#failed TV pilot

[chernobog13]

Doctor Strange, Master of the Mystic Arts!

From the rather yawn-inducing 1978 CBS telefilm Dr. Strange, starring Peter Wooten as psychiatrist Stephen Stange, and Clyde Kusatsu as Wong.

[jhsharman]

Hollywood Tales

[dozydawn]

Marlene Warfield in Pomroy’s People (1973).

[mikimeiko]

Legion | Season 1 (2017)

[mariocki]

Edward Woodward guest stars as Jack Liskard, Prime Minister of an unspecified African country and the target of multiple assassination attempts, in The Saint: The Persistent Patriots (5.15, ITC, 1967)

[rainbowbeanstyles]

these bitches with their cryptid fucked up websites

[thinkbolt]

The Three Dogeteers (Zeidman, 1960) - A failed Saturday Morning TV pilot? Maybe?? Who knows! But's it's AWFUL!

[queenlyfae]

What’s that? You’ve never seen Brendan Fraser in Son of Goncharov (1989)? Crazy!!

[nic-is-the-worst]

Every one should watch this movie because it’s crazy and bad. Leonard Nimoy is a psychic race car driver who gets Into a physical altercation with an elderly lady and also a child. Please watch it I’m begging you.

[sciencefiction-and-comics]

Failed Cartoon Pilots!

[chernobog13]

Ted Cassidy as Isiah, John Saxon as Dylan Hunt, Janet Margolin as Harper-Smythe, Christopher Cary as Baylok.

The main cast of Planet Earth (1974), Gene Roddenberry's second attempt at a science fiction television series: a man awakened after being in suspended animation for 150 years finds himself on an Earth trying to rebuild itself after a devastating world war.

Like Star Trek's two pilots, The Cage and Where No Man Has Gone Before, this proposed series had two pilot television movies: Genesis ll (1973) and Planet Earth. And like the Star Trek pilots, these two films had the same trappings but almost completely different casts. The main hero, Dylan Hunt, stayed the same: portrayed by Alex Cord in the first film, and John Saxon in the second.

Unfortunately, neither of these telefilms, nor Roddenberry's other two pilots - Spectre and The Questor Tapes - were able to find any love at any of the three networks, and series were never ordered.

Back in the day, long before the Star Trek films and The Next Generation, a lot of us Trekkies liked to think that Genesis ll and Planet Earth fell into the Star Trek timeline, the world war mentioned maybe being the Eugenics War. As far as I know, that speculation was only that, and these two films were never incorporated into the official Star Trek canon.

[couchpilotspodcast]

S40 EP400 Part 4 Part 1

S40 ‌EP10 “PART 4 of EP400”‌

COUCHPILOTSPODCAST.COM‌‌ ‌ ‌*‌ ‌‌PATREON‌ ‌ ‌

‌

Here we are. The final installment of the Couch Pilots saga. It’s a two parter so make sure you check out Part 1 and Part 2. We have a huge marathon of a show in store for you. We have laughs, tears, and everything in between. We also have Matt, Kevin, Dustin, and Big E with their full episode of the show. Yep they are flying the plane to bring you their version on Couch Pilots and reviewing our first ever failed pilot, BAFFLED!. Jason and I want to thank you all for everything. The support, the downloads, the feedback, the participation, it means so much to us. 

  **‌THE END**‌

Check out the latest episode!

[mortalityplays]

what people who aren't haters fail to understand about my culture is that, yes, it is sometimes exhausting being critical of everything all the time, being unable to participate in silly turn-off-your-brain summer blockbuster fun, being a tiresome cunt at parties etc. however, this is counterbalanced by the fact that the 3-4 people on planet earth who truly understand your snarling trembling dripping purebred mongrel taste profile will recommend you things that blow your head off every single time. they'll be like "saw a tv pilot that was uncovered from a time capsule in pembrokeshire this weekend. it's an adaptation of the 1970s packaging for Zoom ice creams and a man died filming it. it's bad, you personally will love it, check it out 👍" and they're always right. you're texting them 24 hours later offering boons and oral sex bc the part where the ice cream butler travels to the moon and sees all the food colourings boil away into space as a metaphor for the decline of the nuclear age somewhat changed you as a person forever. meanwhile you go out in society and it's like no I didn't like glass onion. I don't want to talk about it, you'll divorce me.

