Pilot Season Comes to Amazon

As the landscape of television continues to change, Amazon has decided to jump in with a unique experiment – Pilot Season. Everyone who goes to the site now has access to pilots for 14 potential shows – six kids shows and eight comedies. These will be available for a few more weeks for free with viewers having the opportunity to rate and comment on the videos they watch. These are full 22-minute pilots (at least for the comedies; not sure about the kids shows).

The plan is to potentially turn some of these shows into original programming for Amazon Prime members, I believe. There’s no real public formula for how much the voting on Amazon will count or whether they have a minimum of maximum number of shows they eventually want to take to series. I’m intrigued by the concept and plan on watching a bunch of the comedies.

I first tuned into “Those Who Can’t,” which is a farcical comedy about three high school teachers who really don’t belong in a position of authority. There’s the overly tattooed, sadistic history teacher, the gym teacher bullied by his own students and the thinks he’s really cool Spanish teacher. I gave the show two stars.

At first, I didn’t think I would make it all the way through, but it got a little better as it went on. They seem to be trying to mimic the “It’s Always Sunny” model where a group of pretty irredeemable folks deliver comedic story lines despite the nature of their characters. These guys don’t have the ability to pull this off the way Charlie Day, Rob McElhenney and Glenn Howerton do. The main characters of “Those Who Can’t” lack the energy and originality that makes “Sunny” so successful. The secondary characters are so broadly drawn that you just want to shake your head. An elitist lacrosse player? Sassy African-American receptionist? New Age-y principal (who I can only guess is a cousin of Jeff Rosso)? At least try something different.

The fact that I stuck around for all 22 minutes is more of a testament to the uniqueness of the Amazon crowdsourcing concept than the show. I doubt this sitcom could pull off even six original episodes without some major re-tooling, much less a whole season.

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brian

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