Fox rejected the pilot for Heat Vision and Jack, which featured Jack Black as a super-intelligent former astronaut and Owen Wilson as the voice of his motorcycle.
There was also talk of a solo series for Giles, called Ripper. At first there was talk of making it about his younger days, but then it was supposed to be a horror anthology with Giles as the host.
I would have loved to see a show about Riley and his wife; it sure looked to me like they were being set up for a spinoff series. But, apparently not.
There was supposed to be a spin off of “The Middle” featuring Sue Sue Heck.
AFAIK, it never happened.
If you truly want to research all American TV pilots that never made it to be a series, there’s a book called Encyclopedia of Unaired Television Pilots, 1945-2018 by Vincent Terrace. It lists 2,923 of them. It gives the cast, crew, and a description of the plot that’s between one sentence and one paragraph.
Here’s a YouTube collection of 104 unsold TV pilots (and not just clips but the entire pilot):
Mulholland Drive. It was planned as a TV series, and a variety of weird unrelated scenes were shot. The TV project fell through, so the unrelated scenes were pasted into a feature movie. Nobody, including the writer/director, can make sense of it, but it gets 7.8 IMDB score!
installLSC writes:
> Zelda" would have spun off Sheila James’ character from “Dobie Gillis” in 1961. Sadly
> enough, Sheila would relate the reason it never got past the pilot stage was the
> network execs found out she was a lesbian.
It was (according to the websites I just read) a little vaguer than this. The character of Zelda Gilroy was different in several ways from a typical female American TV character at the time. She was smarter than all the other characters on the show, more willing to put herself forward and not stay in the background, and not classically pretty. After the pilot wasn’t picked up, she went back to Dobie Gillis and did another season. One website says that the pilot was perhaps deliberately done so as not to get picked up as a series. It was only to keep Sheila James (and director Rod Amateau) on contract at CBS. The reason that CBS president James Aubrey supposedly gave (and this was never openly stated but passed to Amateau and then to James and then to interviewers of her) for not picking it up was that the character was a little too butch for his tastes. James went on to do another TV show called Broadside for one season. She later did a pilot for a revived version of Dobie Gillis and then a TV movie of it. She did appearances on a number of other TV shows. Her acting career then went into decline, probably because of the same reason that it goes into decline for many actresses after 30 and most actresses after 40, because too many TV executives didn’t want to hire any actress they didn’t consider young and pretty.
Too bad they never had Shatner on.
When the show debuted, Dhiegh gave an interview (for TV Guide, I think) in which he said (IIRC) “The last thing TV needs now is another private eye series, but somehow I thought Khan! was different.”
I wish now I had caught an episode or two. It must have been interesting.
I would like to have seen a Doc Savage series. At one point, Chuck Connors was being considered for the role. Sadly, we had to settle for Ron Ely. (I like Ely, but he is not in the same league. Connors would have been awesome!)
The pilot got a theatrical release, but you can tell that it was intended for TV. There are a couple of abrupt scene changes that are jarring in the theater, but would have worked fine around a commercial break.
I think they were hoping for a Saturday morning time slot. The pilot has a bigger budget than most live-action kids’ shows of the era, but it has the same general aesthetic.
The important part here is that the character Jack Black plays is only the smartest man on earth while the sun is up. He’s kind of a dope at night. And Ron Silver plays himself, revealing that he’s an actor by day, and a NASA assassin at night.
I think I saw this on back in the '70s, on late-night TV. I remember it started out with Doc literally ducking a rifle bullet while chasing a bad guy. (All he had to do was shift his shoulder to the right slightly. Didn’t even bat an eyelash.)
Before Sliders George RR Martin wrote a pilot for a show called Doorways about people jumping from parallel world to parallel world looking for home.
The first episode was about a world where a bacteria designed to clean up oil spills eats all of the petroleum in the world. You can find it on YouTube and they did a comic adaptation of it. It’s not bad. I would have liked to see an alternate history show that took the premise a little more seriously than Sliders did.
OMG I saw this as a little kid and yes, never forgot it. What is it about that show? I recall: Well dressed protagonist, gloomy, dread-filled atmosphere, and a scene showing the “birthplace” of a mud monster, a creepy, man-shaped depression in the earth where mud had been removed. Pretty scary, and I was 8 years old. Thanks for the memory!
Also, both CBS and ABC at some point (I think late 1970s for ABC, and early 1980s for CBS) dedicated a half-hour summer time slot to unsold pilots, although ABC’s version also included burn-offs of at least one of its cancelled sitcoms (The Nancy Walker Show). Note that I am not referring to the 1985 CBS series George Burns Comedy Week, which had one of its stories turned into a series; I don’t think that very many of those shows were intended as pilots.
Two unsold pilots come to mind:
Kelly’s Kids - a backdoor from The Brady Bunch, with Ken Berry as a father who wants to adopt a child but, after determining that the Bradys’ secret is, “There’s always another kid around,” end up adopting three; one of the kids would later return to TV as Mousketeer “Pop” on The New Mickey Mouse Club (the version that included a pre-The Facts of Life Lisa Whelchel).
Dear Diary - an unsold HBO pilot with Bebe Neuwirth; because HBO never aired it, the producers decided to show it in a movie theater for a week and submit it in the Live Action Short category at the Oscars, where it won, prompting what I call the Dear Diary Rule - TV pilots and episodes of existing TV shows can no longer be entered in the category.
I’ll mention the sitcom “Dads”, a 1997 pilot that I’m not aware ever made the airwaves but found a second life on self-erasing, single-play VHS tapes sent out by a marketing company for a decade afterwards.
I got scammed into watching this tape. They claimed that they were soliciting feedback for a new show, but they really only tricking you into answering questions about the commercials included at the end. I’m guessing they used this show because it was bland and inoffensive, and Rue McClanahan’s name recognition would make it seem legit.
There was a pilot for a Wonder woman show like 5 years ago starring Adrianne palicki. They filmed the pilot but it never aired. You can find the pilot out there if you’re so inclined. It was not good IMHO.
All the mentions of Roddenberry failed pilots, and nobody cited the biggest of all? The original pilot for Star Trek was different in many ways. An almost entirely different cast and characters, and the personality of Spock was very different. It would have been a totally different show if it had gone ahead, and probably totally forgotten today. Maybe too obvious to mention.
A 1994 episode of Matlock titled “The P.I.” was a backdoor pilot for a show with George Peppard and Tracy Nelson. However, Peppard’s died months later so the show never was made.
**The WB **
The WB had a couple that they released the pilots as TV movies instead of giving them a series order as intended.
The Lone Ranger starring Chad Michael Murray
Aquaman starring Justin Hartley
NBC
Mockingbird Lane though the less said about this one the better.
Fox
Before it was a NetFlix show, Locke and Key had an aired pilot on Fox. It was pretty good.