[jakeperalta]

autumn on tv (film version)

anne with an e - "the determining acts of her life" (2018)

this is us - "the cabin" (2020)

gilmore girls - "like mother, like daughter" (2001)

one tree hill - "between raising hell and amazing grace" (2010)

how to get away with murder - "pilot" (2014)

friends - "the one with the football" (1996)

teen wolf - "the tell" (2011)

the buccaneers - "failed betrayal" (2023)

[txttletale]

how would you recommend watching doctor who? there are so many different guys idk how it works.

so the thing about doctor who is that there's two shows -- classic who (1963-1989, doctors 1-7) and new who (2005-2023, doctors 9-14). due to a renumber of the seasons and a change in production company, i think it's fair to call the upcoming version of who (2023-??, doctors 15-??) its own, third show. the reason it's been able to run for so long is that when the show's lead actor, (william hartnell as the titular doctor) had to step down in 1966 due to failing health, they made up some sci-fi bullshit: the doctor's species can 'regenerate' instead of dying, instantly healing but changing their appearance and some of their personality. this means that every time a lead actor has walked away (or, in one unfortuante case, been fired) the show's just recast the doctor and moved on, often with notable changes in tone and format.

the easiest option if you don't want to backwatch anything is to start with this year's christmas special, the church on ruby road (2023). it's an obvious jumping on point to the series, introduces you to all the basic stuff (the doctor, the TARDIS, the fact that it's a silly sci-fi show about fighting weird rubber prop critters), and presumably sets up the upcoming season 1 of the disney-bad wolf version of the show that's gonna come out in may 2024.

if you do want to backwatch, you have to decide if you want to start with new who or classic who. i personally would recommend starting with new who, because there's less of it, it's got higher production values, and (imo this is the biggest obstacle to getting into classic who) it's paced in a way that makes much more sense to a modern TV viewer (self-contained 45-minute episodes). also once you're invested in the show, its main character, and some of its classic elements, you get to soyjak at the screen whenever you're watching classic who and you get to see the oirign of a monster you already recognize. you can also skip classic who entirely and never watch it, they don't bring up anything from it in the new series without giving it a new explanation, but if you do this you hate fun.

anyway, starting points for nuwho: the most obvious one is rose (2005). it's the pilot episode for the new show and imo it holds up brilliantly -- it introduces all the most basic concepts of the show, but ultimately it's really all about billie piper and cristopher eccleston's performances and they deliver. the special effects are gonna be pretty terrible for a while because it's early 2000s cg. there's no jumping on point like it for the whole of RTD's run of the show (imo, the best run of nuwho) so if you want to watch seasons 1-4 you've gotta start on rose.

another episode that's written as a jumping on-point is (heavy sigh) the eleventh hour (2011). as well as introducing matt smith's doctor and his companion amy, this also does the whole rigamarole of introducing the show's core elements, giving a nutshell recap of its history in the form of the doctor's rooftop speech, and also signal what the oncoming moffat era is going to be like (whimsical, full of complex time travel plots, way more misogynist). i'm biased -- i'm a hater, one of this episode's central plot conceits sucks real bad and i also hate the eleventh doctor's whole run. but it is meant to be a jumping on point.

there won't be another one of those in nuwho until the pilot (2017). this begins moffat's final season with which he made the odd but extremely welcome decision to jettison all his convoluted continuity shit from the last five seasons and refocus the show with the doctor being a professor at bristol university with a mysterious secret. i think season 10 is a hidden gem and if you find starting from rose daunting this is the next best place to pick up. capaldi's doctor is a delightful abrasive eccentric with a heart of gold at this point in his run & the stories are wall-to-wall bangers with only a couple misses.

