Does your pilot really represent your series as it should? Or are do succeeding episodes do a better job at encapsulating what it is you're trying to say with the series once you've established your characters in the pilot?
These are questions I'm asking myself seeing that my 2nd, 3rd, and 4th episodes are a lot stronger in story, theme, and character than the pilot itself.
Has anyone else run across this problem and how are you addressing it?
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I don’t know it depends on what kind of pilot your doing, I have been writing and rewriting my pilot for years trying to make it perfect it’s set in Kentucky and I wanted it to have that small town feel.
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Dunno, never created a tv series but it seems pilots are world building, and praying for test audiences to like it, & pray Executives give okay to produce a season.
Game of Thrones is infamously known for filming the pilot eps and Hbo executives canned the whole pilot and they told the creators to rewrite/film another pilot from scratch. So even pros & execs in charge dont know themselves.
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Kapow!
There are fundamentally 2 kinds of pilots. A "premise" pilot is a set-up for the series. An "episode" pilot is exactly how the show will look week to week.
Premise pilots have fallen out of favor. But that's another discission.
The point is to pick the approach that works best for your story.
But I suspect you're really struggling with this --
1. You need a plot engine that drives the pilot episode forward that you must resolve.
2. And you simultaneously need a series dilemma that drives the entire project forward.
And about 600 other things.
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Nice comment, David, thank you.