Last week, The Hollywood Reporter’s Borys Kit put out a report on Daredevil: Born Again. While I recommend reading the full piece, here’s the gist for our purposes today: The way Disney is making TV isn’t working. And, unfortunately, Daredevil: Born Again just so happened to be the moment where Kevin Fiege and other Marvel executives realized it. This realization seems to have cost head writers Chris Ord and Matt Corman and the existing series directors their jobs despite the level of oversight that happens on these MCU projects before they even hit production (read: the scripts they were producing were very approved).
It’s unacceptable that this epiphany came at the cost of a team of folks’ jobs. But it also signals a very good shift in the future of MCU (and hopefully Star Wars) television.
How can both things be true at once? Because Disney’s solution is to hire showrunners and rely on pilot episodes rather than shooting the whole kit and caboodle at once. Which, for those following along at home, is literally how television shows are supposed to be made.
Netflix Killed the Pilot, Streaming Buried it
When Netflix started creating streaming originals, it changed the way that television shows were made — at least for the purposes of streaming. Because Netflix’s model is to drop the entire series all at once (regardless of what the show needs based on tone and tempo), they had no need for pilot episodes. Or at least they thought they didn’t.
A pilot episode has two jobs. First, it’s to sell executives so they can decide whether or not to give the pilot a series order. Then it has to sell the audience. A pilot is meant to be a show’s thesis statement. It's there to set the bedrock of the series to come, introducing the audience to key themes, characters, and narratives in a way that is exciting enough to keep folks tuning in from week to week.
Netflix was half right in its idea that pilots didn’t matter for them. In the traditional television purchase model, the aforementioned executives review the pilot and decide if they want the rest of the series to be made. But Netflix didn’t have the constraints of timeslots, and its sole function was to keep people watching around the clock, so it wasn’t always about quality. It was also about volume. Because of this, the streamer’s purchase model is to buy an entire season (or sometimes multiple seasons, which can happen in linear television as well) and produce it upfront.
Netflix does have a recent strong exception to this rule to help prove the necessity of pilots and, to a lesser extent, premieres. Mike Flanagan’s The Fall of the House of Usher’s first episode sets up all of the intrigue and mystery necessary while still telling you exactly who the players are and what kind of ride you’re about to get on. You’ll also notice how strong the reception has been for the series. While that’s only partially thanks to having a killer first episode, you can’t get strong positive responses if people aren’t sticking around throughout your season, and “A Midnight Dreary” very clearly gave folks a reason to continue to click “I’m still watching.”
Exceptions aside, what Netflix forgot in the case of the murdered pilot episode is that they still have to sell the audience. Everywhere you turn you hear people talking about the quality of Netflix series, and it’s very rarely in a positive light. A lack of pilot episodes most certainly isn’t solely responsible for Netflix’s problems, but they do play a part in them, particularly as the streamer struggles to get audiences to connect with whatever their next big thing may be with Stranger Things coming to an end and The Witcher very clearly in its death throes. (The aforementioned The Fall of the House of Usher is a limited series, and Mike Flanagan is taking his talents to Prime Video moving forward.)
But Netflix only killed the pilot, all of the other streaming platforms threw the dirt on top of the proverbial coffin.
For better or for worse (it’s worse), Netflix’s insistence to drop all of its episodes at once separates it from other streamers. Each of the other platforms decide on a case-by-case basis which of their shows will drop all at once vs. weekly; thanks to their weekly fare, they certainly should be more reliant on the pilot episode than Netflix ever needed to be. And yet.
This is especially a problem with series that feature multiple-episode premieres. More and more, we’re seeing streamers shift to two- or three-episode kickoffs to their seasons. Streamers didn’t create the two-part premiere by any means, but in the rare instances that we used to see them, they were attached to 22-episode seasons.
There is absolutely no reason for your 12-episode show to have a two- or even three-part pilot or premiere. There isn’t. You are being disrespectful to your audience. You are wasting time. There is no time for dilly-dallying in a series any shorter than 13 episodes. I am an ardent defender of the filler episode, but those are tools of a longer season, not these truncated affairs we’ve seen over the last several years.
And yet, in many of these six-12-episode seasons, we are seeing so much wasted space. I suspect this is thanks largely in part to the little-discussed third job of both pilot and premiere episodes alike: setting the bedrock for your writers room. A house with a poor foundation cannot stand. Yes, I’ve used this simile twice in as many weeks, and I’ll keep prattling it off for as long as necessary! Long live the pilot episode!
And Disney agrees, at least for now! Moving forward, it will produce pilot episodes and decide if a show works before sending it to order. Or, rather, they’ll retool the pilot until they think the series that they’ve decided to move forward with is ready rather than getting halfway through shooting a season before realizing something isn’t working (as happened with Daredevil: Born Again). We win! Disney’s budgets win! It’s a rare everybody wins!
The Return of the Showrunner
Now that we’ve gotten all of that pilot business out of the way, let’s talk about a uniquely Disney problem: They just… don’t use showrunners for the MCU or Star Wars shows. Sometimes it has worked out for them — I am a strong defender of many of their series — but not using a showrunner is madness. It’s a decision made in hubris, and I couldn’t be more thrilled to hear that the streamer has suddenly realized how television is meant to be made. Bummer that it took dwindling engagement with all of their series across the board to come to said realization, but hey, we made it!
For those who don’t spend way too much time dealing with the inner workings of TV, a showrunner is exactly what it sounds like. They’re responsible for all of the creative decisions on a show but, most importantly for the purposes of our conversation, they oversee the writers room.
If you’ve been reading this column regularly, you’ve heard me harp quite often about the importance of keeping writers involved with a series throughout its creation. While many — myself included — believe that it’s critical to have multiple writers involved throughout the entire production, the showrunner(s) is the bare minimum in this regard. Multiple writers means that there is an added level of checks and balances throughout the process, but since a showrunner’s job is to know all of the inner workings of the series and to make all of the creative decisions both in and outside of the writers room, they are a strong enough line of creative defense.
Disney just… didn’t have that up until now. They were relying on film executives to run their series. And, bless them, they’re very talented people, but that might have been the stupidest business decision that Disney has made in a good long time. Film and television do not work the same and business and creative decisions are not the same thing. It’s why a showrunner and a producer have actively different jobs. Their goals are not and should not be the same beyond “make show good.”
As for Daredevil: Born Again, things are looking bright. Ord and Corman may be out as head writers, but they’re remaining involved with the project as executive producers, and The Hollywood Reporter confirmed that some scenes and episodes will be kept. Things are simply being retooled so Charlie Cox shows up in the Daredevil costume before Episode 4 and there’s more action in the series as a whole.
In the story, they quote one insider noting that “TV is a writer driven medium. Marvel is a Marvel driven medium.” Here’s hoping these changes signal a significant enough shift in understanding for the media giant before it’s too late.
Oh, and for all my She-Hulk: Attorney at Law lovers, series creator Jessica Gao’s involvement in the show’s post-production — something that was incredibly outside of the norm for a Disney series — helped Marvel realize that they would benefit from a creative throughline in their television series.
