by Emily Maesar, Associated Editor, TVJawn

If you live in the United States, then you probably own a television. In fact, you probably have more than one in your house, given the data. Presently, the numbers put it higher than home, computer, and even car ownership in the US. Despite all the data, though, television has a… specific kind of connotation. The history of it is deeply interesting, as it’s only been in the last decade or so that the reputation of TV has shifted into a potential kingmaker. 

During the height of what many consider to be the “Golden Age of Television” there was still a rather large stigma attached to both making television, and to consuming it in large quantities. Only recently has there been a shift in the perception of actors moving from films to television with the rise of “Peak TV”. Before it was for the ostensibly washed-up actors and for new faces in the industry. It was a place to break in, or to make your last stand as a performer. Despite the money being good, the stigma was similar for the creative forces behind the shows, as it was for the faces on the screen. Even though television is in people’s lives more often, and for longer, than many films (even the biggest hits, at their peak) television is often seen as a “lesser” medium.

As someone who makes their living in scripted television, working in post production, I find it fascinating to see how people still consider television to be disposable. We, as a collective, seem to have accepted that not all television is schlocky, easily consumable nonsense, though. That the right show, with the right themes, and that looks the right way is worthy of our praise and adoration. However, I would argue that no television is actually unimportant. Sure, not all television is “prestige,” whatever that means nowadays. Not all of it should be committed into the pantheon of TV gods. But I’m here to say that we should take seriously every show that is deemed worthy of going through the arduous, and expensive, process of being made.

Even before television was made with any specific consideration to it as an art form, the types of shows and the way people were watching them was as important as it remains today. When you spend as much time as Americans do watching TV—even if it’s on in the background—it’s bound to affect you in some way. So, the hours upon hours of reality shows, procedurals, and nonsense teen shows are actively shaping the way that you’re viewing the world. Even if you don’t think they are. 

Now, let me just say (though I’m sure it’s quite obvious) that I love television. I have loved TV for as long as I could watch it, and I’ve always been curious about how it’s made for just as long. Which is, as it turns out, a complicated affair. On so many levels. Last year, I wrote about the 2007-2008 WGA Writers’ Strike, which was the last union strike in the industry (though there’s a very strong belief that it’ll happen again this coming year when the MBA, aka Minimum Basic Agreement, comes up for debate). That was one of my favorite pieces I’ve written and a really fun dig into something I find very interesting: esoteric specifics that really, really matters to very few people.

So, I decided that this year I was going to write a column in the vein of continuing that obsession. Actually, I’m doing two different columns this year, and the other one is also continuing some weird specific things I love about the film and television industry that I’ve kind of already written about: tie-in novels. But this one is about, as the column title suggests, the syntax of television. What are the things that make TV function, historically? Because I’ve been obsessed with TV, studied TV in college, and now work in TV, I have all these thoughts and knowledge about the function of behind-the-scenes things that range from pretty well known, but potentially misunderstood, to just flat-out industry-specific knowledge. And I want to talk about them. 

For this first piece in “The Syntax of Television” I wanted to talk about pilots. It seemed fitting to start by talking about the first episode of a show, why it’s called that, how it functions, and what the future of the medium means for this important little episode. 

Unfortunately, like many things in Hollywood, a lot of our history is quite apocryphal. This includes the idea of the “pilot.” Generally speaking, a pilot is the first episode made of any given TV show. It’s not always the first episode aired, but it’s the proof of concept for the rest of the series. So, why is it called a “pilot”? Great question… but we literally don’t have a cut and dry answer. It might be an etymological occurrence, with the word’s roots in Greek. But it also might be a reference to pilot lights or pilot ships. The metaphorical idea that this is the episode that gets everything cooking or steers the larger ship (the whole show), guiding it along. The ship one is the one that I was taught in college, and it’s my favorite because it’s also possible the etymological base also has to do with ship ores. No matter where the word came from, though, pilots became a staple of American television. One that seems like it’s kind of dying. More on that later.

Okay, so pilots exist. But what’s up with them? Well, since pilots act as the proof of concept for the future of the series, the rule of thumb for writing them is that if there’s some kind of recurring device (like voice over or flashbacks) that you want to have as part of the language of your show, then it better show up in this episode. It shouldn’t just show up a few episodes down the line, since the studio and network bought the show based on that first episode. Because, as you probably know, it’s really, really expensive to make television. It’s estimated that shooting a day of TV costs about half a million dollars and the average schedule for a single episode is about eight working days. So, pilots tend to cost somewhere between $3-6 million dollars to produce. However, there are the wildly expensive pilots. You’ve got the low end of $9 million, which was the cost of the HBO series Rome in 2005, which would be about $13.5 million in today’s money. And the astronomically high end of HBO’s Vinyl, a two-hour pilot that reportedly cost $30 million dollars in the year of our lord, 2016. 

There are two factors that tend to balloon pilot episode costs: genre and period. Sometimes both! It’s why the top ten list of “most expensive pilots” has shows like FOX’s Fringe, HBO’s Game of Thrones (HBO is all over this list), Netflix’s The Get Down, and ABC’s LOST. And since pilots are often indicative of what a network and studio should expect the average cost to be, the ones that are expensive need to be hits—which they aren’t always capable of being.

Pilot season, which traditionally happens on the broadcast networks (ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, and The CW) from January to April, is the time for all the executives to weed out the shows they don’t think are gonna cut it. Basically, during the fall of the previous year pitches and scripts go out to all the networks from writers and agents. Executives from each network pick a handful of shows to make pilots from, which are then processed like a normal episode of TV. Once they’re finished and screened, it’s decided which pilots will become actual shows and air on the respective network during the following fall (or sometimes even the next winter if they’re a mid-season replacement). 

So, something I find really interesting about knowing all of that, though, is that in the new era of television everything is changing. I know that, and so, dear reader, do you. TV feels different. Part of it is certainly because of the way the attitude surrounding television has changed, but it’s also because the entire model of TV has changed. Streaming, particularly Netflix, popularized a few things, including shows getting ordered to series. No pilot necessary. However, we often still call the first episode of shows that are ordered to series “the pilot.” I assume, even for myself, that is mostly out of conditioning.

As Netflix led the charge on ordering shows to series, many other streamers and cable networks (including premium cable like HBO, Starz, and Showtime) followed suit. A lot of television, especially the shows that many consider “prestige” aren’t made in the traditional system. Their pilots aren’t actually pilots and don’t tend to function as such, especially when you consider the rise of mini-series/limited series across all networks and studios. Pilots are, in effect, becoming a thing of the past. Except they aren’t actually. The broadcast networks still use them, and even still run a pilot season every year. Because broadcast has always known what streaming, cable, and pay cable are having to learn—television is the new television. 

The advantage with making a pilot, an actual pilot, is that you only spend whatever it costs to make that one episode. Maybe it’s a lot, sure. But if you make it, then you know. Maybe you make a second, updated pilot that better fits in with the rest of the show because of tone, location, or even casting. But at least you’re only out the cost of the episode if it doesn’t have legs as a concept. Which is the entire point of a pilot from the network and studio side of the business. 

Television is a vast and complicated old system. It’s kind of changing, but also remaining exactly the same. Streaming and new media has, for the last decade, tried to shake up the landscape of television, for better or for worse. As TV goes through growing pains specific to our current era, I think it’s important to talk about how things have been in the past, and how things are likely to be again. That’s what “The Syntax of TV” is ultimately about: the elements of television that add up to the whole of a very important medium. I’m excited to talk about the esoteric machinations of my industry with everybody because TV is just so dang weird!