TV in 3: Is Pilot Season Taking Off Again?
Network by network, I reveal what’s happening at the Big Three as an old system returns
I recently spoke to Versant execs Mark Lazarus and Val Boreland about the NBCU spinoff’s strategy, showrunner Alex Kurtzman about his Paramount+ Star Trek universe, and the Bell Media execs who bet on breakout hit Heated Rivalry. I’m lesley.goldberg@theankler.com
NBC this week handed out the first pilot orders of 2026 — a reboot of The Rockford Files, a U.S. Marshals drama called Protection, an untitled crime drama and a PI comedy from the minds behind Brooklyn Nine-Nine — all four of which will be in consideration for the 2026-27 broadcast season.
The network is looking to make between five and seven pilots this season in what would be its biggest investment in the model since the pandemic — following years of streaming disruption — radically changed the way broadcast television is developed.
At the height of Pilot Season back in 2013 — a frenzy of script pickups, castings and scrambling to produce a “test” episode that stretched from January to May’s upfront presentations for Madison Avenue ad buyers — broadcast networks ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC and The CW ordered nearly 100 comedies and dramas among them. Since then, the numbers have continually declined as competition from streaming and cable intensified and resulted in an explosion of straight-to-series orders. By 2014, then-Fox topper Kevin Reilly famously declared Pilot Season to be officially dead as he shifted the network to year-round development, a model that has become commonplace across the industry, including at the broadcast networks.
So why is NBC making more pilots this year? No one is commenting, but the answer probably lies on a P&L spreadsheet. The development ecosystem once saw the Big Four broadcast networks each buy around 150 comedy and 150 drama scripts annually, helping to keep scores of writers working for years. In the post-Peak TV era, fiscal responsibility is a top priority, and networks no longer buy hundreds of scripts, instead making only what each platform could need for the following season. And while there’s a cost to making a pilot, the process does reveal if a premise, its creative team and cast can truly work — and provides more opportunity to course-correct than the costlier straight-to-series order.
For this week’s TV in 3 — my take on the industry’s latest — I look at the state of development and pilots in the works at ABC, CBS and NBC. (The CW, under Nexstar, no longer produces originals, while Fox hasn’t really been in the pilot business since its studio counterpart, 20th Television, was sold to Disney and is not expected to order any pilots this year.) It’s a mix of reboots, originals from trusted top creators and a second comeback for a beloved set of characters shepherded by Seth Rogen. Read on for the titles to watch and my analysis of the strategy behind them.
