up kicking itself for not giving it more of a chance in the first place... and you can never go back.

So, keep in mind, Teague, that you're on the same side as Fox. They canceled Firefly, Futurama, Family Guy, and whatever else because they didn't seem to be getting traction. Then, whoops, a lot of people liked 'em. They were SO popular, that they actually got second chances, but it's not the same. (Well, Family Guy is the same, for whatever that's worth....)

Even so, after Twin Peaks, I've long had a policy of waiting out TV shows—especially since I got a DVR—until I was satisfied that they weren't going to suck or wander off into crazyland. (I'm lookin' at you, Lost.)

I guess what I'm saying is: William Shatner is the greatest man alive.

/stuck in Charlotte airport in a frickin' white squall

Give it a pilot, Teague.