Commentary: 10 years ago, Amazon tried to reinvent TV pilots. Its failure foretold our streaming future

In 2013, Amazon’s fledgling streaming service, Prime Video, had a new form of competition to confront. Pilot Season, integrating the streaming revolution with the longstanding tradition of the focus group, was a perfect fit for a company whose “leadership principles” include “customer obsession.” If sheer breadth is what guided the first Pilot Season lineup — which featured 14 titles, including the satirical “Onion News Network,” political comedy “Alpha House” and a television adaptation of “Zombieland” from original film writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick — the following year’s crop refined Amazon’s vision. “We had 20 times more freedom than I’ve ever had before,” said indie film director Whit Stillman, whose pilot “The Cosmopolitans” premiered through Pilot Season in 2014. Indeed, the Pilot Season brand that first attracted critics — “offbeat,” said Price; “indie,” per Kilpatrick — increasingly seemed to come up against the economic realities that have long defined Hollywood entertainment. When Salke officially announced the end of Pilot Season in 2018, she described Amazon’s pivot as an attempt to prioritize its “own testing barometers and some audience-driven data to make decisions” — in other words, bringing the decision-making back behind closed doors after a brief five-year window out in the open.