This post is for What Else Is Alan Watching? bonus tier subscribers. Click here if you want to upgrade your account.
Alan Sepinwall
In last week's review of Adults Season Two, I noted that there's a long history of TV shows that made multiple pilot episodes, even if the way Adults did it — shooting a new pilot after an entire season had been produced and released, and slotting in as the series' first episode for all future streaming, to give new viewers a cleaner entry point —is something I've never seen before.
Still, there are many reasons to reshoot a pilot, and many levels of success when it happens. So let's look at some memorable cases of it.
With one exception, which I'll get into below, I'm not going to touch on instances where one role in a pilot was recast while the rest of the episode remained untouched. And I'm also not going to include situations like The Seinfeld Chronicles, which had some notable differences from the (retitled) series that followed — Kramer was named Kessler, and instead of Elaine, the fourth notable character was a diner waitress (played by Lee Garlington) — but actually aired(*). Nor am I getting into pilots that changed a lot but weren't necessarily reshot: Fox's dinosaur drama Terra Nova had three different pilots — each one somehow worse than the one before — but if I recall correctly, this was either entirely a case of different editing choices regarding preexisting footage, or it was mostly preexisting footage(**).
(*) The Seinfeld Chronicles, though, is rare in that the pilot aired a year before the modified, and retitled, series that followed.
(**) Regardless, the only reason to remember Terra Nova is for the promos they ran for one episode where a befuddled Stephen Lang asked the immortal question, "How do you kill a man with a dinosaur?"
This also isn't meant to be exhaustive. For instance, I know of but have never seen the original Gilligan's Island pilot, where Gilligan, the Skipper, and the Howells were joined by two secretaries and a high school teacher, rather than Ginger, the Professor, and Mary Ann. The ones I chose are just interesting examples that illustrate different aspects of a wide phenomenon.