What is a PREMISE PILOT? Also, please DON’T WRITE ONE!
We are almost four weeks into Get Repped Now and, as expected, we’ve seen a lot of pilots with amazing ideas so far.
Alas, many of them are afflicted with a dread case of pilotitis — an insidious malady affecting four out of five of the the 1-hr pilots we see. This is our not-so-affectionate term for what the industry refers to as a “premise pilot.”
And we’re about to explain to you why they’re bad.
What is a premise pilot?
A premise pilot introduces us to all of the characters, their relationships and their world. Essentially, it’s setup, akin to the first act of a feature. It gets all of the characters into a starting position, ready to do what they’re going to do in the show itself…
from episode two onward.
Here is what they don’t do: they don’t actually show the audience what the series will be week after week. AKA “the series engine,” or to put it simply: what the show is.
For example, if it’s a drama about a doctor working in a hospital, a premise pilot might show us how and why the doctor got hired by the hospital and moved to town for the job. By the end of the episode, the team has come together, and we’re ready for the adventures to begin!
It won’t, however, show us a typical episode — the doctor practicing medicine in the hospital, troubleshooting impossible cases and dealing with the ghosts from his criminal past which threaten to catch up with him.
In other words, the very thing that the show will be about, week after week.
Which is why we sometimes have to give out the advice in the above graphic.
See, premise pilots were fine back in the day. But nowadays, when it comes to spec pilots, the expectation is that the first episode should be the blueprint of what the series will be, from episode 1 to episode 100.
In other words, if the show is about a doctor practicing medicine in a hospital, then we need to see exactly that.
Which brings us back to pilotitis. Many hopeful TV writers spend the first episode depicting backstory and getting everyone in place for episode two. And there’s nothing wrong with writing all this stuff. You should get to know your characters, and you should have a firm idea how the team came together. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that stuff needs to be seen in episode one — or at all.
And it also doesn’t doesn’t mean that you can or should forego character introductions and acclimating the audience to the world of the show. In fact, it’s vital that you do so.
That is why a pilot is absolutely the hardest thing to write, simply because it needs to do so much. It needs to set up the world and its characters in a way that we get it quickly while at the same time wanting to see more. It also needs to tell a standalone story that is part of a much larger whole. It needs to be the blueprint for the next hundred episodes to come. It needs to reel in the audience far enough that they want to come back next week and see more. And there is only a very limited amount of real estate (pages) in which to do all of that.
Let’s look at how BREAKING BAD accomplished that:
We start off with this great hook of our protagonist in his underwear and a gas mask, driving like a maniac. We hear sirens. He jumps out of an RV and he points a gun. And we wonder, what the heck is going on???
Yup, we’re hooked.
Act One introduces us to Walter and his sad sack life. A smart guy who has never lived up to his expectations, having once contributed to Nobel Prize-winning research and cofounding a Fortune 100 company – now battling money problems and uninterested high school chemistry students. He’s got a pregnant wife and a special needs child. He moonlights in a car wash and, humiliatingly, has to wash his students’ cars.
At the end of Act One, he collapses.
Act One is a very effective introduction to Walt and his world. We get what his skills are and what his Achilles’ heel is. We also get the inciting incident of the series, because…
Act Two is when Walt learns that he has terminal lung cancer. He’s maybe got two years to live. He doesn’t tell his wife, but he goes off on his boss at the car wash. How can he provide for his family? He’s only got two years. He goes on a ride-along with his DEA brother on a drug raid… and spots one of his former students getting away.
In Act Three, Walt propositions that wash-out former student. He will cook, Jesse Pinkman will sell. And thus begins Walt’s criminal enterprise. Milquetoast Walt is now all about “breaking bad”— Jesse even uses that phrase.
In Act Four, Walt and Jesse run afoul of hotheaded local drug dealer Crazy-8, and things go south quickly.
All the hallmarks of the series, right there in the first episode:
- Walt talks Jesse into doing something he doesn’t want to do, with unexpectedly violent results – which lead to lingering consequences
- Walt employs his superpower — scientific knowledge — to solve the crisis
- Walt and Jesse cooking meth and slingin’ crystal
- Walt’s pit bull DEA brother-in-law hoveris in the BG
- Walt lies to his wife to cover up his double-life…
- And realizes that for perhaps the first time ever, he feels powerful. Breaking bad gives him his mojo back.
First half, setup; second half, typical episode. It’s all right there in episode one: the series engine chugging along at full speed. Vince Gilligan shows everyone exactly what this show will be every week in 58 pages.
If you find you’ve written a premise pilot, don’t despair. Remember, you have a whole series to get out all that backstory and setup. It’s fine to save it for later.
The most important thing is: avoid pilotitis. One way or another, SHOW us what the series is going to be.
