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dga quarterly 45 PHOTO: AUGUSTA QUIRK/IFC ulie Anne Robinson knows that the only thing that's predictable about shooting a pilot is that it will be unpredictable. Robinson, who directed the pilot for the upcoming ABC series The Catch, re- calls, "One time, we'd had lots of time to prep and I was on a tech scout, and the writer called me and said, 'Julie Anne, we're going to do a car crash on a lawn in front of a house.' So I'm in the tech van and I said, 'Look, there's a great house—pull over!' I surveyed the area and said, 'There's going to be a car accident and here's a fire hydrant and water's going to be spurting everywhere. That's perfect! Let's set it here. Let's go in and get permission.' So we had 15 people on tech scout, everyone measuring up for a car crash that wasn't in the script 15 minutes earlier. You literally never know what you're going to get." That was especially true this past season, when a number of pilots were ordered at an unprecedented late date, and directors found themselves scrambling to deliver their finished products on time. "There was not a lot of consideration to the actual process of making the pilot," says David Nutter, one of TV's most successful pilot directors, who most recently helmed the upcoming The CW pilot Con- tainment. "You're in a situation where you can't get a green light to go forward and hire your cast and crew. My cameraman got an offer to go to another project. Actors were getting other deals. It didn't help anybody in the process." The broadcast networks remain loyal to the late winter-early spring ritual in which hopeful show- runners compete in a Hunger Games-like fashion to secure the best actors, directors, and crew mem- bers to realize their visions. Most basic and pay cable networks develop programming year-round, and are more selective of the pilots they greenlight. Eric Schrier, FX Networks president of original programming, says, "We use the script process as everybody else's pilot process. A lot of networks try to discover if there's a show there. When we make a drama, in our minds, that's a show unless something goes wrong or the combinations don't come togeth- er." Of the 20 drama pilots FX has ordered, 15 have gone to series. Pamela Fryman, who directed the pilot for the long- running sitcom How I Met Your Mother and the up- coming NBC series People Are Talking, marvels, and not in a good way. "It's amazing we still do pilots, that we still try to cram everything into six to eight weeks and do nothing the rest of the year. The process is bro- ken, and no one seems to want to fix it." Adding to the uneasiness is the fact that new tech- nology is changing the industry's economic model more quickly than ever. A television program no lon- ger has to be seen on a television set and online ser- vices like Amazon Prime and Netflix are increasingly producing original content for subscription video-on- demand. This has prompted traditional broadcast and cable networks to expand the ways in which pilots are produced, which in turn has directors innovating ways in which they give birth to new programs. The Quar- terly spoke to a number of pilot directors and execu- tives about this evolving landscape and the challenges of creating the first episode of what they always hope will be a successful and long-running series. The Backdoor Pilot Perhaps the least risky path to a new series is the backdoor pilot, in which a popular show introduces new characters and situations for a proposed spinoff series. If the backdoor pilot is successful, a new series is born; if not, the episode may have cost more than a regular installment of the show (but still less than a traditional pilot) and is guaranteed to air. Dick Wolf, TV's reigning king of spinoffs, relocated from Law & Order's New York to Chicago for a new NBC drama franchise, a triptych which began in 2012 with Chicago Fire, continued with Chicago P.D. in 2014, and will add Chicago Med in the fall. Fire director-producer Joe Chappelle directed the episodes that introduced both the P.D. and Med worlds. "In some ways, a backdoor pilot is easier to do than a traditional pilot, because there are elements already in place; you're not starting with a blank slate," he says. "You have to strike that balance between, 'Is it another episode or is it a pilot?' That is the fine line." To launch the Chicago P.D. backdoor pilot, Chap- pelle created a logistically difficult chase sequence that paid homage to the classic '70s film The French Connection. The production was given access to a sig- nificant chunk of an above-ground train line, locked down the streets below, and had helicopters shooting the action from the air. "It was a huge deal for a TV show, fun and exciting to do," Chappelle says. "It was way above our normal orbit. It wasn't something we'd do on Fire, but we went for it; it was a really ambitious chase sequence. I fig- ured they'd cut it for time, but it survived in its entirety. SMALL WORLD: Jonathan Krisel (2nd from left) directed the pilot for the Web-to-TV series Portlandia. The challenge was translating the spontaneity and freshness of a bare-bones show for a bigger screen without losing its charm. J