Of all the pilot scripts writers craft per year, think how few TV execs want to hear about, how few of those are produced as pilots, and how few of those make it to networks’ programming lineups.
In 2011, when pilot season was still a yearly tradition for broadcast TV, The Wall Street Journal reported that networks were fielding around 500 pitches a year but commissioning only 70 as scripts, then producing only 20 of those scripts as pilots, only for a handful to make it to screen.
So a pilot script has to hook a reader, and a pilot episode has to leave a viewer eager for more, as did all of the following series-starters. Here are our picks for TV’s best pilot episodes.