A Big New Reference Book on Unsold Pilots

The Encyclopedia of Television Pilots, 1937-2019 by Vincent Terrace. This is the second edition of his encyclopedia, covering 2470 broadcast pilots, and it’s a big step up from the previous book. For the new edition, he’s added two useful appendices — one on Series Pilot Films (pilots movies that aired and led to series) and another on Series Spin-offs (TV series that begat other series). It’s a terrific book. And if you combine it with his recently-released Encyclopedia of Unaired Television Pilots, 1945-2018, it represents an astonishing achievement in television research and the definitive work on unsold pilots to date.Most of the problems I had with the previous edition of the Encyclopedia of Television Pilots have been solved with this new edition and with publication of his Unaired Pilots book…but some persist.

For example, Terrace still organizes pilots alphabetically rather than by the season/year they were considered by the networks for the fall schedules…so it’s missing the cultural, creative, and strategic context at play that’s crucial to understanding why a particular pilot was developed and produced by a network. Although an unsold pilot may have aired in 1977, that doesn’t mean that’s the year/season it is was developed and produced. Many pilots were aired years after they were made. He could have organized the book by season and also included an index that listed the pilots alphabetically, with their entry number. The alphabetical arrangement of the book makes the book far less useful than it could be for TV producers and network and studio development executives…a large audience outside of libraries and universities that could afford this book.Also the index doesn’t include the titles of TV series that hosted unsold pilots for proposed spin-offs (aka “nested pilots”)…so if you wanted to look up all the unsold pilots that aired as episodes of, say, Kraft Suspense Theatre, The Untouchables, Magnum PI, Bob Hope Chrysler Theater, Diagnosis Murder, The Rifleman, or Mr. Ed, you couldn’t. You’d have to slog through the book and find each one. And I wish each listing included the studio or production company that produced the pilots…which is invaluable information for TV historians, particularly those researching a particular studio or production company.

There are also unsold pilots that are missing, particularly among the nested pilots. For example, the final episode of George Segal’s 1988 series Murphy’s Law was a nested pilot for an unsold Joan Severance spin-off and in his second Appendix on Series spin-offs, he misses that Diagnosis Murder was a spin-off from Jake and the Fatman and that Dirty Sally was a spin-off of Gunsmoke. (Richard Irvin’s book The Forgotten Desi and Lucy TV Projects includes several nested pilots and spin-offs that Terrace missed in this book). But that’s a minor quibble. It’s inevitable that some pilots will fall through the cracks. It’s very, very hard to keep track of all the shows in development, particularly those that are snuck onto the air as episodes of existing series…or that are aired in only some markets in the dead of summer in the wee hours of the night. The networks have become incredibly secretive over the last twenty years about their pilots… their R&D…even forcing producers to sign NDAs, limiting circulation of scripts, and refusing to allow unsold pilots to be seen outside of their screening rooms. In the face of all that. he’s probably succeeded in finding and listing 98% of the scripted, network pilots that have ever been produced, which is remarkable.

However, a few of the missing pilots raise a troubling question. How many of the omissions are intentional?

For example, only one of the half-a-dozen aired, episodic drama pilots for major networks that I wrote and produced are in the book, which I have to assume is a conscious decision by Terrace, perhaps based on animosity he feels towards me and my book Unsold Television Pilots 1955-1989 (I assume that Mystery 101, the one pilot of mine that slipped into his book, in his appendix on Series Pilot films, happened because he didn’t realize that I co-wrote the pilot and co-created the series). As a result, a researcher looking for all of Fred Dryer’s unsold pilots wouldn’t know that he and Neal McDonough starred in The Chief, an unsold pilot that aired as a two-hour episode Diagnosis Murder. Or someone researching an article, paper or book on nested pilots wouldn’t know that Sal Viscuso and Kate Burton starred in Play It Again, Sammy, an unsold spin-off pilot that aired as an episode of Spenser for Hire. I suspect these are intentional ommissions, since Terrace lists some, but not all, of the unsold spin-off pilots from Diagnosis Murder and Spenser for Hire. It makes me wonder how many other pilots or credits he didn’t include for purely personal reasons…a dislike of a writer, actor or producer. If that is the case, it’s petty and undermines his work.

But I don’t want to give you the wrong impression about the book or raise the stench of sour grapes. This is a wonderful book. Vincent Terrace is the undisputed Godfather of TV reference books, breaking ground with his landmark, multi-volume set The Complete Encyclopedia of Television Programs 1947-1979 and he hasn’t stopped since. If anything, he’s repeatedly topped himself.Today, his four mammoth (and outrageously expensive) reference books — The Encyclopedia of Television Pilots Second Edition 1937-2019, the Encyclopedia of Unaired Television Pilots 1945-2018, The Encyclopedia of Television Shows 1925-2010, and The Encyclopedia of Television Shows 2011-2016 — represent the crown jewels of any television reference library.

