The Failed Pilot Project Case File # 10: The Dresden Files

 When a pilot gets reordered, the entire series gets thrown off kilter

When The Dresden Files premiered in January of 2007, it was greeted with what could best be described as a collective shrug. It was a genre-lite kind of show, a mix of the PI show with a fantasy twist, and while it was serviceable enough, to call it good might have been a stretch. While the core of the show’s failure rest squarely on the shoulders of Hans Beimler and Robert Hewitt Wolfe, who developed the series from Jim Butchers series of novels, it’s worth noting that some of the audience confusion and later drop-off must be attributed to Sci-Fi’s handling of the show’s development.

The trouble started in 2006, when certain casting changes and developmental problems set in, and the pilot was pushed back to be the eighth episode aired, while the third episode (production number 103) was moved up to be the first episode aired. Episode 102, meanwhile, was reordered to be the fourth episode aired, allowing 104 and 105 to air as the second and third episodes. (For a better idea of just how out-of-control the reordering got, click here.) The pilot, meanwhile, was edited down from its original 100 minute running time into 45 minutes, but, for reasons I’ll explain in a moment, this didn’t exactly lead to a decrease in viewer understanding of the show, even if it did screw up the continuity a bit. The question of why Sci-Fi decided to reorder the show like this, and not say just push back the start date to give the show a better starting point, remains unclear.

So why exactly did this episode shuffling not seem to make that big of an impact on viewer understanding? For starters, the show’s basic premise – a modern day wizard uses his powers to help solve crimes – doesn’t exactly take a whole of setup. Second, the show’s first episode (103) does a pretty good job of filling in the backstory of Dresden’s family, which no doubts explains why it was chosen to kick the show off. Lastly, though it seems to have started out as creative decision, the show’s use of first-person narration undoubtedly helped the show give over the larger gaps in continuity that this reorder no doubt caused.

So let’s try an experiment. Below are embedded the videos for episodes 101, 102, and 103, in the order that they were aired - as the eighth, fourth, and first episodes, respectively. You can watch them in the order that they aired (i.e. top-to-bottom) or the order that they were produced (i.e. bottom-to-top). Either way, you’re bound to notice some discrepancies, and – in the case of the pilot – some storytelling elements that just doesn’t seem to work. (If you don't want to watch all of these, you can skip 102 and not miss out on much. I just embedded it here to provide full context, but the real discrepancies are apparent in the contrast between 101 and 103.)

(Note: No, I don’t know where you can find a copy of the original pilot, but for the purpose of this exercise, it doesn’t really matter. It’s more important to know what problems the edited pilot held for the series, as opposed to what was edited out.)

The most noticeable flaws are the obvious changes in the continuity – the change in Dresden’s office/home, the switch over whether or not Dresden is allowed to tell those around him about the magical world, a more antagonistic relationship with the CPD, more overt uses of magic – but these aren’t the biggest problems that would dominate the series. No, to locate the real problems with the series, you have to understand what doesn’t work in the pilot. It feels overly busy, but it doesn’t actually seem to tell us a whole lot. This is because most of the exposition was cut out – assuming we had already seen the previous episodes enough to know what was going on – which just left us with one not very well-thought out case that may have played better when it had more room to breathe.

And while this makes for a crappy single episode, it holds even bigger troubles for the rest of the season. Since the pilot was apparently reordered after production (or at least the writing) had already started on the following episodes, this meant that the showrunners eventually edited down the pilot after the other episodes were already started, thus allowing very little wiggle room to change those other episodes. This means that, the overarching story of Dresden, The Council, Uncle Justin, et al. was developed in a very piecemeal fashion, and not in an intriguing, intentional manner a la Lost.  What’s more, name-dropings that meant nothing to the audience, but were spoken as if we were supposed to (count how many times “The Council” is mentioned in 103, and all without any explanation of what it is) became simply maddening by their lack of context. Conversely, explanations of things we had already figured out (like Dresden’s voiceover in 102 about how civilians couldn’t know about the magic world) become stupid, not enlightening.

But this isn’t to say that 103 doesn’t work in its own ways; it certainly does and adequate job of introducing us to Dresden’s backstory, and its mystery – about a kid with magical abilities who’s being shadowed by monsters – at least feels more original than 101’s simply murder mystery. In fact, most of the post-pilot episodes tend to work better, if only because of the normal changes that generally take place between all pilots and the series that follow. Gone are the overly showy magic and the use of something banal as murder for a case, replaced instead with a more subdued sense of what magic is, and a greater variety of cases. One could argue that the change in the former was a financial decision, and the latter was just the nature of the genre. (The pilot was based on Storm Front, the first book of the series, so there’s not much the Beimler and Wolfe could do about that.)

But focusing on the changes that we see is beside the point; it’s the changes that we didn’t see that truly matter.  By the simple act of shelving the pilot until a later date and then replacing it with an episode that didn’t do a complete job of setting up this world, it rather explicitly showed its preference for a show that has a very light serialization. That’s fine and all – such a format does well on basic cable, especially on the Sci-Fi network – but The Dresden Files clearly wanted to be more than that.  A two-hour pilot, plus multiple episodes that dealt explicitly and exclusively with the larger story arc would seem to point to a show that wants to be closer to Battlestar Galactica than Warehouse 13. And while Sci-Fi’s decision to reorder the show may not have hampered the show commercially – it’s premiere numbers alone were pitiful, and they only kept dropping – but it did seem to limit the show creatively, and that in and of itself is a crime.

Next Week: The pitch "pilot" for Veronica Mars' fourth season that never materialized.