The 25 greatest television pilots

“She’s dead. Wrapped in plastic.” The murder of prom queen Laura Palmer rocked the small Pacific Northwest community of "Twin Peaks" and hooked viewers on a spellbindingly off-kilter mystery from idiosyncratic filmmaker David Lynch and veteran television writer Mark Frost. The two-hour pilot is a perfect, mainstream-skewing synthesis of Lynch’s style: It’s sexy, kooky and downright frightening in a way that didn’t immediately turn off your average “Dynasty” viewer. The show eventually got too weird for normies, but for a brief moment in the spring of 1990, on the strength of its groundbreaking pilot, it was all anyone could talk about.

The network cop drama had calcified into tidy, one-hour tedium by the early 1980s, which allowed Steven Bochco’s gritty, seriocomic reinvention, with its colorful characters and hummable theme song, to hit like “The French Connection." Television viewers had never seen a police show that dealt with corruption, drug dealers and prostitutes as an everyday part of the job. The pilot comes on strong. Bochco kills off two of the series’ most likable characters, Hill (Michael Warren) and Renko (Charles Haid), as a signal to the audience that anything can and will happen. That he subsequently resurrected Hill and Renko was a bit of a cheat, but, regardless, we were always on our toes. “Hill Street Blues” changed everything.

The Boston bar where “everybody knows your name” felt like a familiar boozy refuge from its first episode. The series’ premise centered on the addition of haughty Diane Chambers (Shelley Long) to the working-class milieu, but viewers immediately realized the show had way more to offer than culture-clash laughs. Sam (Ted Danson), Carla (Rhea Perlman), Coach (Nicholas Colasanto), Norm (George Wendt) and Cliff (John Ratzenberger) bantered about silly subjects like body sweat in movies as if they’d been born to the joint. It’s no wonder audiences kept dropping by for 11 seasons.

The greatest meta show in television history kicked off with an uproarious pilot in which late-night talk host Larry Sanders (Garry Shandling) is forced to incorporate an ad for the Garden Weasel in the body of his faltering show. Shandling wisely introduced his Carson-esque character at a moment when he was happily married and neurotic about non-career-threatening problems. The weather would get choppy soon enough, but these early halcyon days gave us a sense as to why the show mattered to Larry. The pilot also found Jeffrey Tambor’s Hank and Rip Torn’s Artie in midseries stride.

The “ER” pilot was a thrilling two-hour event that could’ve been released theatrically and grossed $100 million. Written by red-hot author Michael Crichton (just one year removed from the big-screen success of “Jurassic Park”) and directed by TV veteran Rod Holcomb, the show had a propulsive, cinematic energy that few series had evinced up to that point. The cast of familiars included Anthony Edwards, Eriq La Salle, Julianna Margulies and William H. Macy, but the guy who popped was George Clooney as the flirtatious, handsome-and-he-knows-it pediatric resident Dr. Doug Ross. Viewers came back in droves for years to come, even after most of the initial cast had departed.

You’re way ahead of the game when your pilot is scripted by the incomparable David Milch and directed by the great Walter Hill. It was a long time coming, but “Deadwood” did for the TV Western what “Hill Street Blues” did for the cop drama: It embraced a street-level realism that got at the gritty, gory heart of the Old West while demystifying folk heroes like Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane. It also brought to television a Shakespearean love for language that turned some of our most profane words into ecstatic poetry. “Deadwood” was a fully imagined world from jump.

The agony of being a teenage outcast was rarely grist for a long-running series, and, well, that wouldn’t change after Paul Feig’s “Freaks and Geeks” died in its inaugural season. Though the series never found favor with mainstream viewers, the Jake Kasdan-directed pilot deeply resonated with its target audience to the point where fans followed it from time slot to time slot and are still clamoring for a revival or movie to this day. The balance between Lindsay and Sam Weir’s groups of friends was effortless from the start, and the Styx-scored final scene is absolutely perfect.

