Let’s Visit Some Alternate Timelines

For obvious reasons, we’re in the suckiest timeline now. If only things had gone a different way at some point in the past — if the hanging chads had hung differently, if Howard Dean hadn’t screamed so close to the mic, if someone hadn’t stepped on a particular butterfly — we would be in a totally different reality now.

Each of those events branched us off into a different timeline, and nobody could predict what would come next, just like you couldn’t predict that the rest of this newsletter is about to pivot to a totally unrelated topic. In another timeline, it continues on about the election, but in this timeline it takes a sudden shift to talk about television.

See, there’s a genre of videos that can be found online that always makes me think of alternate timelines: failed TV pilots.

Each time I see a pilot for a TV show that never got picked up, I wonder, but what if it had?

What if Jean Smart, Octavia Spencer and Christopher Lloyd were all in a sitcom about a family medical practice and it became a huge hit everyone talked about?

Or what if Marissa Tomei starred in a sitcom about a literary genius with writer’s block, and everyone loved it?

Maybe comedy’s not your thing. Okay, then. What if Natalie Dormer, Leslie Odum Jr., and Christopher Egan were in a period crime drama set in 1840 Boston where the only person who could possibly solve a series of murders is Edgar Alan Poe?

Or what if Spike Lee directed a show starring Amy Ryan and Bobby Cannavale about a public advocate who’s used to fighting City Hall but when the mayor falls into a coma he suddenly becomes the interim Mayor Of New York?

And how would history have changed if Brian Cox and Katee Sackhoff were in a hit show about a detective forced to work old John Doe cases? I mean, okay, it probably wouldn’t have changed that much, but what if it meant Brian Cox’s career went in a slightly different direction and we never got Succession?

And I have to wonder if Pedro Pascal would have been in the second Wonder Woman movie if the David E. Kelley Wonder Woman TV show pilot he was in had gone anywhere.

Every one of these shows that never got picked up is the start of a counterfactual for me where I try to imagine where the show would have gone, and how that would have changed things. Think of your favorite TV show that had a cultural impact. How would things be different if it had never gotten past the pilot episode?

Back in the 90s, people used to trade videotapes of pilot shows that achieved cult status. Most notable for me was Lookwell, a comedy written by Conan O’Brien and Robert Smigel starring Adam West as a washed up actor who used to play a detective on TV and now imagines himself to be an actual detective. When he’s not teaching acting classes, he uses his terribly outdated skills to go undercover and help the police, who find him more annoying than anything else. It’s one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen, and I still quote it often to this day.

Lookwell finally did air on TV on the now-defunct cable network Trio. They had a series called Brilliant But Cancelled that showed programs that either never made it to air or were cancelled too soon and forgotten.

Another critically-acclaimed pilot that never got picked up but gained a cult following was Heat Vision and Jack, written by Dan Harmon and directed by Ben Stiller, starring Jack Black as an astronaut who develops powers after being bombarded by solar energy, and his sidekick, a talking motorcycle voiced by Owen Wilson. Yes, you read all of that right.

Unaired pilots are a mixed bag. A rare few, like Lookwell, are quite fun. But most of them are passed on for good reason. If you watched more than a minute of that Marisa Tomei example above, you understand why it wasn’t picked up. So watching old pilot episodes is rarely truly great entertainment and more often just a curiosity.

But if you are curious to explore what might have been, here are some places you can go to find a ton of pilot episodes:

/r/RIPilots — There are only about 1,000 members of this subreddit, but it’s always full of surprises, with people posting “unique unaired pilots, weird concepts, original pitches, and shows cancelled before they reached their full potential. Terrifying utter garbage that we are happy didn't make it to air is also allowed.”

TV Pilots Archive — This treasure trove on the Internet Archive has 346 pilot episodes you’ve never seen, from About A Boy based on the Nick Hornby novel, starring Patrick Dempsey, to Zero Effect starring Alan Cumming as detective Daryl Zero.

TV Tunnel Unaired Pilots — Another 72 pilot episodes on the Internet Archive

Media Garage is a YouTube channel that posts a lot of unaired pilots, but I’ve noticed that some of them are unlisted, with links shared on the above-linked subreddit and on their Patreon.

90sKid is another YouTube channel with a lot of unaired pilots, particularly from an era that may be of interest to, well, 90s kids.

Among all those pilot episodes, you’ll also find shows that did get picked up as a series but were retooled, sometimes with changes to the cast. And that brings me to the TV pilot alternate timeline I guess I most wish we were on.

See, the pilot episode of NewsRadio featured a character who was an electrician named Rick, played by Greg Lee.

After the pilot episode, his character was replaced by a handyman named Joe, played by Joe Rogan.

NewsRadio was a fantastic show. It still holds up. And Joe Rogan was pretty funny on it. But I can’t help but wonder what the timeline looks like where Greg Lee was kept in the role that made Rogan famous.

[It turns out that Cracked wondered the same thing and actually reached out to Greg to ask what he thinks would have happened in that alternate timeline.]

Well, I guess we’re stuck in the timeline we’re in. I have no words of wisdom to help get through it right now. I fluctuate between disbelief that Trump will actually do all the things he said he would (like, logistically, how could you even round up and deport 11 million people?) and concern that he’ll do so much worse things that we haven’t even thought of yet.

I’ll be here with you through it all. But if you need a brief escape, a way to imagine what would have been if things had gone just slightly differently, maybe one of the TV pilots can help you cope for just a little bit.

And if anyone has a copy of the original pilot for Game Of Thrones, let me know. I’m dying to see it.

As always, thanks for reading. See you next time.

David