2018 Pilot Trends

Several trends in broadcasting pilots that I thought would've died are still, sadly, alive and well this 2018 season. The revival renaissance, sparked by the return of The X-Files in 2016, is still in full swing, though this season there seems to be more of an interest in rebooting old properties (a la CBS's Hawaii Five-0, which has been on the air since 2010) rather than bringing back older shows, like NBC has done with Will & Grace and ABC is set to do in March with Roseanne. Movies are still being turned into pilots. Popular formats are being aped a season or two too late. And despite the acclaim and excitement of serialized dramas from streaming and cable networks, the broadcasters are still hedging bets on legal, medical, and, especially, police procedurals.


Trend: Remakes and Revivals

Prior to this season, the only true revival on broadcast TV was Fox's The X-Files, which reunited the original stars and creatives for a new, limited season of episodes. It was a smash, and Fox renewed the show for another season (which is currently airing). Capitalizing on this nostalgia, NBC realized an audience for one of its most popular bygone sitcoms, Will & Grace, after the cast filmed a scripted short to encourage voting in the 2016 election. A ninth season was ordered to premiere in 2017, more than a decade after airing a series finale that seemed to definitively answer where these characters ended up. And it worked, as Will & Grace's premiere garnered huge ratings (and a quick renewal for another season). ABC saw potential in this and developed a new season of Roseanne, which ended after nine seasons in 1997; and acquired American Idol, which ended its original run on Fox only a few seasons ago. Following Will & Grace's ratings boom, CBS ordered a straight-to-series revival of its classic 90s sitcom Murphy Brown, which will air sometime in the 2018-2019 season.

Thankfully, Murphy Brown is the only new revival we'll currently be seeing next season (though the trend continues on streaming and cable, where Queer Eye is enjoying a new run of episodes with a new Fab Five, and Trading Spaces is returning to TLC). But the nostalgia train doesn't stop there. More numerous are the many reboots and remakes on deck for the new pilot season, many of which are set up at CBS and CBS Studios.

CBS already has a Friday night lineup that includes two reboots: Hawaii Five-0 and MacGyver, plus the Thursday night freshman SWAT. It's looking to potentially expand on that, with pilot orders for updates of Cagney & Lacey, the all-female detective team from the 80s; and Magnum, PI, the Tom Selleck-starrer about a private investigator in Hawaii. Selleck is already a staple of the network, leading Blue Bloods for eight seasons now to regular Friday-night ratings wins and starring in the network's series of Jesse Stone telefilms, so it'll be interesting to see if this new iteration of his most famous role will push the man himself and his current series off the air. After all, a Friday night lineup of MacGyver, Hawaii Five-0, and Magnum, PI would be on-demo and hard to resist.

The CW (which is half owned by CBS) is also banking hard on reboots, with pilots ordered for Charmed, an extension of the 1990s supernatural tale of sister witches; and Roswell, a short-lived but well-liked series about alien teenagers and their human loves. The former originally ran for eight seasons (1998-2006) and amassed a cult following that persists to this day; a previous reboot was pursued by CBS back in 2013, but it never made it past the script stage. The original cast, in particular Rose McGowan and Alyssa Milano, were not happy with the reboot... this time around, Holly Marie Combs made her displeasure known. Only time will tell what happens with this newest incarnation, but with the CW expanding to Sunday night programming once again, all of their pilots have a better shot than ever before. That's good news for Roswell, which ran for only three seasons on, like Charmed, The WB and then UPN... which is now The CW. While Roswell had its own rabid little fanbase, it never quite reached the pop culture heights of its contemporaries like Buffy, Angel, Charmed, and the Star Trek spinoffs. With CW darling Julie Plec directing the pilot and a timely immigration twist to the plot, it also has a good chance of making it back to air.

ABC, not to be left out, is rebooting the 1980s series The Greatest American Hero as a female-led sitcom pilot.

Additionally, while not a revival, reboot, or remake, NBC has one of the season's ultimate throwbacks: the first new pilot created by the legendary Norman Lear (Maude, Good Times, All in the Family, The Jeffersons, Sanford & Son, One Day at a Time) in over twenty years. The pilot, Guess Who Died, stars Christopher Lloyd and Holland Taylor.

