The TV pilot has one job: make you come back. The problem is that job has become structurally disconnected from the show that follows. Pilots front-load everything — spectacle, mystery, emotional hook — in ways that make for compelling first hours and then have nothing left to sustain the series behind them. This episode makes the structural case for why the pilot format is lying to you, which pilots told the truth, and what the ones that lied reveal about how Western TV gets made.
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