The 50 Best TV Pilots of the 21st Century According to Film School Rejects

"The first episode of a series is often awkward, sensationalized, & occasionally features a different cast than later episodes. A piece of art gets better when more time is spent on it, & plenty of pilots during our era of entertainment saturation have felt like messy rough drafts. There are plenty of excellent pilots out there that deserve praise for exceeding expectations. I watched a few hundred of them & made a list of 50 exceptional ones, ordered by a complex ranking system. I didn't include miniseries that ran for a single season, children's television, reality or variety shows, or anything that was created before the year 2000. I identified elements of a good pilot which I then used to evaluate each show that I watched: Is the pilot open enough for audiences to stick with it & relevant to the rest of the series? Does the pilot feel fresh, have a sense of artistry, feel complete, already contain the DNA of the show that it would later become, & still hold up today?"