Pop Vultures

Last week, TV Guide came up with its list of the ten best pilots ever, a list that was clearly written by insane people. While it’s hard to argue with the inclusion of Lost (which is, in fact, on this list as well), the presence of Football Wives and Desperate Housewives is a bit harder to justify. Of course, these lists tend to be published just so that people like me can disagree and post our own favorite pilots, and I have fallen right into their evil trap. Feel free to disagree with me below and keep the circle turning.

5. Veronica Mars
Why it was a great pilot: This show should never, ever have worked. I’m actually grateful I didn’t have this blog when the show first aired, as I certainly would have made some snarky comment about how a show based around a spunky high school student who works as a PI and solves a murder in her spare time was bound to be unwatchable. And yet, from the first minutes of this episode, I was hooked. The writing was smart, the improbable characters believable, and the mystery compelling. Although some people complained that the pilot was actually too convoluted, as it introduced a murder mystery and a rape alongside the more mundane mystery of the week, hindsight proved that the show knew exactly what it was doing. Every mystery the pilot presented was solved over the course of the season, and most of the clues were present in that very first episode. Sure, I was dubious when I first started watching, but it only took an hour for me to become a devoted fan.

4. The Wire
Why it was a great pilot: I hesitated to include this one, honestly. I have no doubt that The Wire is one of the greatest television shows of all time, but best pilot? Well, yes. Although much of the show’s artistic success comes from its vast cast of characters and the way they develop and interact over the show’s five seasons, it’s also a show that never made a misstep, and I can’t think of another show I could say that about. The first episode contained everything that made the show so great: the clash between both sides of Baltimore’s drug trade, the tenuous friendships between the various characters, the dark humor that accompanies the bleak lives and, always, the sense of intense realism that marked the series as something new, never seen before or since. The show started with McNulty asking a witness why, if someone kept stealing from a game, they still let him play. His response that, “You got to. This is America, man,” kicked off a show that never once stopped exploring just what America was and could be.

3. Cheers
Why it was a great pilot: If ever there was an argument that shows need time to find their audience, Cheers would be exhibit A. Despite having an excellent first episode, the show took a while to become the hit we all remember. Reviewing this pilot, though, it’s hard to say why, because every classic element from the show was there from the get go. Carla was crass and irritable, Norm was the perfectly schlubby everyman, and Sam and Diane’s lightning-quick banter was already zipping across the screen. Watching it again, the most surprising thing for me was how genuine and likable all the characters were. Unlike most sitcoms today, which seem to involve ridiculous levels of overacting and unnatural pauses for the laugh track, the characters of Cheers felt natural and the humor organic. They were allowed to be characters first, rather than joke delivery devices. I was laughing out loud from the first exchange, when Sam asks a clearly underage kid, who’s trying to buy a drink with a fake military ID, how ‘Nam was. “Gross,” he replies, much to Sam’s amusement. In the end, the pilot provided not only a half hour of great comedy, but gave us a bar full of characters we wanted to hang out with again.

2. Friday Night Lights
Why it was a great pilot: It’s been months since I’ve talked about my love for this show, which means it’s well past time that I mention again how brilliant it is. Although the second season struggled a little bit (dropping from “freaking amazing” to just “really, really good”), it’s hard to find a single complaint about the first season, and this episode in particular. In a mere 42 minutes, Friday Night Lights managed to create an entire world for the viewer, introducing us to a small town in Texas so real that I’m pretty sure I could find it on my next road trip — or one just like it (although, admittedly, the people wouldn’t be quite so pretty). Everything about this world was painfully, heart-breakingly real. Dillon, Texas is a town populated by working class people, devout Christians, and football fanatics, and the show managed to present everyone with empathy and compassion. Not once did the show patronize its subject or condescend to its audience. This is not a show I expected to like, and I merely watched the first episode because of my love of teen dramas. Little did I know how much more I was getting. At the end of the first episode, I was reaching for the Kleenex and setting my DVR for the season pass.

1. Lost
Why it was a great pilot: Well, it was just incredible, wasn’t it? There was a plane crash! And survivors on a beach! And some of them were hot! There were polar bears, and mysterious man-eating black smoke monsters, and big stompy things in the jungle. In fact, there was so much crammed into this pilot that they had to make it two hours long — and every minute of it was interesting and exciting. Unlike every episode that followed, the pilot was under no obligation to provide answers, and instead had the luxury of crafting the mystery, one which would engross fans for seasons to come. Still, sometimes I think the reason I can never be a true Lost devotee is that the first episode set the bar so high that it was nearly impossible for the show to maintain that level of quality. The initial scenes on the beach, post-crash, were as intense as anything I’ve ever seen on television, and the conflicts between the characters were believable, based on their horrible experience, and never felt manufactured for the sake of drama. The pilot ended with Rousseau’s chill-inducing message: “I’m alone now, on the island alone. Please someone come. The others are dead. It killed them. It killed them all.” When Charlie asked, “Where are we?” in response, the audience wanted to know the answer as much as the characters did. And, four years later, we still want to know.

What do you think? Which pilots are your all-time favorites?