A mob boss in therapy? What a world! The hook of David Chase’s “The Sopranos” would barely move the needle nowadays, but the pilot is still an intoxicating, sharply written immersion in a world of modern-day gangsters who are aware of their cultural stereotypes but gleefully embody them anyway. Watching the pilot today, it’s intriguing to wonder how the narrative would’ve played out had Nancy Marchand, brilliantly cast as Tony Soprano’s mother, Livia, not died so early in the series’ run. That we kept watching after a performer of her magnitude was gone is testimony to the show’s greatness.

Apologies to fans of this long-running zombie series, but the show went rapidly downhill after the pilot, which was written and directed by “The Shawshank Redemption” maestro Frank Darabont. It’s hard to find a novel angle on a zombie apocalypse after four excellent George A. Romero films and countless riffs/spoofs, but Darabont connected with the frayed humanity in Robert Kirkman’s graphic novel and delivered a nearly feature-length treatise on our decaying civilization. While the series stuck to the nihilistic theme, it quickly turned its characters into plot-obeisant ciphers.

Matthew Weiner’s “Mad Men” was a surprise ratings hit in 2007 thanks to its seductive pilot, which captured the womanizing, day-drinking joy of being a New York City ad executive in the early 1960s. Jon Hamm was an immediate TV superstar on the level of Tom Selleck or Ted Danson: He possessed a caddish charm that, much like the product he was hellbent on selling to the American public, you knew was bad for your health. The show found an even larger audience thanks to a priced-to-move Season 1 DVD set. On the strength of its electric pilot, it might’ve been the first bingeable show.

“I vant… to veed your veengers… to the Volverines.” The opening sketch of the first “Saturday Night Live” episode found head writer Michael O'Donoghue giving a bizarre language lesson to a foreigner played by a then-unknown John Belushi. After both men feigned a heart attack, Chevy Chase burst in as an ostensible stage manager, looked straight at the camera and said, “Live from New York, it’s Saturday Night." The gradually getting-domesticated counterculture had found its weekly, late-night quasi-rebellion. George Carlin, who had no time for half-hearted upheaval, hosted.

Glen A. Larson’s novelty 1970s TV series was boldly reinvented by Ronald D. Moore for the Sci-Fi Channel in 2003, and the first episode sent an exhilarating message that this was anything but a nostalgia-driven cash-in. The series would go on to far exceed Larson’s vision in scope and thematic depth, and it was all right there in the first part of the 2003 miniseries that launched the next four seasons.

J.J. Abrams and ABC were so confident about “Lost” that they screened the pilot at the San Diego Comic-Con two months before it aired on television. Geeks staggered out of the convention center’s storied Hall H screaming to the world that they’d just watched the American version of “The Prisoner." This was a show in which plane crash survivors were forced to live on an unidentified island with a load of spooky stuff housed in its interior. Monsters and riddles and interdimensional travel, oh my! The show got to where it was going in an increasingly uninteresting way, but that first episode is a powder keg of promise.

Paul Attanasio took Baltimore crime reporter David Simon’s superb “Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets” and turned it into a network television event worthy of broadcast after Super Bowl XXVII. (The Cowboys won in a walk.) The Barry Levinson-directed pilot episode introduced us to the whiteboard where open and closed cases are listed in red and black, respectively, while also giving us a sense of the Sisyphean task before these investigators. It’s a never-ending quest for justice that will eventually grind these men and women down. And there will always be suspects who lie to you like you’re Montel Williams.

How do you get revenge on the network that canceled your Emmy-winning sketch comedy series in its first season? Maybe fulfill a put pilot order with a show about an astronaut (Jack Black) who’s a moron until he’s exposed to sunlight (at which point he becomes a genius) and team him with talking motorcycle (Owen Wilson). “Heat Vision and Jack," which was produced by Ben Stiller and written by the audaciously talented duo of Dan Harmon and Rob Schrab, didn’t get picked up for series but not because it wasn’t hilarious; Fox executives just didn’t get it. The pilot is readily available online and begs for feature-length justice.

