PILOT shows are a TV tradition in the US, but in another indication that the times are a-changing, NBC has said it is looking to save as much as $50 million a year by no longer producing expensive pilots for new TV programs.

Here’s an excerpt from the Guardian Unlimited article:

Days after announcing plans to end another of the US television industry’s cherished traditions by pulling the plug on annual “upfronts”, presentations to advertisers, the NBC Universal chief executive, Jeff Zucker, said the ongoing US writers’ strike had made the network re-examine its attitude to pilots as well.

He said the cost of a typical pilot, many of which are never made into a full series, had soared from $3m to $7m in three years. Because that bore no relation to the eventual cost of a standard episode and was an increasingly poor indication as to its eventual success, Zucker added that they were becoming redundant.

Every year, US producers pull out all the stops to produce pilots for series they hope will be picked up by broadcasters.

But Zucker, in London today en route to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and speaking to journalists before addressing NBC Universal’s 16,000 worldwide staff, said: “It’s a different world, yet Hollywood is built on this system of making pilots in the old way without realising things have changed.”