The first episode of this ghost-hunting slice of Americana has everything viewers could ask for, plus a couple of things none of us could have predicted. Does the pilot still hold up today? Shows from the past two years can only score a two out of four on the final category since there hasn’t been time to view them with any decent sense of retrospect.īelow, check out the 50 greatest TV pilots of the 21st century.

Is the pilot relevant to the rest of the series, or does it feel random and detached?Ħ. Does the pilot feel fresh, or is it something I’ve seen dozens of times before?ĥ. Does the pilot feel complete, and already contain the DNA of the show that it would later become?Ĥ. Does the pilot have a sense of artistry - outstanding technical elements, writing, or acting that sets it apart from other shows?ģ. Does the pilot have a point of entry? Is it open enough for audiences to stick with it and respond positively?Ģ.

It would’ve been impossible to slap together a ranked list like this without foundational criteria, so I identified six elements of a good pilot which I then used to evaluate each show that I watched (shoutout, as always, to Matt Zoller Seitz and Alan Sepinwall’s TV: The Book for inspiring me to consistently up my list-making game).ġ. And before you press send on that comment, The Sopranos was in the ‘90s and therefore ineligible. The list is composed of adult narrative series from the 21st century. Some notes: for the sake of organization and for my own sanity, I didn’t include miniseries that ran for a single season, children’s television, reality or variety shows, or anything that was created before the year 2000. In my attempt to give TV pilots a better name, I did what any normal person would do: I watched a few hundred of them and made a list of 50 exceptional ones, ordered by a complex ranking system. A series doesn’t need a good pilot to become a good show, but there are still plenty of excellent pilots out there that deserve praise for exceeding expectations. Naturally, a piece of art gets better when more time is spent on it, so thanks to the speed with which new series are pumped out, plenty of pilots during our era of entertainment saturation have felt like messy rough drafts.

It’s understandable, as the first episode of a series is often awkward, overly expository, sensationalized, and occasionally features a different cast than later episodes. I have a friend who hates pilot episodes. This countdown of the best TV pilots of this century is part of our series Update the Lists.

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