What is a reality show 'pilot'?
A reality show pilot can take several forms. If it's a game show, it's probably an episode of the game show from start to finish. The pilot is usually a little lower budget than the real series would be, so the set's not quite as nice, and the graphics aren't as nice, and you may have not found the perfect host yet, so you've got somebody filling in. There might be aspects to the reality show that aren't what the real show would look like, but the closer you can get your pilot to what you actually envision the real television show to be, the better for you. It's better to have the right host. It's better to have good graphics. It's better to have the nice-looking set. But it's understood that you may not have all those things because the pilot is lower-cost, and it's meant to be a demonstration of an episode, a sample episode of the show, in the case of a game show. Recently I've been doing pilots for my customers in which I lay out the entire ten-episode series in one half-hour presentation. I'll shoot for three days in a house with fake contestants and fake games and fake challenges and fake elimination ceremonies. In three days I'll take the show from the twenty initial contestants to the one winner, and show, through a narrator, what the network will be buying in all ten episodes that they're buying. I actually do a full season pilot for the reality show. It's not super-common, but it does happen that way. Most often a pilot is a sample episode, and in that subset it's the sample first episode.
