10 Classic TV Shows With Terrible Pilot Episodes

Some great shows are great all the way through. They start strong, end strong, and even their middle episodes are nothing but pure entertainment. Other shows take a little while to really get going, churning for a few episodes or a season or two before the fun begins. It’s rough when an otherwise really good show has a tough start, especially if it’s the first episode that’s the real barrier to entry.

A bad pilot of a bad or just-okay show is one thing, but a bad pilot of a great show is a true tragedy. How are we supposed to convince our friends to stick with our favorite series when the opening episode is such a slog? There’s potential in even bad pilots, and a good TV show usually knows the lay of the land from the jump, even if its first hour or half-hour doesn’t quite stick the landing. But to whiff the first try at reeling in an audience, even if the rest of the story shows so much promise, means a show has even more work to do to convince people that no, really, everything after this is good!

Then again, when we think of bad first episodes of good shows, these pilots tend to look especially bad up against the sheer quality of the subsequent episodes. A “bad” episode of Mad Men or The Sopranos would be the best episode of a mediocre drama on some streaming service no one knows about. Still, we know bad when we see it, and these episodes are not great. At least we live in the future, so, fortunately, we know that the rest of these shows are phenomenal.