The Best TV Pilots Ever Aired

Survivors staggering through a burning fuselage on a beach, with something enormous moving in the trees that nobody ever sees — the hour hands you an island, an ensemble and a mystery engine before the first act break, then withholds enough to make next week compulsory. Abrams and Lindelof spent between ten and fourteen million dollars, cutting apart a Lockheed airliner that had flown for Delta until 1998. Nothing else here builds this much this fast.

Ducks on the swimming pool do the work an hour of exposition usually does, and when they fly off, Tony hits the kitchen floor — a mob boss's panic attack, not a hit, as the inciting incident. David Chase wrote and directed the January 10, 1999 premiere. Drea de Matteo was hired for one episode as a restaurant hostess and the crew liked her enough to build Adriana around her. No pilot here states its premise in fewer moving parts.

David Lynch and Mark Frost put 34.6 million Americans in front of ABC on April 8, 1990, and made a dead girl in plastic sheeting feel like grief rather than plot. IMDb dates the record 1989, the year of the longer European cut that runs 116 minutes against the broadcast 94 and names the killer outright; the aired version refuses to. Pete Martell finding the body and phoning it in flatly sets the tone inside ninety seconds.

Jon Hamm auditioned seven times against roughly eighty other actors before AMC trusted him with a period drama, and the July 19, 2007 premiere drew only 1.2 million households. Matthew Weiner won the 2008 Emmy for writing it. Don's Lucky Strike pitch — the toasted line, delivered after he has visibly lost the room — is the thesis of the whole series: a man selling a story he does not believe to people desperate to hear it.

Vince Gilligan wrote and directed it, and the script was originally set in Riverside, California until Sony pushed production to Albuquerque — a budget decision that handed the show its light. Only 1.41 million people watched on January 20, 2008. Walt recording a goodbye video in his underwear in the desert, sirens rising off-screen, tells you inside three minutes that the register is comedy and horror at once, and nothing else here changes gear that fast.

Aaron Sorkin keeps the President off screen for most of the hour, which is the boldest structural choice on this list. Thomas Schlamme's September 22, 1999 premiere sells the staff first, so Bartlet's entrance — correcting a lobbyist on the First Commandment before anyone can finish a sentence — lands as an arrival rather than an introduction. Seven years of walk-and-talk rhythm are already fully built here.

Roll call opens the January 15, 1981 premiere and hands you an entire precinct — a dozen named cops, a hostage siege, a station house that never quietens — inside one hour. Robert Butler directed from a Michael Kozoll and Steven Bochco script, shot handheld with overlapping dialogue and a documentary racket underneath; it took Emmys for both directing and writing. Sergeant Belker biting a suspect's ankle at the hostage scene is played dead straight, which is the trick.

Finishing 60th out of 63 programs with a 9.6 rating, the September 30, 1982 premiere was a ratings disaster NBC kept anyway. James Burrows directed; Glen and Les Charles wrote it and took the 1983 Emmy for comedy writing. Diane, abandoned by Sumner and reduced to reciting an order she has memorised from a table, becomes a waitress in one beat. An entire premise assembled out of humiliation.

Handheld cameras chase the players rather than framing them, and local football players were cast in small roles so the games look like games. Peter Berg wrote and directed the October 3, 2006 premiere for NBC and 7.17 million watched. Jason Street going down on a tackle against Westerby and leaving on a stretcher turns a sports show into a town's grief inside a single play, and the show never lets go of it.

Michael Crichton had the script in a drawer since 1974, when he wrote it as EW out of his own emergency-room internship while at Harvard Medical School. Rod Holcomb directed the 87-minute premiere for NBC on September 19, 1994 and 23.8 million people watched. Carol Hathaway arriving as a patient, overdosed, on the ward where she works is the beat that says this hospital eats its own staff too.

BBC One rejected the first attempt outright — a 60-minute version directed by Coky Giedroyc was shot and shelved, and Steven Moffat reworked it into the 90 minutes Paul McGuigan shot for 25 July 2010, watched by 9.23 million. The series took a Peabody the following year. A woman in pink clawing RACHE into the floorboards, with deductions printed on screen beside her, solves the problem of how to film somebody thinking.

Fox wanted Gillian Anderson replaced once Chris Carter had already cast her, on the grounds that she lacked the qualities executives associated with hit shows; Carter held the line. Robert Mandel directed the September 10, 1993 premiere in Vancouver, and roughly 12 million watched a partnership that arrives fully formed. Mulder spray-painting an X on the road where the car radio dies, then losing minutes he cannot account for, is the method in one gesture.

Alan Ball wrote and directed the June 3, 2001 premiere and opened by killing the family patriarch: Nathaniel Fisher, hit by a bus while driving his new hearse on Christmas Eve. Mock funeral-home commercials break each act, a device abandoned straight afterwards and used in no other episode. Selling the family business its own product, in advertising language, is the joke the series then runs on for five years.

Eleanor Shellstrop dies under a line of runaway shopping carts that shove her into traffic, then wakes somewhere she has not earned. Drew Goddard directed Michael Schur's script for NBC on September 19, 2016, and 8.04 million households watched. Holding the reveal until the final minute — she is not the death-row lawyer Michael describes, she is nobody's idea of good — converts a sitcom premise into a mystery engine.

Only 582,000 people watched HBO's June 3, 2018 premiere, which is worth remembering now that everybody claims they were there from the start. Adam McKay directed Jesse Armstrong's script. Roman offering a kid a million dollars to hit a home run at the company softball game, then tearing the check up in his face once Tom tags him out, is the cruellest character introduction here — and it places last because introductions are nearly all the hour does.