I mean it was the pilot and I saw it in Italy, on line.
In the pilot for A Man Called Sloane, the title character was played by Robert Logan. When it was picked up, Logan was replaced by Robert Conrad. Ji-Tu Cumbuka’s character was originally the villain’s henchman, but became the hero’s sidekick. The pilot was a relatively straight action flick. The series had more humor.
When Sheriff Elroy P. Lobo first appeared as a villain in B.J. and the Bear, he was an orwellian Evil Authority Figure. When he got his own series, The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo, he morphed into a Lovable Rogue, whose get-rich-quick schemes always backfired, forcing him to fall back on honest police work to catch the real villains in the episode.
Interesting thing about Forever Knight: When the series went into production, they re-cast every role (except for the sidekick, Detective Schanke, played by John Kapelos in both versions), and they changed the setting from Los Angeles to Toronto. Then they made an almost shot-for-shot remake with the original script, using the new cast. This became the first episode of the series.
The backdoor pilot of The Andy Griffith Show aired as part of an episode of The Danny Thomas Show. When it became a series, Don Knotts was added to the cast and Andy Taylor was was made less conniving.
Quark is an interesting case - the pilot came out in May 1977, so this science fiction comedy was a parody of Star Trek, with a half human character, etc. The series wasn’t picked up until early 1978, and the cultural landscape had changed substantially. The series was now heavily influenced by Star Wars, with the main character attempting to maintain his faith in “The Source.”
ABC aired a Wonder Woman TV movie in 1974, starring blonde Cathy Lee Crosby as a martial artist with no super powers, an original-to-the-movie costume, a “secret identity” of Diana Prince that didn’t seem to be much of a secret, and a vague association with a secret government agency (“Diana Prince” was an assistant to Steve Trevor, but the fact that she was Wonder Woman seemed to be about as secret as James Bond’s identity).
That technically wasn’t a pilot for the series that eventually aired; ABC just completely scrapped the idea, and started series development from scratch. But, the next year, ABC did start airing a Wonder Woman series.
That was the classic Lynda Carter version of Wonder Woman, complete with dark hair, a costume closely based on the comics, super strength, magic lasso, bracers that deflected bullets, an invisible plane, and, in the first season, set in the same World War II era that Wonder Woman originally appeared in.
In Lucifer, the detective’s ex-husband changed between the pilot and the subsequent episodes.
I’m not sure if this counts, but the fantasy show Wizards and Warriors was a straight up adventure show in the pilot, except for Julia Duffy’s performance, who played it for laughs, and then the subsequent series followed suit with it being purely silly from then on.
Similarly, the pilot and early episodes of “To Tell the Truth” did not feature the most remarkable feature of that program - the wacky costumes. People noticed that Monty picked the most noticeable people in the crowd and a runaway competition for being the most noticed soon led to the classic bizarre costumes of the crowd.
“To Tell the Truth” did change from the pilot but the audience in costumes wasn’t it. Mike Wallace who go on to be the notorious interviewer on “60 Minutes” hosted the pilot. At the time Wallace was a frequent on panel shows. “Let’s Make a Deal” is the show with the costumed contestants. In the pilot, which is available for viewing on You Tube, contestants are dressed normally and even asked the occasional general knowledge question in addition to the usual deals.
My ghod-They even changed the title!
It was unaired. There are 2 female characters, one is a Penny-like character and the other is sort of a proto-Amy. The proto-Amy is a researcher with Leonard, she’s interested in him, and in the spirit of full disclosure notifies him that she and Sheldon once had sex at a Star Trek convention. So pretty different.
The aired pilot is at least a little different in that it starts with Sheldon and Leonard at a sperm bank so they can make money to get faster internet. That isn’t exactly something Sheldon’s character — as it quickly developed — would probably do.
IIRC, they went through with it in the unaired pilot, but were too uncomfortable to do so in the one that was aired.
McHale’s Navy originated as a dramatic episode on an anthology program, as a small group of survivors of a devastating Japanese attack, who are whipped into shape to make a counter attack.
Police Cops. The infamous switch that made people assume Homer Simpson was stupid.
Sigh. I was watching an episode of the revived “To Tell the Truth” while writing that post. I obviously meant “Let’s Make A Deal” - sorry about that.
Was the Forever Knight movie actually intended as a pilot, or did some exec see potential in the film? That’s a big difference. Or we could claim the movie MAS*H was a pilot for the TV series, which it certainly was not, it was just a movie of a book. Likewise, the short lived series Delta House was derived from the Animal House movie, but in no way was that movie a pilot.
To be more precise about the unaired pilot of The Big Bang Theory, Jim Parsons played Sheldon Cooper and Johnny Galecki played Leonard Hofstadter. They shared an apartment and were physicists. Not much else was similar to the aired pilot. Sheldon and Leonard’s personalities were somewhat different. The woman in the show was Katie, played by Amanda Walsh, and she was quite different from Penny. The plot was also quite different. Neither Raj nor Howard was in the unaired pilot. The only other character/actor in both the unaired and unaired pilots was Althea, played by Vernee Watson. Her character also appeared four times in later episodes. She’s also played a similar character twice in Young Sheldon.
Forever Knight was a TV movie. I don’t know for sure that it was intended as a pilot for a series, but in the era it aired, it was common practice to have an open-ended TV movie as a quasi-pilot to test audience reception, leading to either a series of further TV movies, or to a regular series. Forever Knight was very clearly intended, if not necessarily as the pilot to an ongoing TV series starring Rick Springfield, at the least as a quasi-pilot. It set up character arcs and plot lines that were deliberately left open at the end.
According to Wiki
The show is an adaptation of a made-for-television film, Nick Knight , which premiered on 20 August 1989. CBS initially declined to option the film for a television series. In the summer of 1992, the series was picked up with all but one of the actors[1] being replaced and the storyline for the film acting as the first two episodes of the series.
- sigh -