Network TV Pilot Season Is Mostly Dead — but Stubbornly Hasn’t Gone Away Completely
variety.comJoe Otterson TV Reporter Broadcast pilot season was already mostly dead when the Hollywood strikes came along. But to paraphrase Billy Crystal in “The Princess Bride,” “There’s a big difference between ‘mostly dead’ and ‘all dead.’ Mostly dead is slightly alive!” And that’s where pilot season now stands: Mostly dead — and yet still stubbornly, slightly alive.
A relic of a bygone TV era, broadcast pilot season has been on the chopping block for years as networks aimed to get out of that springtime crunch by focusing on year-round development.
The fact is, pilot season was already so disrupted there was not much left to disrupt, strikes or no strikes. After all, last pilot season saw the broadcast networks pick up just six shows out of their combined 14 pilots.
Compare that to pre-pandemic times, when it was a shock that the broadcast networks ordered just 60 pilots in early 2020. But sales are still happening, and pilots will indeed be produced during the January-April period that has traditionally been deemed “pilot season,” according to multiple network programming executives and agency sources who spoke with Variety.
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