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Pilot Season 2022: Projected Volume Well Below Pre-Pandemic Levels As Covid-Imposed Changes Take Hold

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deadline.com

During the holiday break, which traditionally shuts down Hollywood for the final two weeks of the year, top broadcast network executives used to spend a significant portion of their time reading pilot scripts before kicking off pilot pickups at the start of January with early drama standouts.

Broadcast business traditions, already threatened by the fast evolving marketplace with the rise of streamers, have been completely upended by the pandemic.Three weeks into the new year, we’ve only had three January pilot pickups: NBC dramas Quantum Leap and Found and ABC comedy Josep.Pitch buying season, whose start had been creeping further and further into the summer in the years prior to the pandemic, was late in 2021 — and lighter than usual with fewer projects taken out by writers and fewer pitches taken in by the networks for (virtual) meetings.

As a result, many of the projects were delivering first drafts to the studios — not the networks — before the holidays, making for a more restful holiday break for top network executives with no reading homework and a very stressful one for studio executives who fear the crunch that would come with a delay in pilot orders when up against the May upfront delivery deadlines.

Those fears have been justified so far, with pilot orders tracking weeks behind schedule.There are lingering effects from the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, which wiped out the 2020 pilot season by shutting down production and threw a wrench in the traditional broadcast cycle, with pilots filming in fall 2020 and winter 2021 and a number of projects bypassing the pilot stage altogether to go straight-to-series.

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