finally, you could start on the woman who fell to earth (2018), the first episode to feature jodie whittaker's 13th doctor and head writer chris chibnall. i'd recommend this even less than the eleventh hour, because while i actually like it more, i think it's a much worse preview of what the upcoming era is going to be like than that one. if you watch the woman who fell to earth and keep watching from the start of whittaker's run on the show off the back of it, you're going to be severely disappointed as most of the more promising aspects of the episode get instantly abandoned.

so, summary, if you're starting with nuwho, there's five jumping on points, which i'd rank:

rose > the pilot > the church on ruby road > the eleventh hour > the woman who fell to earth

but i want to start with classic who because i'm a contrarian

alright. classic who also has a few jumping off points -- before i mentioned them, let me just talk about that format thing i mentioned earlier. classic who doesn't have self-contained episodes for the most part, but rather for most of its run told each of its episodic narratives across between two and seven 20-minute episodes. this leads to a lot of weird pacing, forced cliffhangers, and infamously a lot of filler shots of the doctor running up and down identical corridors. so obvsies i'm recommending entire stories here nad not individual episodes. that said, let's look at where you could jump on:

an unearthly child (1963). this is, like, the start of the show. that said i don't recommend it as a place to start (funnily enough), for a couple reasons. firstly, because of dreadful fucking archiving by the BBC, a lot of episodes from the show's first six seasons are straight up missing. some of them have been animated by the BBC from surviving audio recordings, but some of them are just straight up lost -- due to the format, this means there's very few full complete stories, which makes this whole era really hard to navigate. if you don't mind that and really want to start in the black and white era, i'd still recommend the tomb of the cybermen (1967) instead -- hartnell's portrayal of the doctor as a haughty, slightly impish old professor is great, but troughton basically defined the character's core traits for the next sixty years.

spearhead from space (1970) is a pretty big format upheaval for the show and so serves as a pretty great classic jumping-on point. it's the first episode to be in colour, and sets up a new status quo for the doctor as being trapped on earth and working for an elite paramlitary organization called UNIT that operates out of a ratty office. it's an interesting premise that the show gets some great stories out of. the special effects are bad in the best way. pertwee has instant charm in the role and it's all around a banger by classic standards.

if you want to jump right to the one all the boomers are nostalgic for, you can also start with robot (1974). i wouldn't recommend it, though--tom baker is electric in the role from the start, but the episode itself kind of assumes a lot of the context of the third doctor's setup and supporting cast which you're not gonna have.

i wouldn't recommend anyone start at any point during the fifth or sixth doctors runs because i want them to actually like the show, so i guess the last jumping on point i could really recommend after robot would be, like, dragonfire (1987), which heralds the show's short-lived renaissance with the seventh doctor and his best companion, ace. but although you'd be watching some of the absolute best the classic show ever gets, it feels like it would be a weird and disorienting place to start.

finally, you could watch tales of the tardis (2023), a limited series produced to celebrate the show's 60th anniversary. each episode follows the same format: through a vaguely handwaved Palace of Memories plot, two much-aged characters from the classic series meet up and fondly remember one of the adventures they shared. the bookends with the original actors are mostly shameless fanservice, but the episodes they're reminiscing about are superbly edited down into a much more watchable format -- it works as a good 'sample platter' for most eras of the show (although, weirdly, there wasn't anything from tom baker's run!) and i think it honestly wouldn't be a bad shout to just start from tales of the tardis and then keep watching from whichever of the stories featured in it you liked most. that all said, if you want to start with classic who, i'd rank these jumping on points as follows:

spearhead from space > tales of the tardis > tomb of the cybermen > dragonfire > robot > an unearthly child

all that shit said it's fundamentally a very episodic show with very few exceptions like trial of a time lord and whatever moffat was doing seasons 6-7 so in the end you can basically just start with any episode and more or less get some of the idea. have fun and make sure to do the most important job of a doctor who fan, update the tardis wiki page for penis whenever one is mentioned