A little to my surprise, I enjoyed the pilot to Men of a Certain Age quite a bit. I always planned on watching it at least for the first few episodes, if for no other reason than to see Andre Braugher working again (the dude is, in my opinion, one of the most underrated actors out there today).
But here’s why I liked it: It wasn’t exactly your typical pilot. The rule for pilots, for the most part, is that you introduce your characters, throw them through some life-changing experience, and end with them in an all-new status quo that, in turn, will be the status quo of your show moving forward.
Men, on the other hand, starts in media res on almost every count. Joe (Ray Romano) and his wife have recently made their separation final. Terry (Scott Bakula) gets a date with a barista at the end, but he didn’t meet her for the first time in the pilot—rather, it’s established that they already have a rapport when he notes that she’s been gone for a week.
Owen (Braugher)’s plotline is the closest to matching up with the traditional pilot structure, I suppose, as he receives a kick in the pants over the course of the episode that forces him to approach his job as a car salesman at the dealership his father owns with renewed vigor.
Of course, each character begins and ends at slightly different places by pilot’s end, but if we were to re-imagine it in a more traditional framework, it would look something like this:
-In the first scene, Joe’s wife tells him she wants a separation, and by episode’s end he’s moved out of the house and begun to face the reality of living on his own again in a hotel room.
-Terry, down in the dumps, miraculously meets this hot, young barista who gives him the jump start he so needs at just the rightest, most convenientest moment possible. Thank god for random first meetings with strangers that change your life!
-Owen... well, again, in the course of the pilot, Owen is shamed by his father, has a diabetic seizure and winds up returning to work with new purpose. Can’t really think of how you’d tweak that.
But Owen is a supporting character. Thus, the A-plot of the series--Romano’s storyline--avoids that traditional structure, and in so doing prevents the pilot itself from retaining it.
Now here’s why this is good. The problem with pilots that feature a major change in its main character presents the beginning of a story. It provides a TV series with a Point A. Logically, then, the series will progress from there to B and C and D, and reach Point Z in its finale.
That’s traditional story structure. That’s the structure we apply to novels and film. And, yes, it is the structure we apply to some longform, serialized storytelling, such as The Wire or Lost. But those two shows aren’t open ended. They had planned conclusions that the showrunners mapped out in at least some detail from very early on.
Open-ended series such as this, however, need a looser, more organic structure for the most part. They’re meant to mimic real life, with their arbitrary endings and overlapping plotlines.
Of course, there are exceptions to this. The Shield, for instance, had a pilot that ended with a major game changer, as Vic and Shane killed a fellow cop. But Shawn Ryan, through his brilliance, was able to pull that element all the way through to the end of the series. Very few runners understand organic storytelling the way Ryan does, and that’s in large part what allowed him to pull off his little feat.
Alternatively, if you are going to begin the series with a game-changer, it shouldn’t be the only one to occur in its lifetime. Buffy began with the titular vampire slayer becoming accustomed to her new digs in Sunnydale High. Three years later, the show completely transformed itself as she graduated from high school and moved onto college, effectively giving the Season 4 premiere a somewhat pilot-like structure.
But anyway. I don’t know if all of that makes sense, and there are probably so many exceptions to what I’ve stated above so as to make any type of “rule” or “theory” I could extrapolate here meaningless, but it was refreshing to see a pilot in Men of a Certain Age that so subtly tweaked the form, and in so doing provided a great deal of potential for the show to capitalize on as it moves forward.
And hell, even if it falls flat on its face in the writing as the series progresses, it still co-stars Andre Braugher, which is more than any other show can say right now.
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