DAY NONE
Television casualties come in many forms. Cancellations being the most obvious and common. Then there's the show's that don't get picked up after pilot season. Cast and shot but the network just saw more reason to leave it wither and die then to put it on the air. It happens.
What doesn't happen so much is that a show gets cast and shot, then picked up, given a standard starting order and staffed. It gets put on the schedule as a midseason show, then gets it's order reduced, reduced again and eventually disappears from schedules and radar, all without airing a single episode.
That would be Day One. It was one of many shows last pilot season that seemed to poised to ramp up and take over for Lost once the story of the Island came to a close. It was serialized, had strong character story potential and a sci-fi bent with it's weird alien-ish invasion premise.
Castwise, it had some fun choices. Catherine Dent, Julie Gonzalo, Carly Pope and Xander Berkley to start. And it had a solid writing staff. Jesse Alexander is a veteran of serialized shows, having been on Alias, Lost and Heroes and all at times when they were working. He'd picked fellow Lostie and ex EP/creator of the ridiculously fun show The Middleman, Javier Grillo-Marxuach and Christine Boylan from Leverage, among others.
Day One stood a good chance. Except that it never had a chance. First it was cut down to a four-hour mini-series, would would then serve as a launching pad for a series...or another mini. Then it got cut down to a two-hour MOW which would serve a backdoor pilot for a series. Never mind that it already had a pilot and was picked up once already.
Its page at nbc.com is still there, but in an abandoned-Detroit-building kinda way.
I don't know why any of this happened. Maybe there's a good reason, maybe there isn't. However it's a shame this one got so close and remained so far away.
If you look around, you may find the pilot script on the intertron webulator. It's a fun read full of potential.
What doesn't happen so much is that a show gets cast and shot, then picked up, given a standard starting order and staffed. It gets put on the schedule as a midseason show, then gets it's order reduced, reduced again and eventually disappears from schedules and radar, all without airing a single episode.
That would be Day One. It was one of many shows last pilot season that seemed to poised to ramp up and take over for Lost once the story of the Island came to a close. It was serialized, had strong character story potential and a sci-fi bent with it's weird alien-ish invasion premise.Castwise, it had some fun choices. Catherine Dent, Julie Gonzalo, Carly Pope and Xander Berkley to start. And it had a solid writing staff. Jesse Alexander is a veteran of serialized shows, having been on Alias, Lost and Heroes and all at times when they were working. He'd picked fellow Lostie and ex EP/creator of the ridiculously fun show The Middleman, Javier Grillo-Marxuach and Christine Boylan from Leverage, among others.
Day One stood a good chance. Except that it never had a chance. First it was cut down to a four-hour mini-series, would would then serve as a launching pad for a series...or another mini. Then it got cut down to a two-hour MOW which would serve a backdoor pilot for a series. Never mind that it already had a pilot and was picked up once already.
Its page at nbc.com is still there, but in an abandoned-Detroit-building kinda way.
I don't know why any of this happened. Maybe there's a good reason, maybe there isn't. However it's a shame this one got so close and remained so far away.
If you look around, you may find the pilot script on the intertron webulator. It's a fun read full of potential.