Tim DeKay Quotes

Pilot season in L.A. is just this blood bath. They make so many pilots, and such a small percentage are picked up. And then if you are picked up, there are so many variables. You have to get a good time slot, and you have to get promoted. And then you have to thrive in that time slot.

I've heard that George Clooney did something like nine pilots before 'ER' was picked up, way back when he was doing TV. It's just the way the business works. There are a lot of pilots that we've never seen. It's protocol.

Like, to do a pilot, you don't know what's going to happen with it.

I've done, like, eight pilots, and every time, everyone thinks it's going to go for 10 years.

Television and movies just take so long. If you pitch a show or develop a project, it can be a year before your show even gets on the air, if it gets picked up.

I did a pilot for Anything But Love in 1988 that didn't sell.

From an actor's point of view, you never really like to hope that anything will go beyond the pilot. I'd always say to my agent every time I filmed a pilot, 'Great! Well, I'll see you at pilot season.'

Before 'Entourage,' I couldn't get a sitcom.

There is a 90% failure rate for most shows. It's difficult for any show to write for the next season.

I guarantee there's people who watch television who have no idea how complicated it is to make a television show.

What I do know is how difficult it is in this industry to get a show on the air. There's so many different stages: getting a script bought by the network, then getting a pilot made and having that pilot go to series, and then, when that series gets on the air, having people watch it.

It's rare to get a part in a show that's greenlit, let alone two shows that have been greenlit.

There are a huge amount of people who sell a TV pilot every year, but most of them never get produced. It's very easy to make a living and never get anything produced.

Writing pilots is such a specific thing. It's not even really writing TV shows. A pilot is its own beast.

The director in TV and the writer and the creator are working very much hand in hand.

I was, in my day, one of the best directors of episodic TV around.

I love HBO productions, actually, like 'The Wire.'

We went down for pilot season, I got Full House, and we wound up never leaving.

The pilot system in television is utterly broken. It's a huge waste of money.

I believe that 99 percent of successful TV shows change an immense amount from the pilot to the tenth or twelfth episode.

I was 16 when I auditioned for the series '8 Simple Rules.' They cast the kids first.

When you're making a pilot, what you're mostly thinking is, 'Please let this be a real job, please.'

My approach to 'Star Trek' was, 'I know science fiction, and I know screen writing.' That was very arrogant of me, but you really need to be a little bit arrogant to think that what you have to say is good enough to justify the expense of hundreds of thousands - now millions of dollars - to make an episode of the TV show.

You read a million scripts during pilot season, and most of them are not very good, so the good ones really shine.

I think it's not uncommon for new television shows to spend certainly the first year, but without a doubt, like, the first eight or ten episodes, kind of figuring out what the show is.