TV REVIEW | 'PILOT SEASON'

Like Cinéma Vérité, but Without the Vérité

By ANITA GATES

Published: September 6, 2004

Eight years ago Susan Underman was just another hopeful New York actress heading for Los Angeles in hopes of being cast in a television series. Today Susan (Sarah Silverman) is opening the door to her glamorous, less-is-more Southern California house to a documentary film crew.

"It's actually my boyfriend, John Devlin's, house," she says. "He got it after he created and wrote 'Zephyr Star.' It's on the Sci Fi Channel. Which I don't get. Or, I don't know what channel it is. But it's doing amazing. Actually I'm thinking of developing it, for a religion."

"Pilot Season," the first original comedy series on the cable channel Trio, knows its Hollywood people. The show, which begins tonight, has a little of the flavor of Larry David's partly improvised HBO series "Curb Your Enthusiasm." With an ensemble cast of intertwined characters, it also feels a bit like one of Bruce Wagner's Hollywood novels. "Pilot Season," a true mini-series (it runs six nights in a row), is cynical, sophisticated and a lot of grim fun.

While Susan is living well (but still waiting for her big break), Max Rabin (Sam Seder), the inept ex-boyfriend who followed her to the West Coast, is just trying to hold on to his job at Big Management, a talent-handling firm. He does this by a connection with Russ Chockley (Ross Brockley), a Nebraska dairy farmer who is the hot commodity of the moment by virtue of some motel commercials he did, which everybody in the industry loved. ("He's got a Heath Ledger-Bill Murray thing," one TV executive says.)

Russ ends up in Hollywood but also in prison, where network executives are happy to visit for pitch meetings and table readings. Meanwhile Russ's girlfriend, Butterfly (Isla Fisher), is teaching Pilodes (like Pilates, an instructor explains, "but you don't sweat as much") and revealing that her long-lost father is a movie star whose most recent action film is being turned into a series in which Susan may get a role. Max's life is further complicated by Jason Reemer (Andy Dick), a rival manager who is up to no good.

As the film crew follows Max around, he pretends that he owns a fancy house he's really just house-sitting. Of course it's a bit suspicious that he's sharing the place with a washed-up sitcom star (David Waterman) from the mid-1990's who bitterly declares, "I'm in my seventh year of temporary hiatus." And it's embarrassing when Max runs into Susan at a chic shop and panics when he finds that the two chenille throws he wants to buy cost $4,330. To cover, he pretends to remember suddenly that he's allergic to chenille.

"Pilot Season" is something of a sequel to "Who's the Caboose?," an unreleased 1997 documentary made by Mr. Seder and Charles Fisher, co- writers of this series, with several of the same cast members. The new show's only significant mistake is not giving the gifted Ms. Silverman more screen time. This woman deserves a great series all her own.

PILOT SEASON

Trio, tonight at 9, Eastern and Pacific times; 8, Central time

Sam Seder and Charles Fisher, writers and executive producers; Michael Shea and Ivan Victor, producers.; directed by Mr. Seder.

WITH: Sam Seder (Max Rabin), Sarah Silverman (Susan), Andy Dick (Jason Reemer), Jon Benjamin (Ken Fold), David Cross (Ben), David Waterman (Earl), Isla Fisher (Butterfly) and Ross Brockley (Russ Chockley)

Sep. 03, 2004
Pilot Season
By Barry Garron
Bottom line: Even civilians in the hinterlands will appreciate the preposterous characters that populate this mockumentary.

9 p.m. Monday, Sept. 6
Trio

Here's proof, if more was needed, that there is little, if any, relationship between the cost of a series and its entertainment value.

The six episodes of "Pilot Season" cost considerably less to make than a single episode of any network comedy but deliver plenty of laughs. Granted, the series will have greater appeal to those in the biz, but even civilians in the hinterlands will appreciate the preposterous characters that populate this mockumentary.

