Somewhere in warehouses containing Hollywood’s old records were the forgotten synopses of television shows that never made it.
Gathering dust were pitches for dramas, comedies, and other programs that television executives rejected or that never got beyond a pilot episode. But many novel ideas within discarded pilots have been more valuable than anyone realized.
A study led by UC Riverside Assistant Professor of business Demetrius Lewis found that rejected television pilots are richcessful
In fact, television series drawing on novel content from rejected pilots rather than from previously broadcast shows tended to attract larger audiences.
“The very reason they didn’t make it to become a broadcast series also makes them more fertile grounds for innovation because they have all these new ideas that audiences haven’t been exposed to yet that can be recombined in creative ways,” said Lewis, a member of the management faculty at UCR’s School of Business.
The findings challenge the notion that rejected creative projects have little lasting value. Instead, Hollywood’s discarded ideas can become building blocks for future hits.
The study, recently published in the Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, used AI to examine thousands of American pitches for prime-time television from 1955 to 1995, a period that included the rise of some of television’s most recognizable programs.
The pilots had been painstakingly gathered by television author and producer Lee Goldberg, who spent years searching through warehouses containing old industry records. He examined documents from pitch meetings and other materials describing proposed television programs.
Goldberg compiled information about thousands of unsold television pilots into a book — “Unsold Television Pilots 1955-1989” — preserving details of projects that otherwise might have remained largely unknown. The researcher supplemented data from Goldberg’s book with pilots through 1995 from a pilot encyclopedia compiled by television historian Vincent Terrace.
Many of the documents had been created for internal industry use, not public consumption.
For Lewis and his collaborators, Goldberg’s collection offered an unusual opportunity to examine ideas Hollywood had considered but never brought to television audiences.
The researchers combined these records of nearly 3,000 pilots with descriptions of television programs that reached the airwaves.
AI was able to sort through these voluminous records to determine where television ideas came from, and what happened to them after they were rejected by looking for similarities in their plots, settings, characters, and other features. This allowed them to identify creative connections that have been long overlooked.
Traditionally, researchers have studied television innovation by grouping shows into broad genres, such as crime dramas, comedies and science fiction. But Lewis said these categories can obscure important differences between programs. Genres also change as once-unusual ideas become commonplace.
Consider the popular crime dramas CSI and NCIS, which spawned spinoffs set in different cities. The programs follow familiar crime-solving formulas, but their settings, characters, and other features distinguish them. Moving a fictional crime drama from Miami to Nashville or Dallas, Lewis explained, is just one way producers could put a fresh spin on a familiar concept.
The researchers used their analysis to create what amounts to a family tree of television shows. Programs sharing more creative features were grouped closer together, while those with fewer similarities were placed farther apart.
Previously broadcast shows supplied recognizable formulas, such as police investigations or high school romances. Rejected pilots contributed fresh settings, relationships, and other creative twists. Those combinations could make a television show feel both familiar and new to audiences.
The research also found that ideas from rejected pilots were particularly valuable when they came from industry outsiders or producers whose work differed from conventional television programming.
The findings suggest a paradox in Hollywood’s approach to innovation. Television executives often reject unconventional ideas because they seem too unfamiliar or risky. Yet those same qualities can make the ideas valuable when incorporated into more recognizable programs.
Lewis said rejected pilots were more experimental and contained more novel material than programs that reached the air. The challenge was combining that originality with formats audiences already understood.
Older rejected ideas may be especially useful because they are less tied to current television trends. A pilot written 20 years ago, Lewis explained, may offer more creative possibilities than one rejected last year.
“The older content is going to be kind of further away from the kind of current audience exposure, and is going to be more fruitful then for reimagining and recombinating,” Lewis said.
The implications extend beyond Hollywood. Entrepreneurs, product designers, and other innovators routinely abandon prototypes that fail to win approval or attract customers. But those prototypes may contain ideas that can succeed when combined with other concepts or presented differently.
For companies, the lesson is that rejected projects should not be forgotten. They may be valuable repositories of ideas waiting for another opportunity. And for Hollywood, the next groundbreaking television show might begin not with an entirely new idea, but with one that has been sitting in a warehouse for decades.
“These ideas are known within the industry to producers or gatekeepers, but the audiences have largely been unexposed to these ideas,” Lewis said. “So that when they’re reapplied and sort of refined effectively, then they appear really novel and exciting, and they do better with audiences.”
The study, “Novelty and its genealogy: The role of discarded prototypes as repositories of innovation,” was co-authored by Lewis; Giacomo Negro, a professor at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School; and Isin Guler, a professor at the Kenan-Flagler Business School, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA
