Now's the time to bring out TV's unaired pilots
The Ringer's Ben Lindbergh makes a convincing argument that now's the time TV networks should bring out some of their unaired pilots, like for instance Charlie's How and Why and Game of Thrones' reportedly horrible original pilot.
One of the problems with trying to resuscitate those pilots long after some suit pronounced them dead is that they can’t fill a time slot week after week. “I think the issue is to just have a single episode of something,” Tarses says. “There’s really no way to promote and market it without spending money that you don’t want to spend on something that’s a one-off.”
There might be one way: Package the pilots together. At HBO, the original Game of Thrones pilot could conceivably serve as a pilot for a series of previously unseen pilots.
[...] Showtime passed on Ridley Scott’s The Vatican, which starred Kyle Chandler and would have marked Scott’s small-screen debut. CBS passed on Nick Stoller’s Entry Level, a cubicle comedy with a cast that included Michael Angarano and Brie Larson. ABC passed on a Brian Cox fantasy detective drama called Gotham (not the Batman one). NBC passed on Brad Anderson’s Midnight Sun, a Julia Stiles drama about an Alaskan cult being investigated by an FBI cult specialist. Comedy Central passed on David Gordon Green’s Black Jack, starring Ving Rhames as a decommissioned special ops agent. FX passed on Charlie Kaufman’s How and Why—a half-hour comedy starring John Hawkes and Michael Cera—as well as Hoke, a Scott Frank vehicle starring Paul Giamatti as a homicide detective in mid-1980s Miami. (Source)
