You may have noticed that a disproportionate number of musings of late have tended to be on the negative side, and you’re not wrong to criticize me for it. But facts are what facts are and when one sees an industry that continues to be defined by audience erosion, fractionalization and corporate contraction it’s hard to see the forest through the trees, especially when many have been planted in soil that’s not conducive to growth.
So on the rare occasions where I see reports that what I perceive to be decisions that my experience has deemed to be especially misguided self-inflicted wounds are being reconsidered I’m in an unusually celebratory mood. Such was the case yesterday when THE ANKLER’s Lesley Goldberg dropped this into my and her other subscribers’ inboxes:
NBC this week handed out the first pilot orders of 2026 — a reboot of The Rockford Files, a U.S. Marshals drama called Protection, an untitled crime drama and a PI comedy from the minds behind Brooklyn Nine-Nine — all four of which will be in consideration for the 2026-27 broadcast season. The network is looking to make between five and seven pilots this season in what would be its biggest investment in the model since the pandemic — following years of streaming disruption — radically changed the way broadcast television is developed.
Not to be outdone, last night the ever-intrepid and recently promoted Nellie Andreeva at DEADLINE added another log onto this fire:
NBC is truly bringing back pilot season. In addition to the barrage of January pilot orders — six over the past four days — the network also has revived another forgotten pilot season tradition: Friday night greenlights.
Getting pilot orders tonight are dramas Puzzled, from former Charmed showrunner Joey Falco, and What the Dead Know, from Dick Wolf‘s Wolf Entertainment and writer Beth Rinehart (FBI: Most Wanted)…NBC had been expected to pick up a sizable number of pilots by today’s standards this pilot season — about four dramas and four comedies. The network is already overdelivering on its goal with five drama pilots — The Rockford Files reboot, Protection, the untitled Georgaris/Fox project, Puzzled and What the Dead Know.
As someone who spent dozens of years working on hundreds of such pilots, that’s a rare “toldja” moment, a point you’d be aware of if you happened to have read my castigation of CBS’ braintrust just about two years ago. when they made a public declaration that they were backing away from the process. At the time, a few of their mouthpieces actually took umbrage at me for daring to question what they saw as the necessity to make that decision. I lost years of connection and supposed friendship over stating the obvious. Well, Goldberg also reported that in that particular case I might have been accurate after all:
CBS entertainment president Amy Reisenbach said in 2024 that “Pilot Season is probably dead” for the network, but that hasn’t completely been the case. This season, CBS has two pilots in the works: Eternally Yours, a single-camera vampire comedy starring Ed Weeks (The Mindy Project) from the team behind Ghosts that was picked up in July; and period multicam Regency from Warner Bros. TV and Big Bang Theory grad Tara Hernandez that was ordered less than a month ago. What’s more, sources say CBS is already developing for the 2027-28 season as its Texas-set medical drama starring Jared Padalecki — put in development last January with the network opening a development room in November — will be for the season after next.
And for good measure she added some evidence that Burbank is greenlighting a few more projects for my remaining vendor and executive colleagues to sink their teeth into:
Under Simran Sethi, president of scripted programming at Hulu and ABC, the broadcast network has been focused on year-round development with orders in the spring and a second cycle in the summer. ABC this week announced a March 3 premiere date for Scott Speedman-led drama RJ Decker, which was picked up to pilot in last May — right around the time networks used to make decisions on which pilots went to series. This season, ABC has two pilots in the works: Rachel Bloom comedy Do You Want Kids?, which has been in the works since August; and The Rookie spinoff, The Rookie: North, the Jay Ellis (Insecure) vehicle that was formally picked up in November and this week cast Chris Sullivan (This Is Us) to co-star.
To be sure, these are relative baby steps in what I would argue is a return to reason, and the seasoned Goldberg’s been around long enough to soberingly expound on that reality check:
The development ecosystem once saw the Big Four broadcast networks each buy around 150 comedy and 150 drama scripts annually, helping to keep scores of writers working for years. At the height of Pilot Season back in 2013 — a frenzy of script pickups, castings and scrambling to produce a “test” episode that stretched from January to May’s upfront presentations for Madison Avenue ad buyers — broadcast networks ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC and The CW ordered nearly 100 comedies and dramas among them. By 2014, then-Fox topper Kevin Reilly famously declared Pilot Season to be officially dead as he shifted the network to year-round development, a model that has become commonplace across the industry, including at the broadcast networks.
Since then, the numbers have continually declined as competition from streaming and cable intensified and resulted in an explosion of straight-to-series orders. In the post-Peak TV era, fiscal responsibility is a top priority, and networks no longer buy hundreds of scripts, instead making only what each platform could need for the following season. And while there’s a cost to making a pilot, the process does reveal if a premise, its creative team and cast can truly work — and provides more opportunity to course-correct than the costlier straight-to-series order.
I will underscore her observations and further remind that those lessons are even more applicable to those streamers who continue to place blind faith in a creative’s “freedom” and their desire to enable thinner-skinned approaches to seeing their vision to air. You know what’s a way uglier line item on an asset sheet than the sunk costs of pilot testing? An eight-episode dud that fail on multiple KPIs and take up shelf space on a platform’s home page only long enough to be recommended for removal by a group of overpaid beancounters who regularly monitor them, thus dooming it to almost perpetual obscurity.
I’ve personally shepherded dozens of concepts that benefited greatly from the testing process, many getting ordered only after the results were integrated into redrafts and repitches that fell better in line with buyers’ demands; a few like RESCUE ME becoming de facto hits after the producers were able to swallow their pride and decide to rewrite the disappointing ending to their first episode that set a tone that ultimately got it to 93 well-rated episodes and a decent amount of awards.
I acknowledge that it’s easy to dismiss that as an outlier from a different time, and more recent showrunners might be able to point to a host of other examples where pilots didn’t help one iota. In my alleged takedown of Team Reisenbach I was exceptionally explicit in qualifying the differences between good and bad research practices. Now more than ever I would implore those best practices to be heeded, since I fully concur with Goldberg’s informed take that “fiscal responsibility” does superzede practically everything else. Considering far too many involved in this process over the years have moved on one way or the other, I would ask the newbies to click on it–it’s offered as a public service more than anything else.
I don’t think the days of 300 projects crammed into a few hectic weeks in the spring will ever come back, at least not in my lifetime. Nor would I suggest it should–no one should have to have their lives as disrupted and hectic as ours were in what was ultimately a fool’s errand more often than not. But the very fact that we’re experiencing even this small degree of renaissance is more than I might have once expected–certainly about two years ago. To those who may have been offended at that time who I’m sure aren’t going to read this musing unless it’s forwarded to them I have five words. Welcome back. And you’re welcome.
Until next time…