Television Pilots - As Distinguished From "first Episode"

As Distinguished From "first Episode"

A pilot episode is generally the first episode of a new show, shown to the heads of the studio to whom it is marketed.

The television industry uses the term differently from most viewers. Viewers frequently consider the first episode available for their viewing to be the pilot. They therefore assume that the first episode broadcast is also the episode that sold the series to the network. This is not always true. For instance, the episode "Invasion of the Bane" was not a pilot for The Sarah Jane Adventures because the BBC had committed to the first season before seeing any filmed content—yet it is routinely referred to as a pilot.

Sometimes, too, viewers will assign the word "pilot" to a work that represented the first appearances of characters and situations later employed by a series—even if the work was not initially intended as a pilot for the series. A good example of this is "Love and the Television Set" (later retitled "Love and the Happy Days" for syndication), an episode of Love, American Style which featured a version of the Cunningham family. It was in fact a failed pilot for the proposed 1972 series New Family in Town, not a successful pilot for 1974's Happy Days. So firmly embedded is the notion of it as a Happy Days pilot, however, that even series actress Erin Moran views it as such, as well as its creator, Garry Marshall.

On other occasions, the pilot is never broadcast on television at all. Viewers of Temple Houston, for example, would likely have considered "The Twisted Rope" its pilot because "The Man from Galveston" was only publicly exhibited in cinemas four months later. Even then, "The Man from Galveston" had an almost completely different cast, and its main character was renamed to avoid confusion with the then-ongoing series.