Last week we did Irwin Allen’s not-at-all-famous B-movie, “City Beneath The Sea.” The man had kind of a nut for underwater shows, and for pretty obvious reason: Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea was his longest-running series. (4 seasons, 110 episodes) He made periodic attempts to re-capture that particular spark, and this is, more or less, the final one.

PLAY BY PLAY

Irwin Allen had four, count ‘em, four SF series running on TV in the second half of the sixties, an accomplishment that has never been equaled, though the 90s Trek franchise came as close as anyone ever has with three series running over the course of a decade. That in no way prevented Mr. Allen from trying for five, however, and though ultimately he failed, he still produced a film that is ripe for our riffing.

“Well there’s 80 minutes of my life I’ll never get back”
----Mark Waid
(Comics Writer)

It’s fun to watch unsold pilots. It’s fun to second-guess the network executives who passed on a particular show. It’s fun to get a glimpse in to an alternate world where a show may have lasted a whopping 13 hours on Fox, rather than just one. For me, the highlight is seeing the kind of high-concept crap that people developed with no real thought of how they’re going to keep it going.

Every year there are dozens of pilot episodes made. These are essentially a working model or proof of concept episode for a potential new TV series. Some of these are fully-fledged episodes, and some are only partial-length. Others are feature length. Based on the strengths or weaknesses of these ‘proposals’, networks decide which new shows they’re going to pick up and which ones they’re not.

Ah, the summer doldrums, when young man’s fancy turns to thoughts of love and TV networks burn off their unsold pilots in an attempt to amortize their development costs. It’s romantic, really. We get a chance to meet and bond with characters that we’ll never see again, never get to know; we get a glimpse down a road the network, in it’s wisdom, decided not to travel down. We get to test the waters of what the suits think us hayseeds will like. We get a window in to which failed shows from the last few seasons the other suits feel are worthy of ripping off.