Pilot Watch stuck in holding pattern

Still getting back into the swing of things after my Memorial Day adventures took up an extra day on the backend. I'm hard at work on the first "wire" review and gradually starting to watch new summer fare. ("In Plain Sight": as much fun as expected. "Swingtown": ugh.)

Ordinarily, this would be the time of year on the blog where I'd be offering up my initial impressions (but not reviews) of the network pilots, but that's proving problematic this year, because there aren't that many pilots yet.

ABC pushed back all of its series development for mid-season, with its only new scripted pick-up being a show they developed last year, "Life on Mars," and where the pilot is going to be redone enough (with a brand-new creative team) that it would be all but worthless for ABC to send out a pilot, much less for me to watch it. NBC picked up their new shows without going through the pilot process, which means they don't have completed first episodes of anything yet. And while Fox has pilots, they haven't sent them out yet, and in the case of "Fringe," they may not send it out until right before press tour.

Even CBS, which boasted during upfront week of a relatively stable development process, only sent out four of their six new series, with only clip reels for "Harper's Island" (because it's being recast and shot from scratch; the clip reel was just a sales tool) and "Eleventh Hour" (for reasons unknown). I dipped into a couple of the CBS shows before I left for the holiday weekend, and when I find time to watch the rest, I'll write them all up. (In the meantime, Fienberg has offered up his take on the CBS drama pilots, and his take on the two sitcoms.) But that may be it for Pilot Watch '08 for quite some time, if not rendering the concept completely moot.