Garry Marshall was a Mensch

Garry-Marshall-headshot-smallI was very sad to hear about Garry Marshall’s passing. I only had a brief encounter with him, but it had a big impact on me.

I moved to Los Angeles when I was 18 to attend UCLA. I was also working on a book called UNSOLD TELEVISION PILOTS that I began writing when I was nine years old.  As soon as I got to L.A. I cold-called Garry Marshall for an interview. To my shock, he not only answered the phone, he immediately invited me to his office, which turned out to be an apartment in Burbank or Studio City. We spoke for several hours. I was in awe being in the same room with the legendary writer-producer…and having this opportunity to ask him not only about his unsold pilots, but also a million other questions I had about the TV business. He answered them all in wonderful detail. I couldn’t believe how friendly, funny, and open he was to me… or that he would devote so much of his valuable time to help some kid he’d never met.

A few years later, after UNSOLD TELEVISION PILOTS was published, I interviewed him for an article I was doing for Electronic Media (later renamed Television Age) and he shocked me again… this time because he not only remembered me, but told me how much he loved my book. Most people will remember him for the great TV shows and movies he did. I will remember him for being a mensch.

Unsold Television Pilots: Everything You Never Saw on TV

Unsold TV Pilots by Lee Goldberg

Unsold TV Pilots by Lee GoldbergMy book UNSOLD TELEVISION PILOTS 1955-1989 is back for the first time ever as an ebook (for Kindle, Apple, and Nook) and as a single volume trade paperback. I began writing it when I was nine years old. By the time I finished it, I was in my early twenties and was far enough along in my TV career that one of my filmed, unsold pilots actually became an entry in this book (If You Knew Sammy, a potential spin-off from Spenser: For Hire). I appreciated the irony. It somehow seemed fitting.

The book was written in those dark ages when information couldn’t be Googled….when research meant spending thousands of hours in libraries, going through books, magazines, newspapers, and microfiches (remember those?) and digging through dusty file cabinets.

At the time, unsold pilots were a mystery, and there was no single resource for finding out information about them. This book became that resource. It was the first compendium of its kind.  And to my shock, and delight, the book became a sensation when it was published, leading to scores of articles, national TV interviews, a paperback abridgement (since republished as The Best TV Shows That Never Were), and over the years not one, but two network TV specials, The Greatest Shows You Never Saw (which I produced) on CBS in 1996 and The Best TV Shows That Never Were (which I wrote and produced) on ABC in 2004. The biggest thrill for me, though, was sitting in the audience of The Tonight Show with my wife Valerie while Johnny Carson, a certified TV legend, held the book in his hand, talked about how much he liked it, and then did a comedy bit based on it.

Over the years, readers have alerted me to mistakes in the book… the most embarrassing of which were the inadvertent inclusion of a few pilots that actually did sell and became series. Cringe. I’ve deleted those entries from this edition but made note of them to preserve the integrity of the original index (the pilots are listed by entry numbers, not page numbers).

I’ve also received hundreds of letters and emails from many attentive readers, who corrected errors, gave me additional details on dozens of pilots and alerted me to some unsold pilots that I’d missed. I’d like to single out Barry I. Grauman and Bill Warren for their eagle eyes and keen knowledge of television.

I’ve corrected most of the errors in the book (I say most, because I did my best to get’em all but I’m sure I missed some) and added some of the new details. However, I haven’t added any substantive new material. The few unsold pilots that I missed in the book have since been noted in the other reference works on the topic that followed mine over the last twenty-five years.

Oh, who am I kidding? The truth is, I didn’t add any new stuff because that would be the path to madness for me. I wouldn’t be able to stop until I brought the book entirely up-to-date, adding all of the unsold pilots produced since 1989.

I’ll share with you my dark secret. Since the day I finished this book, I’ve continued to compile information for a follow-up edition and possible new TV specials. I’ve transferred all my old VHS tapes of unsold pilots to DVD…and I grab any new unsold pilots I can get my hands on or that I can record off-the-air. I still clip, literally and virtually, every article that I see about pilots-in-development. But in this age when it’s so easy to find information on the web, when everything is databased (including, probably, every word of this book), it becomes increasingly unlikely that I’ll ever write a sequel to this book covering 1989-to-present.

And yet… I keep gathering the information. So why do I do it?

It could be because I’m mentally ill. Or maybe because it’s a habit that I started when I was seven years old and I’ve never entirely grown up. I’m still that kid inexplicably fascinated by all those lost pilots, those would-be TV series that never were…