I’ll endorse the earlier mentions of :
[ul]
[li]LOST[/li][li]The Walking Dead[/li][li]and MAS*H[/li][/ul]
I’ll add in the Pilot episode of Flash Forward.
And also the first episode of the FX series The Booth on the End, still available on Hulu.
ER’s pilot deserves more than one mention.
Sherlock’s pilot was not broadcast. It’s available on the DVD; interesting, but not as fine as the first episode. Which was shot last in the first “series.”
I loved the pilot for Sleepy Hollow. What a batshit premise for a series–but it worked. Humor & character chemistry & really scary stuff.
The first series was mostly quite good. The second sucked until the last episodes–when two problematic characters were killed off. I’ve avoided reading much about Season 3–will they succeed in unbotching all that botching?
The pilot episode of THE COSBY SHOW was jaw-droppingly good.
There was a short-lived english series called Come Back Mrs Noah. It starred Mollie Sugden (Mrs Slocombe from Are you Being Served) playing - well, a Mrs Slocombe character.
The plot was, Mrs Noah had won a Best Housewife’s Cake award and the prize was a tour of the great British Rocket, that was being prepared for takeoff. The astronauts were played by the two officers from It Aint Half Hot, Mum, and Ian Lavender played the reporter who took her through the rocket.
You can guess the plot - '‘Don’t touch that Big Red Button, Mrs Noah! Oh, No!’. Who would have guessed, eh?
The first half-hour (set on the ground, before the rocket took off) was one of the funniest things I had seen. The episodes after that were full of Anti-Gravity corsets and such-like and were not good at all (I gave up after episode 3 or 4). It was a bit surreal in parts, but basically dire. It has gone down in history as one of the worst British TV comedies of all time.
For me its Deadwood. Admittedly I haven’t seen in it a while, but I know that it just grabbed from the get go.
The first episode of ALIAS was perfect.
PSYCH had an excellent pilot,
and the pilot for Gilligan’s Island was as good as any of the regular episodes
The first episode of AGENT CARTER was better than anything that followed.
And it’s the only episode where they revealed the professor’s name.
I’ll mention a show that was short-lived, not sure why, but the first episode of Pushing Daisies had me drooling in anticipation.
Incorrect; there was at least one other, the one where Zsa Zsa was on the island.
The pilot of CSI, which ended with Grissom on the roller coaster, was excellent.
That first season was some of the best TV ever. Too bad the rest of series never live up to it. Not that the later seasons didn’t have great episodes but, as the series went on, it became more and more clear the writers had no idea where to take it.
Mork & Mindy. Robin Williams nailed it from the start.
Studio 60 had such an amazing pilot —I’ll occasionally just watch that episode. But that show went downhill fast. If anyone’s never watched it, I’d recommend watching just the pilot, and nothing else.
The Sopranos and Breaking Bad stand out for me. Breaking Bad in particular really hooked me. “Walt, is that YOU?”
I thought the first episode of Downton Abbey did an outstanding job of introducing a huge ensemble and making each character distinct and memorable, even if the plot itself was so heavy on exposition.
Interesting factoid: Monty Python’s Flying Circus never made a pilot. The BBC ordered 13 episodes essentially sight unseen.
In her book Enter Whining, Fran Drescher states that the pilot for The Nanny was the highest rated pilot in CBS history.
I find that hard to believe. Drescher was hardly a big star at the time the series debuted. According to this Hollywood Reporter article the pilot was the highest-tested one in years.
This one blew me away when I was 11 years old: