Well, I can't resist pilots. Here are two I recently found on Hulu:

Starring Eddie McClintock, Joanne Kelly, Saul Rubinek

on the SyFy Network

or on hulu.com

Warehouse 13 is on the SyFy network, a network that hates science fiction so much they've tried to rename the very term. Their distaste for syense fyction is evident in just about every show I've ever seen them produce, including the cutesy show Eureka, and it's unfortunately no different here with the cutesy show Warehouse 13.

The show is inline with other SyFy fare: it's cutesy, and contains absolutely no science. There is a lot of magical stuff going on, magical artifacts, but nothing relating to science or the dream of a world that science might create, which is what science fiction is.

Fiction is a made-up story, science fiction is a made-up story whose inner workings are explored and based on logic. Is there any explanation to the football that the characters throw around the world? There is a football that the characters throw, it literally goes around the earth (or into orbit, or something), then comes back to them a minute later, only it's going really fast. The way it's depicted, this football violates many, many physical laws. That's fine; it's fiction. But science fiction deals in part with how the football is able to do that, even if the internal logic is invented. What explanation does the show offer? None. I should say though, that it is cutesy.

The main characters work for the FBI, or maybe the CIA... One of those. The government. Like Mulder and Scully. Only, they're just cutesy most of the time.

Saul Rubinek is fantastic, I should mention. But he's drowning in a sea of cutesiness. The main characters act like cutesy teenagers. They're supposed to be FBI agents! But they're just cutesy. Dammit SyFy.

Starring Ron Livingston, and other people

on ABC

or hulu.com, of course

Defying Gravity is another sci-fi failure. Apparently it was pitched to ABC as Grey's Anatomy in space. I'm fairly certain that the script used for the episode was just a single sheet of paper with that written on it: Grey's Anatomy In Space.

"What are we doing in this scene?"

"Oh, yeah".

"What modern soft-pop ballad should we use to bridge scenes in the fourth act?"

"Oh, yeah".

"Where's my line, what should I say here?"

"Oh, yeah. It's written right here on our single page script.".

"We are perfectly duplicating Grey's Anatomy."

(This was a recreation of what happened on set while filming Defying Gravity. Because Defying Gravity is exactly Grey's Anatomy, or any of the various prime-time soap operas. It is not different in any way, except some of it takes place in space.)

It makes me sad when Ron Livingston, the man, is in a sci-fi drama about near-future space exploration, and I don't like it. ABC took a deliciously grilled filet mignon, sizzled to perfection, and drenched it in mustard. I'm sure someone out there likes that, but... *sigh* Dammit ABC.