The premise here is that, eight years before, Susan Underman (Susan Silverman) came to Los Angeles to find work as an actress. Max Rabin (Sam Seder, who also directs and is an exec producer) followed her to the West Coast, and then became an agent. Now a group of film students has set out to document their lives and the lives of some of their friends and clients during the hectic four-month period known as pilot season.

While production values are more or less threadbare, the episodes are rich in parody and satire. Nothing is safe in this improv comedy, which lampoons sleazy managers, glib agents, actors with careers in eclipse and even Hollywood's fascination with pilates. Other exec producers are Andrew Cohen and Charles Fisher. Trio will show two episodes back-to-back each night. The last episode each night will be shown as the first episode the following night.

`Pilot Season' is a hilarious comedy on Trio, whose own season may be doomed

FRAZIER MOORE, AP Television Writer
Thursday, September 2, 2004
(09-02) 12:18 PDT

NEW YORK (AP) -- This fall's TV shows are only just starting to premiere. But in a scant four months, pilot season will be cranking up, with next fall in its sights.

What is pilot season? "The 120 days between January and April when managers, agents and lawyers try to place actors in new television programs," declares the helpful definition that begins each episode of "Pilot Season," a dead-to-rights show-biz spoof airing next week on cable's Trio.

"Pilot Season" tracks the shifting fortunes of Hollywood hopefuls who want nothing more than to score a role on a sitcom -- or to represent such a cash cow.

It has a razor-sharp cast including Sarah Silverman ("School of Rock"), David Cross ("Arrested Development") and Andy Dick ("Less Than Perfect") as well as Sam Seder (a talk show host on Air America Radio), who is also its director and co-writer. (The first two of the series' six half-hours air Monday at 9 p.m. EDT, with the remaining episodes rolling out nightly through Sept. 11; check local listings.)

Seder and Silverman play Max and Susan, former sweethearts who made a film together and broke up after it didn't sell. But reflecting the series' too-close-for-comfort authenticity, Seder and Silverman dated in real life and made the 1997 film "Who's the Caboose?" -- then broke up, in part because it didn't sell.

Employing a semi-scripted "mockumentary" style, "Pilot Season" provides a where-are-they-now? look at the many characters from "Who's the Caboose?" -- which followed New Yorkers Max and Susan to Hollywood for their first pilot season way back when. Fittingly, this very funny film gets its belated world premiere on Trio at 9 p.m. Sunday, thus setting the stage for the series that collectively serves as its sequel.

As "Pilot Season" begins, Max, the erstwhile dedicated-to-his-craft performance artist, is aiming to cash in as a personal manager at Big Management Company, thanks to strings his ex pulled for him when Big Management signed her.

Susan, who recklessly passed on a sitcom role eight years ago, is still auditioning for TV but hopes to break into films. (Good thing she has a rich boyfriend these days.) She doesn't have much to do with Max, as she tells the camera on the first episode.

"I know he's on the Earth ... he knows I'm on the Earth," she trills with affected breeziness. "And that's good enough for us."

But it's really not good enough for Max, who still wants Susan back -- as a girlfriend, as a client, as something.

Fortunately, Max has other irons in the fire, mainly Russ Chockley (played by Ross Brockley), a reclusive actor-turned-farmer whose success in commercials for a discount motel chain has the networks clamoring to sign him for a series.

Brought by Max back to Hollywood from Nebraska, Chockley takes a meeting where he's introduced as "a real farmer, if you can believe that."

Learning of his agrarian focus, an NBC executive struggles to relate. "I just had corn in my salad," she volunteers.

Will Max, Chockley and all our other friends in this Darwinian flash dance have a deal in place before pilot season -- and "Pilot Season" - - conclude?

A sly examination of the TV industry (and, more broadly, of human vanities and self-delusion), "Pilot Season" takes the cake as Trio's first original comedy series. Sadly, it may also be the last.

According to a deal announced recently, DirecTV will continue to carry loads of channels owned by NBC Universal, including NBC, MSNBC, USA and Bravo. But not Trio, which at year's end will vanish into the ether for DirecTV subscribers.

