What to do when your pilot doesn’t get picked up? Get even with your own web series

2 October 2012 Rob Buckley US TV Post a comment

Not all pilots get picked up. That, after all, is the point of pilots – to see which shows work in practice and which don’t. There’d be no point picking up all of them.

But behind every unaired pilot there’s a dozen stories. People meet, people make friends – or enemies – they come up with ideas for new and better shows.

Take Downwardly Mobile, a pilot for NBC starring Roseanne Barr. That didn’t get picked up, although given the NBC comedies that did get picked up, you have to wonder either how good it was or how bad it was.

Some of the actors from that pilot – Jason Antoon, Mary Birdsong, Greg Cromer, Tricia O’Kelley and Romy Rosemont – became friends. And even though Downwardly Mobile never became a series, they’ve decided to stick together and even make their own series – Bitter, Party of 5.

Here they are, ringing up NBC to find out whether Downwardly Mobile got picked up. You can guess the rest, but how will the next episode go?

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Author

  • Rob Buckley

    I’m Rob Buckley, a journalist who writes for UK media magazines that most people have never heard of although you might have heard me on the podcast Lockdown Land or Radio 5 Live’s Saturday Edition or Afternoon Edition. I’ve edited Dreamwatch, Sprocket and Cambridge Film Festival Daily; been technical editor for TV producers magazine Televisual; reviewed films for the short-lived newspaper Cambridge Insider; written features for the even shorter-lived newspaper Soho Independent; and was regularly sarcastic about television on the blink-and-you-missed-it “web site for urban hedonists” The Tribe. Since going freelance, I've contributed to the likes of Broadcast, Total Content + Media, Action TV, Off The Telly, Action Network, TV Scoop and The Custard TV.

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