Best Foot Forward: Five Great First Episodes

Debut episodes are a tricky game. Over twenty to sixty minutes you’re essentially asking an unknown audience to sit down with you week after week and listen to your stories. Most shows need time to grow, and (generally) viewers will accept this. What’s needed is a spark, something an audience will wait patiently to see evolve. Many fantastic shows start off a little slowly (THE WIRE, which simply has too much content to leap off the screen all at once), or with too big a bang (THE WALKING DEAD, a pilot too good for the rest of the show to live up to). Some shows just nail the sweet spot though, and here are several of them.

Five great first episodes…

Eastbound & Down (2009 – )

HBO’s sitcom about a foul-mouthed, burned-out pitcher doesn’t have an amazing amount of story to tell, so instead spends its debut episode setting the tone and demonstrating its brand of humour. And does it ever do that with confidence. If you’re not grabbed by the story-so-far opening sequence, you will be by the freeze frame-titles combo, one of the show’s best recurring motifs. Danny McBride plays main character Kenny Powers as an (almost) irredeemable guy: a total prick. He throws his weight around, imposes on friends and family, and generally demands that his every whim be granted, while clinging on to his last shred of fame. But the portrayal has a significant element of sadness, and the writers make sure the joke is always on Kenny. He’s such a fully formed (but fully awful) character, it’s likely McBride and co had this guy kicking around in their brains for a while before HBO picked it up.

Breaking Bad (2008 – )

And speaking of confident openings… how about an RV tearing through the New Mexico desert, followed by a man in his underwear leaping out, waving a pistol and preparing to face his doom? Starting as it meant to go on, BREAKING BAD’s pilot is completely unafraid to throw the viewer both in at the deep end and for a loop. And it’s a long while before the desert antics are explained, though the show’s high concept (cancer stricken Chemistry teacher and pent up genius Walter White turns to meth production to support his family) was snappy enough to use as a selling point, so many viewers will have had some idea what was going on. BREAKING BAD has been almost unanimously declared the greatest TV drama of its time (with only network-mate MAD MEN really vying for the title), but in some ways the pilot is an anomaly. For starters, though the series is often very funny, the pilot can lead viewers to believe it is primarily a comedy, rather than the incredibly dark drama it evolves into. Bryan Cranston’s presence is a factor: before Walter White, he was Hal from MALCOLM IN THE MIDDLE, and the man possesses terrific comedy chops. Indeed, the pilot is such a blast that the next few episodes are a little harder going, but show runner Vince Gilligan is quick to capitalise on the terrific premise and cast. The final sixteen episodes can’t come soon enough.

Arrested Development (2003 – 2006)

More so than dramas, sitcoms have a tricky time pulling off individually satisfying pilot episodes. Either the characters aren’t quite there, or an audience needs time to settle into the show’s humour – PARKS AND RECREATION and COMMUNITY, two of our time’s finest, started off this way. ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT comes out swinging, though, its characters fully formed, its genuinely offbeat comedic styling hitting home right away. One reason for this is the characters, which are archetypal enough to be familiar but detailed enough to be original. The Big Dysfunctional Family is something of a TV staple, but each character is distinctive and well formed, a credit to the writers and actors both. Take elder brother Gob, for example. He seems like a textbook spoiled kid who never grew up, but his traits – love of magic and incredibly specific forms of cowardice and self loathing – make him stand out. The voice over helps overcome the ‘pilot problem’, too. Ron Howard’s breakneck narration sets up the main players and the situation within the first minute. After this, we’re straight into the gags, which start flying and essentially don’t stop until the close of the third and final season of this deservedly cherished sitcom.

The Office (UK)  (2001 – 2003)

Another sitcom that arrives fully formed, though in a very different way. THE OFFICE is really a simple story of love and redemption, and those two plots kick off from the get go. We see that Brent is a socially inept buffoon, a lonely attention-seeker with an incredible inability to read a room. But we also see that he’s not a bad human being (though he does have the capacity for it). When he pretends to fire Dawn, he genuinely thinks it’ll be a hoot, that she’ll laugh just as much as him and Ricky the temp. His self-appointed role as office jester would be sweet and even useful if he wasn’t so bad at it. And in Tim and Dawn’s love story, we had a plot that was achingly familiar but beautifully nuanced. It was clear Dawn was with the wrong guy, but the storyline was allowed to simmer away. The documentary style was expertly used to capture the smallest of looks from Tim, which provided an effective dramatic core. Gervais and Merchant seem to have a knack for pilots: EXTRAS did a great job of introducing audiences to a familiar yet alien world, and LIFE’S TOO SHORT’s first episode was probably its least dreadful. But while most of Gervais’ subsequent work seems dashed off, or an excuse to meet celebrities, THE OFFICE just seems perfectly observed from the start, causing no end of pointing at the TV and describing a person you know who’s like that character.

Freaks And Geeks (1999-2000)

From offices to high school, FREAKS AND GEEKS has the same advantage of tackling a familiar subject. But while THE OFFICE focuses on four core characters, the FREAKS pilot does an incredible job of laying out an entire world in 40 minutes. The opening fake-out sets the tone: a jock and cheerleader profess cutesy love to one another, before the camera pans to a group of now-familiar actors discussing Led Zepplin and the wearing of satanic t shirts to church. After this quick intro to the Freak portion of the title, we meet the Geeks, deep in a conversation about Bill Murray. The incredible season – its one and only – would go on to thoroughly dissect the life of Michigan teenagers circa 1980, and the pilot does a great job of setting the tone and themes. FREAKS AND GEEKS is all about the search for identity, and this is personified in main character Lindsay, who has recently made the switch from Geek to Freak. While not an awful lot of plot is set up in episode one, the relationships are so clearly defined and believable (the scrawny kid lusting after the unattainable cheerleader, the overprotective nonsense-horror-story spouting father) that the world feels incredibly real. The lived in atmosphere comes from Paul Feig, creator of the show and experiencer of many of its plots. Even in episode one there’s barely a character that lacks depth, and any that do will probably get a spotlight episode later in the run. The ending is sweet but far from sappy, and marks the start of probably television’s best one-season-and-gone show.

And one not so good one…

The Office (US) (2005 – )

For the first episode of Greg Daniels’ US reboot of Gervais and Merchant’s masterpiece, he decided to more or less remake the original pilot. As mentioned, the UK pilot is a near flawless introduction to a world and a set of characters. The American version, not so much. The problem is pretty simple: The American Office is not the British Office. Michael Scott isn’t David Brent, Steve Carell isn’t Ricky Gervais. Unfortunately, the pilot mainly contributed to the fires of those who refused to accept the potential of a remake. THE OFFICE US came into its own soon enough (with its incredible second and third seasons), but a direct lift of Gervais and Merchant’s script was not the way to start.