And maybe for everybody else. Trio's loss of DirecTV distribution will instantly dwarf by two-thirds its potential audience, an already scant 20 million viewers -- which could spell its doom.

This would be a premature end for a channel that has forged a whimsically curatorial approach to TV and pop culture, and in the process won favor with such programming as "Brilliant, But Cancelled," which highlights short-lived but noteworthy series from the past.

A new round of "Brilliant, But Cancelled" begins Monday at 8 p.m., unearthing episodes of "Deadline," "The Invisible Man," the extraordinary 1996-97 mob drama "EZ Streets," the 1990 comedy "Parenthood" (with Leonardo DiCaprio, David Arquette and Thora Birch), and, from 1959-60, "Johnny Staccato," starring John Cassavetes as a Manhattan private eye. (Check listings.)

Trio, which began life in the mid-1990s as a U.S. outlet for the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., was acquired in 2000 by media magnate Barry Diller for his Universal Television group, which then became part of Vivendi Universal, which, in turn, merged with NBC last spring to become NBC Universal.

So far NBC Universal has been tight-lipped about Trio's fate, but with the network's DirecTV cutoff looming, its new owner can cite ample reason to throw in the towel. Trio, crushed by the embrace of two media behemoths, could soon find that "Brilliant, But Cancelled" is its own epitaph.

That's Showbiz

Pilot Season: A satire as real as reality gets

For those who think making TV might be as much fun as watching TV, let Pilot Season be a wake-up call. This deeply bitter, darkly funny mock documentary, airing in six half-hour chapters on the upstart digital channel Trio, depicts Hollywood as a cesspool of shattered dreams and ambitions.

In this company town, no one blinks at the absurdity of pitch meetings conducted in prison because an in-demand star has been inconveniently jailed on a DUI. The desperation - for a deal, a hit, even the illusion of one - is as palpable as smog.

Pilot Season takes place during the four months (January to April) when actors and their managers scramble for jobs in potential new TV shows. It's the sequel to an unreleased 1997 independent film, Who's the Caboose? (on Trio September 5 at 9 pm/ET), featuring many of the same miserably funny characters, with David Cross and Andy Dick among the inspired supporting cast.

Writer-director Sam Seder stars as Max, a hopelessly inept talent manager who pines for Susan (Sarah Silverman), a frustrated actress who yearns for movie stardom but is settling for a role on a TV spin- off of an action movie. If she's lucky.

As Max spirals downward in a haze of false bravado and Prozac, this delusional nincompoop rivals Ricky Gervais' David Brent of The Office in achieving a squirm-inducing, hilarious pathos.

As Pilot Season unfolds, you may marvel that any good shows ever emerge from this process.

September 6 through 8 at 9 on Trio

A few years ago, comedians Sarah Silverman and Sam Seder made a funny mockumentary film called Who's the Caboose? about the life of young actors who flock to Hollywood for pilot season (the months when new TV series are cast). The two reprise their roles in this six-episode sequel, spread over three nights, which mocks everything from Hollywood fitness crazes (the "Pilodes" (sp.) teacher explains that "once you've paid, 90 percent of your work is done") to movie agency hierarchy (a sign reads, "Assistants may NOT use ceramic mugs. Assistants may ONLY use paper cups"). It's more abrasive than HBO's Entourage but not quite as funny as the original Who's the Caboose?, which Trio will also air September 5 at 9 p.m.

First, from the cryptic Charlie Fisher:

Subj: Re: "Who's the Caboose?"

He was not in Caboose but check out Pilot Season the series - see triotv.com for times. thank you .

And then from the lovely and chattier Sam Seder:

Hi

The six part miniseries sequel- Pilot Season, features most of the same cast [as it's 1997 predecessor "Who's the Caboose?"] - with additions. James Frain is in a couple of the episodes-- he's very funny. He plays a pilates instructor- essentially a personal trainer selling a fairly empty physical fitness program. He uses an American accent and has a couple of really funny scenes.

Thanks

No, no Sam and Charlie, thank you! And thank you Carol!