Unaired Pilot

Here’s another unaired pilot for a series that was considerably improved by casting changes. Married… With Children was already pretty much what it was going to be: Katey Sagal and especially Ed O’Neill had their characters more or less nailed, the neighbours were there. And the writers, Michael Moye and Ron Leavitt, had already established their scorched-earth policy against all the family-friendly, pro-social TV conventions that they’d been working in for the last 15 years;they were trying to create characters whose only redeeming quality was their honesty. (TV characters had been insulting each other and making each other miserable since the medium began; the Bundys simply admitted what was underneath the surface of a lot of “heartwarming” comedies and dramas.) They even had the scene in the opening where Al hands money to all the family members. But the Bundy kids were played by Tina Caspary (Kelly) and Hunter Carson (Bud). The show was picked up basically intact but with the kids re-cast, and that was a good decision. Not just the re-casting, but the way the kids — because of the replacement actors and the writing — became funnier characters.

You can find a number of unaired pilots on YouTube, not just ones that never got picked up (like the semi-famous “Nobody’s Watching”), but pilots for shows that did eventually get picked up with big changes. One of the most famous examples of a hit show with failed pilots was All In The Family; the first U.S. pilot based on the British series was made in 1968, the second in 1969, and the show didn’t get on the air, with a third pilot, until 1971.  Norman Lear simply would not give up trying to get a version of Till Death Us Do Part on the air. This is the second pilot, entitled “Those Were the Days.” Lear’s script is pretty much the same as the final pilot, and they had Carroll O’Connor and Jean Stapleton in place as the Justices (they were renamed “Bunker” in the final version), but there are different actors in the other three roles: Chip Oliver (as the son-in-law), Candy Azzara (as Gloria) and D’Urville Martin (Lionel Jefferson). None of the three are as good as the three people who replaced them in the final pilot that got picked up; casting, as usual, makes all the difference in TV. Also, note that the set they went with in the final version is more spacious than the one in this pilot: instead the set being one big room as in the unaired pilot, Archie and family were given a bigger living room with a dining-room table, with the kitchen separated and used for “private” conversations. The final version is a better set in terms of comedy possibilities.