One of the all-time great pilots, the genius of the initial “NewsRadio” episode is that none of the disgruntled employees realize they’re being insubordinate to their new station manager (Dave Foley). As a result, we get to learn their hopes and grievances without feeling like we’re being fed a load of backstory (which we are!). Paul Simms’ workplace sitcom hit the ground sprinting and never let up.

“Now the story of a wealthy family who lost everything and the one son who had no choice but to keep them together.” It’s “Arrested Development," and it was a scream from the start. Mitchell Hurwitz’s opens with the Bluth patriarch being arrested on the occasion of his retirement party, and the rest of the series is focused on rich assholes dealing with dwindling resources. It’s a remarkably sharp satire of capitalism (that’s shockingly close to the Murdoch family), and the groundwork was solid from the pilot onward.

It is the best needle-drop use of Percy Sledge’s “When a Man Loves a Woman." Kevin Arnold (Fred Savage) began his pursuit of Winnie Cooper (Danica McKellar) in a beautifully directed pilot by journeyman Steve Miner, and it concludes with our adolescent hero making his first, awkward advance into adulthood. You didn’t have to be of the era to understand what was happening in “The Wonder Years." The show fell off in later seasons, but that pilot is one for the ages.

“MTV Cops.” That was the pitch, and Michael Mann delivered with one of the sleekest, sexiest pilots in the history of the medium. Mann has a penchant for returning to the sites of his greatest triumphs and, generally, messing them up, but he’s left the “Brother’s Keeper” pilot — directed by Thomas Carter and written by Anthony Yerkovich — untouched. It’s a moody, small-screen masterpiece with an unforgettable use of Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight."

Aaron Sorkin’s self-congratulatory pilot about an ascendant Democratic administration hit a year before the great tragedy of 2000 and played like a lie throughout the rest of its network run. However…that first season was splendid, and the pilot, which centers on President Bartlet upbraiding his chief of staff, gave us a sense of the show’s spikily humanistic mission.

The Michael Dinner-directed pilot of this phenomenal show was pure, uncut Elmore Leonard. Fans of the author’s novels had been waiting for this bantering, whip-smart adaptation for decades, and show creator Graham Yost injected it straight into their veins. The notion of a quick-draw federal marshal (Timothy Olyphant) was irresistible, but it was Walton Goggins’ outlaw that brought us back for six seasons and nary a complaint.

Jody Hill, Ben Best and Danny McBride brought their caustic redneck sensibility to HBO with this chronicle of a washed-up major league pitcher who refuses to accept that the game has passed him by. McBride’s Kenny Powers was an immediate, white trash folk hero — a chest-puffing jackass who believed he was God’s greatest gift to the game of baseball. You couldn’t help but buy into his hype in the pilot, and you couldn’t look away as each subsequent episode revealed he was a complete loser.

Winnie Holzman’s criminally short-lived dramedy introduced network television’s first openly bisexual character, Rickie Vasquez (Wilson Cruz), whilst thrusting us into the unvarnished life of a young woman (Claire Danes) who can’t make heads or tails of her life. Jared Leto became a star for his vacant portrayal of Jordan Catalano, but the series belonged to Danes from the beginning. It was everything John Hughes had tried and failed to accomplish with “Sixteen Candles” and “Pretty in Pink."

Buzz Bissinger’s account of the Permian Panthers run for high school football glory in the football-obsessed state of Texas made for a great film, but it launched an even better television show. Whereas Peter Berg’s movie adaptation skillfully danced around the edges of the socioeconomic realities of Odessa, Texas, the show thrust us into the homes of the kids who were being asked to give all for their school. That pilot is dominated by Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton; they’re probably the greatest television parents of all time.

The Wayans family exploded taboos with this half-hour sketch comedy show. Building off the cult success of Robert Townsend’s “Hollywood Shuffle," this ribald variety show brought African-American-driven humor to the white America in a Standards-and-Practices-approved manner that would’ve been unthinkable a decade earlier. The show’s strengths and limitations were apparent from the start, but the “Love Connection” sketch in which a Jewish woman and a black man hook up was light years ahead of “Saturday Night Live."