A lot of pilots got good news this week, but several promising genre pilots didn’t get picked up as well.
Entertainment Weekly has a break down of ten pilots that looked like a sure thing on paper, but eventually got passed over for a series order. Among them are a couple of genre projects that fans may wonder what might have been.
While it picked up the rebooted Tomorrow People, the CW has decided that it won’t go with a tv series based on The Selection. The popular young adult novel by Kierra Cass centers on a working class young woman chosen by lottery to participate in a competition with 25 other women for the Royal Prince’s hand to become the nation’s next queen. The CW has been interested enough in adapting the series for television that it’s had the series in development for two pilot cycles and two pilots. It looks like it just didn’t make the cut. Maybe third time’s the charm?
Fox also passed on an adaptation of a young adult novel with Delirium. Written by Lauren Oliver, the trilogy is about a world where love is deemed illegal and is able to be eradicated with a special procedure. With 95 days to go until her scheduled treatment, Lena Holoway (Emma Roberts) does the unthinkable: She falls in love. While the book has a solid following on-line, the pilot was deemed “too young” for Fox’s audience and the network passed.
ABC expanded its Once Upon A Time franchise and is looking to build the network around Joss Whedon. That left little room for a series based on the Disney theme parked ride Big Thunder Mountain. The pitch was a brilliant, late 19th century New York doctor and his family are given a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to relocate to a frontier mining town run by a powerful, but mysterious tycoon, they quickly realize that not everything in Big Thunder is as it seems. ABC passed on the show because there were problems with the pilot.
It seems like with the current vampire craze that a soap with the legends of Dracula, Jekyll and Hyde, Frankenstein and Dorian Gray, among others woven into it would be a sure thing. Apparently not so much with Gothica, which was rejected due to its low production values.
There was also an adaptation of the best-selling graphic novel The Sixth Gun in development for NBC, but the network passed because it was considered “too niche.” Keep in mind, NBC also passed on The Walking Dead for the same reason.