Pilots, pilot seasons, serial movies. Size changes in TV series from the 1980s to the 2010s

After decades of academic debate on the differences between television and cinema aesthetics, television and film studies have never been so close as in the last few years on the topic of tv series. Quality television, complex tv, cinematic tv are the main concepts upon which scholars recently focused their research. Not only the aesthetic and narrative dimensions of tv series are explored, but also how technological changes and audiences’ new habits are related to the rise of new serial formats. In the 1980s, tv serial production was based on the “pilot”, a prototype of an episode of proposed series which tv networks could consider to buy. By the end of the 1990s, HBO introduced the oxymoric concept of “quality series” in the television market: HBO pilots, thus, were not only selling presentations, but they were meant to be short movies, filmed by famous Hollywood directors. The collaboration with them, however, was often limited to the pilot and not to the series as a whole. In 2010, the advent of the internet streaming service by Netflix totally changed the television market rules. The release of an entire season promotes the practice of binge watching. From this new business model, a new size for serials is born, which we can name the “pilot-season”. A new season is commissioned only whether the first whole season is appreciated by the audience, as it was recently the case for the unexpected success of Stranger Things. Recently, HBO proposed a new serial model, represented by The young Pope, a co- production with Sky Italia and the French broadcaster Canal+. The first season of the series was not only filmed by the Oscar winner Paolo Sorrentino, but it was also created and scripted by the director himself, who has been totally involved in the production and shooting of all the ten episodes.As Sorrentino recently declared, The Young Pope is “a ten- hour film”. This new HBO format, thus, could be named “serial movie”. The paper will explore the reasons underlying the evolution in size of tv series, starting from the pilot to the “serial movie”, with the aim to explore how size changes are related to serial narrative styles, tv series models, and audiences’ consumption habits.