TV Pilots Quotes

There's this funny thing with pilots that you have to sign the contract to do the whole job before you're even offered the part. And they make about a million pilots a year, but hardly any of them get turned into series.

I've done a lot of pilots, and they're all so expositional. In the beginning, I think that it is important to make sure that the audience is invested in us.

So many actors started on soap operas. So yeah, I'd graduated Julliard and done some theater. I've done a few guest spots on TV but nothing that long-term. I did a little 'E.R.' back when it was on, and a pilot for 'Cold Case.'

The directors you want to work with are in the television world.

Being on a successful show is kind of like being a sea turtle. Every year, sea turtles lay hundreds and hundreds of eggs, but only a few manage to survive and mature. It's the same with TV pilots. There are so many great ideas, but for whatever reason only the lucky ones get picked up.

People aren't making as many movies as they used to, so youve got a lot of really big-name actors who are coming in, and they want to do pilots, so things kind of disappear for those of us who kind of have to still get in the room and audition and read for it.

When I read both pilots for 'Breaking Bad' and the 'Michael J. Fox Show,' I turned to my husband in real life, and I'm like, 'That is an amazing script.'

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.

You read a lot of pilots during pilot season, and not all of them really grab you.

One year, I did 10 or 11 pilots of TV shows that never went anywhere.

With mockumentaries, the conceit is that the characters are being interviewed, so you can start a scene and cut to a character looking at the camera and saying, "I'm working on this project," instead of having to figure out ways for people to talk naturally about what they're doing. You see this problem in pilots - people end up explaining things to each other that they'd never explain in real life.

I've done 10 or 11 pilots for network television, which is ridiculous.

Usually when you do a pilot, there's a moment where all of the executives get together and say thumbs up or down.

Pilots are so hard because you have to introduce all these characters, you have to hook an audience, and an audience has such a smaller attention span than maybe they used to have.