Locke & Key (2011)

Director: Mark Romanek
Writer: Josh Friedman, based on the graphic novels by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez
Stars: Miranda Otto, Mark Pellegrino, Sarah Bolger, Nick Stahl, Ksenia Solo, Skylar Gaertner and Jesse McCartney

Index: Unsold Pilots

There are probably a lot of ways to start an Unsold Pilots project but Locke & Key seems like the perfect one because there’s a long history that highlights how complicated the process is to bring a well known and successful property to television. It doesn’t hurt that my better half is a huge fan.

Locke & Key started out as a comic book, one with a huge name as writer, Joe Hill, who’s one of Stephen King’s sons, each of whom found a success of their own. It ran for six stories over six years, from 2008 to 2013, to great acclaim. It was inevitable that it would be adapted into something by someone at some point.

That turned out to be a TV show developed for Fox for their 2010-11 season. The pilot was made but not aired, though it was screened at San Diego Comic-Con. However, Fox passed on it, so no show was made.

Unsold Pilots

As I've explored the filmographies of many actors and directors, I've bumped into a lot of TV pilots. Some were exactly what we expect, the pilot episode of a show that was made and aired and seen. However, some weren't. They were pilot episodes ordered by a network but never aired and never greenlit to become shows.

Therefore, they've become frustrating gaps, entries in filmographies that I want to watch but which are generally unavailable. Nobody taped them off the TV because they were never aired. Only occasionally do they make it onto a DVD box set, if another pilot was made that was picked up and turned into a successful show.

I've actually reviewed one before, because The Best of Times was not only the debut of a certain Nicolas Coppola, who as Nicolas Cage was my first subject for a First Thirty zine, but also Crispin Glover. So many big names ended up in unsold pilots at some point, some quite a few.

Having found a source for a whole slew of unsold pilots, I thought I'd dive into a variety for another zine. Some of them are as awful as they probably ought to be, but some are good, some are great and some are shows I absolutely wish I could watch. There are a lot of reasons why networks didn't order seasons and only one of those is quality.

My goal, as always, is variety. I'll be covering a range of genres and a range of eras, my initial thirty dating back as far as 1963 and as recently as 2020.

Rating System
1 - Abysmal | 2 - Bad | 3 - Poor | 4 - OK | 5 - Good | 6 - Excellent | 7 - Classic

Title	Year	H	D	Director(s)	IMDb
The Best of Times	1981	3	3	Don Mischer	IMDb
Locke & Key	2011	5	5	Mark Romanek	IMDb