10 Secret TV Pilot Episodes You Didn't Know Existed
4. The Inbetweeners - Baggy Trousers
In probably the most dramatically different original pilots on this list, The Inbetweeners takes the cake with its 80's set version of the show named Baggy Trousers. You heard that right, the comedy was called Baggy Trousers originally, after the Madness song of the same name that released in 1980.
The show was in essence what The Inbetweens became, with four awkward, outcast, teen boys struggling through school, except with less cultural relevancy as The Inbetweens due to it being set 20 years earlier.
There isn't much known about Baggy Trousers. What we do know is that the characters all had different names and were portrayed by different actors and that 3 of the 4 boys followed the same character archetypes. Except for Jay, who didn't exist at all, in any way, but Jay's actor James Buckley actually was in the unaired pilot as a character named Neil.
It's unknown why the show wasn't picked up until it was reworked for the present day, but my guess is that it had something to do with the audience demographic being able to relate more to teens in the 2000s than in the 1980s.