Trend: Spin-Offs

Once upon a time, the only shows that got spin-offs were highly successful ones: All in the Family spun off Maude, which spun off Good Times, and The Jeffersons, among others. Buffy the Vampire Slayer spun off Angel. The Golden Girls spun off Empty Nest, which spun off Nurses. Spin offs were once a huge market in primetime television, and with good reason: it's hard to launch a brand new show, so it's good to have a starting point, especially when that starting point is a popular show people are already watching.

In recent seasons, spin-offs have failed to launch quite as successfully. Last year, The Blacklist: Redemption was dead on arrival. This year's only spin-off, Station 19 (from Grey's Anatomy), debuts soon. The problem has seemingly been that the shows chosen to spin-off new series either aren't all that popular themselves (see: Agents of SHIELD) or are past their prime when the spin-off is tried (see: The Blacklist).

But that's not stopping the networks from trying, particularly the CW. They have two spin-offs in contention this pilot season. The first is Wayward Sisters, born of Supernatural, which aired its backdoor pilot (an episode of the parent series that sets up the potential spin-off) in January. It follows a group of women orphaned by a supernatural tragedy who are trained by Sheriff Mills, a character who has appeared in every season of the show since 2010. The backdoor pilot got decent ratings, no better or worse than the majority of the season's episodes. The problem? Supernatural is in its thirteenth season. It's a reliable player for the network, but is it too late to use the series as a launchpad for a new one? And how entwined in Supernatural's mythology will the new show be? Will new viewers be able to hop on board?

A similar problem faces the CW's other spin-off pilot, an untitled one based on The Originals (itself a spin-off of The Vampire Diaries) that would follow Klaus's daughter Hope. Again the problem here is that The Originals is ending this year, so the CW can't even use it as a way to launch the pilot. And while The Originals was far from a failure, why try to spin it off so late in its run and after its ratings have fallen dramatically enough to warrant cancellation?

ABC developed a spin-off of its breakout comedy hit The Goldbergs last season, and thought it didn't go to series, they did air the pilot as a special episode of the parent series this past January. The episode, set in the 1990s at the same high school Adam and family attend on The Goldbergs, was moderately well-received (and rated higher than the rest of ABC's lineup that evening by quite a margin), so the spin-off (formerly titled Schooled and aired as The Goldbergs: 1990-Something) is back in contention for the coming season. It makes sense for ABC, as the state of their comedy line-up is not great: The Middle is ending, and Modern Family is waning. The Goldbergs is one of the best and most consistent sitcom performers the network has, so why not try to extend that consistency to a new series, particularly one cashing in on 90s nostalgia?

And while not part of the broadcast networks, spin-offs abound on cable. The Perfectionists is coming soon to Freeform, spun off from their mega hit Pretty Little Liars (and the network recently renewed black-ish spin-off grown-ish for a second season). Starz is developing a John Wick spin-off; FX has a Sons of Anarchy spin-off on deck as well

Trend: Small-Screen Adaptations of Big-Screen Hits

One of the biggest and most prevalent trends over the past few seasons has been transferring or continuing movies with television iterations: Lethal Weapon, The Exorcist, and Taken all aired on broadcast networks this season, with a slew of others (School of Rock, Fargo, Westworld, Ash vs. Evil Dead, etc) on cable, and that's just the ones that have survived. There have been at least a dozen recent attempts to bring the big screen to the small screen in the past few seasons that have either outright flopped (Rush Hour, Training Day, Uncle Buck, Minority Report, Time After Time) or fizzled (The Odd Couple, Limitless). Even those that currently are airing are struggling. So why continue to try to capture lightning in a bottle? This isn't a new trend, of course, with many successful past series being based on films and some even performing better than their inspirational material: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Friday Night Lights, and Fame immediately come to mind. But recent adaptations seem to be offering more of the same when younger audiences want something unique.


