Sarah Lin: Nathan, hey — did you have a weird week, because I had a weird week, and I think it's this topic's fault.
Dr. Nathan Hayes: What, the rabbit hole got you?
Sarah Lin: Kind of, yeah — so I kept landing on this number: roughly a hundred million dollars. Per year. That networks spend on pilots. And the part that I couldn't let go of is that most of that money funds episodes that no one ever sees. Like, ever. Not on streaming, not in reruns — gone.
Dr. Nathan Hayes: Now, when you say gone — you mean shelved, or actually destroyed?
Sarah Lin: Both, actually. Some are shelved, some are — and this is the part that felt strange to me — deliberately destroyed. Not lost in a flood, not misplaced in a warehouse. Destroyed. And I couldn't figure out if that was a broken system or, um, a system doing exactly what it's supposed to do.
Dr. Nathan Hayes: Right — but that's actually the tension worth pulling on, because from a procurement standpoint, the overproduction is the mechanism. You commission far more pilots than you can air so you have real options. The waste is the point.
Sarah Lin: Mm — and I almost believe that. Except a busted pilot, an unsold pilot, is the statistical norm. Not the exception. Most completed pilots never become a series. That's just... what a pilot is, statistically speaking.
Dr. Nathan Hayes: Which is either a perfectly rational selection filter or a staggering amount of human work that vanishes on a schedule.
Sarah Lin: Which — okay, that framing is where I want to stay for a second, because I think the word 'rational' is doing a lot of work there. Like, what does rational even mean when the failure rate is baked in from the start?
Dr. Nathan Hayes: Think of it like a casting call. You audition a hundred actors to fill three roles. You're not being wasteful — you're buying options so the three you pick are actually good. That's the whole mechanism. Networks commission far more pilots than available slots precisely so the ones that make it to fall are genuinely the strongest.
Sarah Lin: Oh. That's — yeah, that reframes it completely.
Dr. Nathan Hayes: And this isn't new improvisation — by the mid-1950s, NBC and CBS were already ordering dozens of pilots for a handful of slots. The overproduction model is the foundational procurement principle. It's always been the design. Now, the hard deadline that makes all of this run is the Upfronts — the May advertising presentations where networks announce their fall schedules. Every pilot filmed between January and May is racing toward that single moment of selection.
Sarah Lin: Wait — so pilot season is literally just... the window before that deadline? January to May, and then it's decided?
Dr. Nathan Hayes: Exactly that window, yes. Pilots ordered, filmed, evaluated, and the ones that don't get picked — they're done. The Upfronts close the gate.
Sarah Lin: Mm. If you know going in that eighty percent won't make it, why not just be more selective at the commissioning stage? Why not green-light fewer, better-developed ideas?
Dr. Nathan Hayes: Right — and that is the obvious question, but the answer is you can't know which ones will work until you actually make them. A pitch is not a pilot. The economic rationale holds because one breakout series — the revenue from that single hit — justifies the cost of every pilot that never aired. You can't identify the hit in advance, so you widen the funnel.
Sarah Lin: So the failures aren't a malfunction. They're um — they're the cost of finding the thing that works. The system produces them on purpose.
Dr. Nathan Hayes: Right — but the part that complicates 'working as designed' is what happens to the work after the gate closes. Because some of those pilots aren't shelved. They're gone. Physically destroyed. And that's where the rational-waste framing starts to fray a little.
Sarah Lin: Okay, this is the part that — Norman Lear keeps striking me. Because 'Justice for All' existed. A whole pilot, different cast, different framing — that's what All in the Family was before it was All in the Family. And nobody saw it.
Dr. Nathan Hayes: Wait — a completely different cast?
Sarah Lin: Completely different. It got retooled — recast, reshaped — and then it became one of the most culturally significant sitcoms ever made. But 'Justice for All' just... sits there, in that gap. And I keep thinking, what if the retooling hadn't happened? That pilot contains the thinking that changed television, and it almost disappeared entirely.
Dr. Nathan Hayes: Now, here's what I find genuinely surprising — there used to be a mechanism that prevented exactly that kind of erasure. NBC's Sneak Preview, CBS's Summer Playhouse. Networks were literally airing rejected pilots as summer filler. Low viewership, low cost, partial recoup. The failed pilot had a second life.
Sarah Lin: Oh wow. So it wasn't — I mean, that's a complete inversion of how I was picturing it. The system acknowledged the work had residual value.
Dr. Nathan Hayes: Which is also how Conan O'Brien and Robert Smigel's Lookwell — Adam West, unaired NBC pilot — at least theoretically could have found an audience. That whole secondary-market logic existed. And now it doesn't.
Sarah Lin: So we're actually — wait, no — we've made it less recoverable, not more. And here's what I can't quite reconcile: both things are true simultaneously. The pilot served its testing function — rational, expected, designed. And something real was lost. Those don't cancel each other out.
Dr. Nathan Hayes: No, they don't. And that irresolution is, I think, the honest answer. The system isn't broken when a pilot disappears — but the disappearance is still a cost that doesn't show up in any production budget.
Sarah Lin: And streaming — the direct-to-series model — that's supposed to fix this, but I think it actually just buries the waste somewhere we can't see it yet.
Dr. Nathan Hayes: That instinct is exactly right — and here's the mechanism. A direct-to-series order from HBO or a streamer is the strongest greenlight a creator can receive. On-air commitment before a single frame is filmed. Which sounds humane. Fewer throwaway pilots, right? Except when that full season fails — and they do fail — you've committed ten, twelve episodes of budget at a stage where there's no summer anthology slot, no Sneak Preview workaround, nothing to recoup even partial cost.
Sarah Lin: So the waste is... larger per failure.
Dr. Nathan Hayes: Significantly. And less visible. A busted pilot — you knew it failed, you knew when, you could roughly price it. A cancelled first season after eight episodes? The viewership numbers aren't published, the production cost isn't disclosed, and there's no discrete moment where anyone says 'this was the selection error.'
Sarah Lin: Oh — the opacity is the thing. It's not that streaming fixed the overproduction problem, it's that we moved it to a place where we literally can't audit it anymore.
Dr. Nathan Hayes: Right — and that matters structurally, because we never had a clean hit rate to begin with. Networks were ordering eight to twenty-five pilots a season — those numbers exist — but the ratio of pilots to long-running, revenue-generating series? Actually never quantified in any rigorous way. So we can't verify that any level of overproduction is economically justified. It might be rational. It might just be inertia that got institutionalized.
Sarah Lin: Wait — so we don't actually know if the math works? The whole 'one hit justifies the failures' logic might just be... a story the industry tells.
Dr. Nathan Hayes: We know one hit can generate enormous value. We don't know the threshold — is it one in fifteen, one in thirty? That ratio is the thing no one publishes. And under direct-to-series, we've made it even harder to track, because the failure isn't a discrete pilot anymore. It's a show someone watched three episodes of before the platform quietly pulled it.
Sarah Lin: Mm. And that person — the creator of that show — they pitched something, got the strongest greenlight possible, and then... the disappearance is just quieter. No announcement, no summer slot, no record.
Dr. Nathan Hayes: The traditional pilot season at least named the failure. February to May, decision made, you knew. This buries it. The waste didn't go away — the industry just got better at not having to look at it.
Sarah Lin: That's the thing that settled for me, actually. The filter was always there — mid-1950s, NBC, CBS, dozens of pilots for a handful of slots — the selection mechanism is the whole point. We just... kept expecting the byproduct to feel less like loss.
Dr. Nathan Hayes: The waste didn't change. The visibility did.
Sarah Lin: Mm. And I think that's — yeah, that's the part I can actually hold. Not that overproduction ends, or should. Just that when it's invisible, nobody has to name what it cost. The pilot at least made the failure legible. Whatever comes after... doesn't.
