Pilots

Opinion: A pilot-training crisis is threatening to make Canada’s aviation sector unsustainable—which would lead to under-served northern communities and more cancelled flights

We need to convince pilots to come forward and seek treatment rather than hide their condition

U.S. pilot season is a dog-eat-dog world where huge amounts of money are wasted on shows no one will ever see, and it is, all in all, a pretty good thing. (In theory it might be more efficient to make fewer pilots, and networks are always talking about it – but the huge number of pilots is part of what keeps the U.S. TV industry humming, because there’s a lot of work out there around this time. If we had more pilots in English Canada, even more failed pilots, we’d probably have a stronger TV industry.) But since most of these pilots will never see the light of day, at least until the networks do the sensible thing and put failed pilots online, it’s hard to know what to say about them until we know which ones made it and which ones didn’t.

Air Canada stops sending its pilots into downtown Winnipeg “due to safety concerns”

In five years, over 50 commercial airplanes crashed in loss-of-control accidents. What’s going on?

Pilots in Denmark are taking big risks in the skies

One thing about the pilot of Accidentally On Purpose, which has been mentioned by others including Myles McNutt, is that this pilot tries to do the equivalent of a movie’s worth of storytelling in one episode. It’s a “premise pilot,” where you have to show the characters before the premise is set in motion, and then get them to what will become the status quo of the series. But since this show is a Knocked Up knockoff, that means giving us most of the story of a 140 minute movie in 20 minutes. No wonder none of the relationships in the episode seem remotely plausible: the writer is completely focused on the mechanics of setting up every single plot point that will be used in the series. There’s no time for it to make sense.

TV Guide came out with a list of the “top 10 pilots ever,” leading a bunch of critics to name their own favourites: Maureen Ryan, Jill Golick, Alan Sepinwall among others. Most commentators have already noted that the TV Guide list is severely compromised by its inclusion of 30 Rock, which is a classic example of a show that got better after a shaky pilot.

Fun article in Variety on the fact that many shows haven’t been able to send out screeners to critics. And since a lot of the new shows will be premiering very early (90210, which didn’t make the pilot available for viewing, premieres on September 2), critics have to preview these shows without having seen them.