About Us

Welcome to Pilots The Podcast with Schmee and Riker!

We are just a couple of nerds who watch entirely too much TV and didn’t want all that training and hard work and practice and focus to go to waste, so we made a podcast about it.

Each week we watch and review the pilot episode of shows that made it to series on the merits of the pilot as a standalone episode and give it a pass/fail grade as successful or unsuccessful. A successful pilot is one that immediately leaves you wanting to come back for more and an unsuccessful pilot…. well, if you’ve ever tried to get a friend to binge one of your favorite shows but need to qualify it first with “give it a few episodes before you’re hooked”… That’s probably a good example of a show with an unsuccessful pilot.

We try to keep our scoring objective so we analyzed what made a successful pilot and boiled it down to four criteria. Does it clearly establish the genre, how well does it introduce the main characters, is the overarching plot clearly defined, does it have a hook that has us coming back for more? Now, our scoring may be objective, but we are not. After all, we are opinionated nerds bullshitting about our favorite TV shows and the shows we love to hate.

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