Last Saturday I went over to my friend’s house, who has a massive home entertainment system, and spent the day watching the pilot episodes of ten different shows. Why? Because it sounded like fun. There was just so much stuff coming out under the wide umbrella of speculative fiction that I thought it would be cool to marathon the pilots of it all at once.
In alphabetic order, they were Andor, House of the Dragon, Interview with the Vampire, The Midnight Club, The Rings of Power, The Sandman, She Hulk, Wednesday, Willow and Vampire Academy.
Here’s an interesting side-effect of such a project: a subconscious part of your brain believes it’s actually watching ten episodes of the same show, which leads to musings such as: “how are the vampires going to handle the dragons?” and “it’s a shame the hobbits don’t have access to blasters” and “maybe Wednesday is Elora Danan.”
It was also fascinating to see how many similarities arose between so many seemingly different genre shows. Just off the top of my head, this collection of pilots involved at least two examples of: wolves on the loose, mysterious naked men, tragic car accidents, succession crises hinged upon women being next in line for the throne, New Zealand scenery, reveals that happened so quickly I suspect they’re red herrings, a lost sibling, whispers in a character’s ear that the audience is not immediately privy to, hidden identities, impending death heralded by a pronounced cough, actresses cast as in-jokes by dint of their previous roles in earlier projects, and Bill Paterson (you know him, he’s the guy who played Fleabag’s dad).
It got a little dizzying at times, noticing the echoes of various tropes and concepts, but interesting too, in seeing just how reliant we are on certain storytelling tools.
And watching so many shows in quick succession brought up another question: what exactly makes a good show? Or a good story in general? Because it became obvious very quickly that some of these pilots were of substantially better quality than others. It’s a question I’ll try to answer at the end of this post...