This season, there are several movie-to-TV adaptations in development. ABC has the 1974 blaxploitation TV movie Get Christie Love, which quickly inspired a 1975 series as well and gave us the catchphrase "You under arrest, sugah!", being updated to follow a female CIA agent rather than a policewoman, and it's being produced by Vin Diesel. (This could also fall into the "reboot" category, so take your pick of trends.) CBS is developing an adaptation of the Oscar-winning 1997 film L.A. Confidential, itself based on a James Ellroy novel. Fox has Gone, Baby, Gone, which they're touting as being based on the Dennis Lehane novel and not the film, but it was previously adapted into a 2007 film starring Casey Affleck. Then NBC has the most high-profile TV series adaptation, a female-led extension of the Bad Boys film franchise... though the untitled pilot does not have the participation of either Martin Lawrence or Will Smith.

It's an interesting (is that the right word?) trend back upward for film-to-TV series. 2017-2018 saw the development of only one (Behind Enemy Lines at Fox), and it didn't go to series. So to see an upswing in the number of movies being rejiggered for television is a bit puzzling. There was no big hit in recent seasons to suggest there is a market or desire for them, so why the renewed focus?

Trend: Procedurals

This is a trend that probably isn't even a trend because it's just never going to see downward-trending years. However, 2018-2019 has an unusually high number of procedurals (non-serialized) being developed, especially at ABC. This is unsurprising for America's Network, since so much of their current and recent programming has been heavily serialized, resulting in some great numbers for early episodes and sharp declines thereafter. Look at How to Get Away with Murder, which in its fourth season is barely registering anymore with routine 18-49 ratings of 1.0 or so. Compare that with the ratings of freshman breakout The Good Doctor, a medical procedural, which has improved its timeslot by 50% and regularly ranks as the highest-rated 10:00pm drama on any broadcast network. So for ABC to look for more procedurals, which they're lacking in, makes sense. Does it make sense for about two thirds of their entire dramatic development slate to be variations on cop shows? Maybe not. But the idea to find more shows where viewers can drop in and out without feeling like they've missed much is not a terrible one. In an era when so much serialized TV is produced in the binge-watching format, it's harder for traditional revenues like the broadcast nets to hang onto viewers over the course of an entire TV season; to have one story be told over multiple weeks, with breaks for holidays and events and regularly scheduled hiatuses, many viewers have started tuning out. So ABC is going for broke with eight (!!!) police/FBI procedurals in development, comprising two thirds of their entire development slate for the season. Some have a twist (Take Two has a Castle feel to it, following an actress who shadows a PI), but many look pretty standard from their loglines: retired cops (Salvage), African American female cops (The Finest), rookie cops (The Rookie), and demoted cops (Staties) among them. Of the remaining pilots in contention at ABC, only five are not procedurals.


CBS has always been one to bank on procedurals. They're like hard candies for certain demographics: soothing and inoffensive. In fact, the vast majority of CBS's dramatic output is in the procedural format, though they are spread across different themes: police (Blue Bloods, Criminal Minds, Elementary, NCIS, etc); medical (Code Black); military (SEAL Team); government (Madam Secretary); legal (Bull); and even tech (Scorpion, MacGyver), they are still very much in the case-of-the-week format. And the network shows no real signs of changing that, as they are developing four police procedurals (including the above-mentioned reboots), as well as a legal and a military procedural, amounting to 60% of their overall drama development.

At the remaining nets, Fox is the only one without a police procedural in development. They only have one procedural ordered to pilot, a legal drama from Empire creator Danny Strong. Even The CW, which has been looking to add a procedural to its lineup for many seasons now, has a few, including one about a blind amateur sleuth and another about a cop who sees the ghost of her detective big brother. NBC has both the Bad Boys spinoff and a cop show with shades of Medium (which aired on the network for five seasons before moving to CBS), plus a CIA series and a medical procedural. (They remain in the procedural game with the Dick Wolf franchises, though, behind only CBS for the most on a network.)

Overall, these are the kinds of shows that give broadcast television a bad name. They're fluffy, inconsequential for the most part, easily digestible, and occasionally lazy. The biggest shows on broadcast TV over the past several seasons have had some kind of uniqueness to them. This Is Us is a simple, emotional story about a family, but its voice and its structure is unlike anything else on TV. Empire is a hip hop musical series that targets and under-served demographic. Are nets going to find the next This Is Us by playing it so safe?

