10 Failed TV Series Pilots You Need To Watch

Forget Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones, the Justice League of America TV pilot is a must-see.

By Alexander Pan /

Pilot season is the time when promising TV shows are given a chance to shine on the airwaves, and not so promising TV shows are sent to the scrap heap. It's a difficult thing to make sure that a TV show maintains good ratings whilst ensuring the creative process isn't hindered. No one goes in wanting to make a bad TV show but, unfortunately, not all TV pilots are as good as Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones and not all good TV pilots can get crazy ratings fresh off the boat like Empire. Sometimes a TV pilot can be good but isn't able to generate the buzz needed to sustain a full TV series, like the 2012 reboot of Mockingbird Lane. Sometimes a TV pilot simply does not click with audiences or studio executives despite the pedigree of the creative team or source material, like the terrible looking Wonder Woman pilot. And sometimes there are those TV pilots that are so fantastically absurd that there is no room in the television landscape for them to fit, like the time the British tried to make a Hitler-centric sitcom set in a Jewish neighbourhood. Yes that last one actually happened. So with that in mind, here are 10 failed TV pilots that were either brilliant but sadly cancelled too early, inferior but interesting adaptations of existing works, or canned for being completely left-field insane.