I’ll go a different direction. Tim Daly had a show a couple of years ago called Eyes. An absolute fantastic pilot episode. One of the best I had ever seen. Then they pissed on everything that they did in the pilot and it was cancelled after a few episodes.
Boomtown with what seemed like half the cast of Band of Brothers had a great pilot. I loved the non-linear storytelling. It kept me guessing during the entire show with a great reveal at the end. To make it more accessible to a wider audience they started making the show more mainstream and it was cancelled.
EZ Streets had me from the very beginning. I think it had the potential to be great. Cancelled. Now it probably would have worked better on HBO.
Have to agree with Lost and Pushing Daisies! Buffy though, I think took a little while to get going. BSG yes, if you count just the actual series, but I thought the miniseries was pretty weak and a chore to get through…but I’m glad I slogged through it to get to the main series.
Interesting how many of the nominees are relatively recent.
A bit earlier:
Homicide: Life on the Street.
The first episode is very, very strong. The entire first season is breathtaking. It wobbles more and more as it goes along, as the network fucks with it, but it comes out of the gate at a thundering gallop.
And here’s an obscure one:
On the Air.
David Lynch’s extremely short-lived sitcom. Seven episodes, I think. The first episode is flat-out the funniest half hour of situation comedy ever aired. There was no way to sustain the lunacy, so the remaining half-dozen episodes don’t measure up, but that first episode is freaking amazing.
Probably a function of our ages and memories. Was Hill Street Blues’ opener a winner? The Paper Chase? Heck if I know. I remember my parents liking both shows a whole lot, but I was more into Kermit the Frog. Did The Cosby Show start out strong? Heck if I know, and I probably *did *watch it, but I don’t remember details about it. I don’t remember, in detail, pretty much anything before the late eighties, and I’m 34.
Hill Street Blues opening was a winner. First off, it was just a completely different cop show with a much more gritty feel.
But most important was that two main characters ended up getting shot. Did. Not. See. That. Coming. Oh, and finding out who the Captain Furillo’s girlfriend was. All and all a great beginning.
And I won’t be 38 until next week, but I guess my parents were pretty permissive to allow a 10 year old to see that show.
I agree with Lost, Futurama, Sopranos, and Six Feet Under.
I also remember really liking Desperate Housewives right away, although that quickly faded. I don’t think I ever went from liking a show to just not watching it so fast. It had a good start, though.
I love me some Buffy, and the pilot (two part) episode was better than most of the rest of the first season, but overall, it was only meh, at least compared to the rest of the series.
I also was unimpressed by the pilot of Arrested Development, at least as compared to how much I enjoy the series as a whole.
A show where the pilot was far and away the best episode of the whole series is Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. Aaron Sorkin always has great pilots, as The West Wing and SportsNight are fantastic as well.
I have to say nay on Buffy… the show took a little while to find its tone and rhythm. In the first episodes, whether it was more on Gellar or on Joss Whedon, it seems in retrospect they couldn’t decide how much they wanted to stick to being “like the movie Buffy.”
The show got a lot darker in tone and brought in black humor — even BEFORE Angel or Spike or any other characters that you could say “made” Buffy darker.