Trend: A Year or Two Behind the Times

One of the more interesting and hard-to-pin-down trends is when nets chase the successes of other nets a season or two later with similarly themed or plotted shows. We saw it this past year when Fox introduced The Gifted, a small-screen take on the X-Men comics; ABC introduced Inhumans, which was originally intended to be part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe; and The CW gave us Black Lightning, the network's fifth superhero show and sixth based on a comic. This was on the heels of successful superhero/comic show launches on Fox (Gotham, now in its fourth season); The CW (the Arrowverse first debuted to ratings success in 2012); CBS (Supergirl lasted only one season on the net before moving over to The CW, where it's in its third year); and ABC (Agents of SHIELD is in its fifth season). And it was a mixed bag. The Gifted managed a second season renewal already, but its ratings were far from huge. Black Lightning is slightly above the CW's ratings average. And Inhumans outright failed, both critically and commercially.

In this coming pilot season, there are no comic book or superhero pilots in contention. Instead we see several pilots looking to mimic the success of shows like This Is Us. ABC, for example, is developing A Million Little Things, a pilot about "a group of friends who, for different reasons and in different ways, are all stuck in their lives, but when one of them dies unexpectedly, it's just the wake up call the others need to finally start living." You don't have to a genius to see the thematic similarities: ensemble cast united by a tragedy, though they are friends rather than a family. NBC also has an "intertwined lives" drama called The Village, about a group of strangers living in the same apartment complex who become like a family.

Then there's Mixtape at Fox, which is clearly inspired by the success of La La Land. Its logline reads: "A romantic musical drama that looks at a disparate group of interconnected people in contemporary Los Angeles through the lens of the music that defines who they are. Mixtape captures the different stages of love, exploring if time can heal a broken heart and if love can withstand life's tragedies." On top of that, one of the supporting stars of La La Land, Callie Hernandez, has landed a leading role in the series.

CBS is tapping into the trend of anthology series, which are still very common on cable (despite waning interest, if the most recent season-ratings for American Crime Story and American Horror Story are to be generalized) and streaming but not really on broadcast TV. They are developing Murder, based on a BBC series in which each episode is a standalone story of a murder from the events leading to and immediately following the crime.

NBC has a Downton Abbey-esque period piece from the PBS favorite's creator, Julian Fellowes, called The Gilded Age, which was originally developed several seasons ago but never went to series. It's an upstairs/downstairs drama set in 1880s New York City, and it's going straight to series.

Trend: Female Directors

In one of the few positive trends this season, female directors are getting a lot more work on pilots. The old reliables like Pamela Fryman (who directed the pilot and then the majority of How I Met Your Mother) are represented, but so are some many ladies new to directing pilots.

In the 2017-2018 season, only ten of the seventy pilots ordered by the broadcast networks were directed by women. Of those ten, only one was a drama pilot, which did not go to series. This season, fourteen drama pilots and six comedy pilots are being directed by women. Five of those pilots are being directed by women of color.

Sanaa Hamri
Among the women making their pilot directorial debuts are Empire director Sanaa Hamri (Fox's Mrs. Otis Regrets); Gotham's Larysa Kondracki (ABC's The Fix); Emmy-nominated cinematographer Uta Briesewitz (ABC's Salvage); veteran writer and occasional The Vampire Diaries director Julie Plec (The CW's Roswell); and Emmy-winning actress Regina King (ABC's The Finest), who's recently directed episodes of This Is Us, Scandal, and breakout hit The Good Doctor, among many others.

Pamela Fryman
Veteran pilot director Liz Friedlander (Stalker, Conviction, The Secret Circle) is helming The Rookie for ABC; Gail Mancuso (Are You There, Chelsea?), who has directed nearly two dozen broadcast pilots over the years, has So Close at NBC; Julie Anne Robinson (The Middle, Selfie, How to Live with Your Parents...) is set for I Feel Bad at NBC; and Fryman is holding the reins to a whopping five comedy, all multi-cam, pilots: Friends-in-Law and Abby's at NBC; Most Likely To at ABC; and History of Them and Murphy Brown at CBS.

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