The Pilot Thread

[Franko]

She's With Me, Dinah Manoff & Jerry Hall's buddy comedy from 1986. Christopher Rich and Michael Sabatino are among the guest cast. Another one that NBC passed on.

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[DRW50]

I did like Terence on the show but I agree a Robert Hays type would have been a more natural fit. 

That was such a good little show, even if I think they would have needed a big cast upheaval (mainly at the soap) if they had gotten another season.

Here's a bts visit with It Had to Be You, which appropriately seems to have been dropped in a vat of acid. 

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The clip of Faye finding out and calling the network is or was on Youtube too.

[Khan]

Also among the guest cast: Charles Flohe (ex-Preacher, EON; ex-Connor, SaBa; ex-Grant, B&B).  He played the OTHER guy who sat with Jerry Hall at that restaurant.

I'm not a "Married...with Children" fan, but I love just about everything else that Ron Leavitt and Michael G. Moye wrote, so I really wanted to like this one.  But...oh my God...Jerry Hall, lol.

Edited November 19, 2024 by Khan

[Vee]

I got through about 15 seconds of Jerry Hall footage.

[DRW50]

With yet another name (Charles R. Cooper). Did he ever say why he changed his name so many times?

I actually thought Jerry worked well enough in this after a rough start. She brings a sweet quality to the role. Where I think they go wrong is it takes so long for Dinah (who is also very good) to start genuinely being kind to her instead of resenting her and trying to steal her offcamera boyfriend.

(I wonder if they were holding out for Mick to appear in the part) 

Still, I thought it was a decent pilot and I'm sorry it didn't get picked up. Dinah got Empty Nest a few years later but I thought they wasted her talents. 

Thanks @Franko. I never would have heard of a number of these pilots without you.

[Franko]

Oh, you just know that if the show got picked up, Mick would have eventually cameoed or guest-starred.

I have a real fondness for Tartikoff-era pilots. You start thinking, "Could this have worked on another network? What would it replace? ..." I'm glad to be sharing some curios.

[Khan]

I should have followed your lead and bailed right away.  But, like I said, I'm a fan of Ron Leavitt and Michael G. Moye's.  Most of the time, their unconventional casting worked.  (I still remember when peeps like Jessica Hahn and King Kong Bundy would pop up on MWC).  But that was one time when they needed a beautiful woman who also could act.

I think the Tartikoff era at NBC was pretty special.  There seemed to be more variety in the network's programming, so that you didn't end up with 12 sitcoms that all attempted to be the next "Friends" or "Seinfeld."

[Vee]

I'm still very fond of that entirely too prescient Robert Altman/Garry Trudeau pilot Killer App (directed by Altman, written by Trudeau) about a Seattle dot-com firm at the height of the tech boom. I think they did it for Fox of all places, back when Fox still took some real chances. It either started at HBO or tried to migrate there after Fox, I'm not sure.

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Featuring (among many others) soap vets Ming-Na, Brian Kerwin and Brenda Strong, and the inimitable Stephen Lang from the Avatar films. The proto-Alexa is voiced by Altman perennial Sally Kellerman.

From Trudeau a few years back:

Edited November 20, 2024 by Vee

[DRW50]

I haven't watched 227 in a long time, but I did enjoy the show back in the day, thanks in large part to the very sharp, likeable cast. 

Watching, for the first time, Jackee (why did they not name the show Sandra?), I see just what a difference a cast can make.

Yes, there's the whole struggle about whether a comedic sidekick on a sitcom should be a lead, but if they'd done a better job throwing Sandra into a new world, I think it might have worked. As it is, they cram too much plot in (the first few minutes almost feel like a different show to the rest), too many characters, and most of the characters aren't interesting. They also seem to be in three or four different shows, especially the player, the usual sour receptionist and the neurotic boss (it's nice to see John Karlen at least).

They also jump much too quickly to having Sandra befriend another woman and having that as a central part of the pilot. I don't believe Sandra would have had much use for this woman, either. 

The biggest casting question for me is who cast the gym hunk that Sandra was drooling over - frankly, he reminds me of Kato Kaelin. Franc Luz, cast in a guest part, shows more heat with a shot of his ass in jeans. 

There is one good surprise in this that I won't spoil, if you've never seen/watched. It's near the end. 

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[Paul Raven]

The Jackee pilot aired after The Cosby Show 3rd and before Cheers 6th and ranked 5th for the week while 227 was 43rd.

Guess NBC attributed that rating to the timeslot rather than the show itself.

March 89

Michael Moye, producer and co-creator of Fox's Married with Children, will write script for NBC fall pilot project. Pilot, spinoff of NBC's 227 series, will star Jackee, currently co -star of that series. Moye said regardless of whether pilot receives series commitment, his involvement is limited to pilot.

Edited Monday at 12:15 PM by Paul Raven

[DRW50]

Trawling through Youtube for pilots and I see this fascinating pilot that has been up around 13 years but hadn't been reuploaded over and over elsewhere that I could find. It is a sitcom adaptation of a play I'd never heard of called The Nerd. Robert Joy plays the titular role (he was, along with Mark Hamill and Rowan Atkinson, one of the actors who played the part onstage). The "normal" couple are played by two actors I always had a soft spot for - Harley Jane Kozak and John Dye (RIP). The intro alone probably tells you why it didn't get picked up.

What makes this fascinating is that it was filmed in 1989 and sat on the shelf until March 1996. I'm not exactly sure NBC decided to burn this off almost a decade later - someone in the comments speculated that it is down to NBC airing a LaRouche infomercial that night and not wanting to air anything they actually cared about afterward. 

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nerd_(play)

[te.]

John Dye started starring in Touched By An Angel in January that year and his character quickly seemed to become popular. I'm sure that had something to do with it. 

[DRW50]

That probably did help.