4 TV Characters Who Act Like Crazy People in Their First Appearances
Traditionally, TV shows start by filming a pilot, a single episode that convinces the network to pick up the series. This is hard because network executives are idiots, who think that viewers are even bigger idiots than they are.
To sell the show, pilots may portray characters in ways that don’t represent episodes to come. For example, any time you watch a comedy with strange characters and fast dialogue (30 Rock, Happy Endings), you can go back to the pilot and see the characters acting boringly relatable, for fear that no one would give the show a chance otherwise.
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But if you watch a drama, you’ll see the opposite. It’s a drama where characters show off all sorts of nuance over the course of several years. In the pilot, however, there’s a good chance a character will have at least one crazy outburst. We may never see the character act like this again, but the pilot must include it for fear that we otherwise won’t be interested. For example...
Don Draper Refuses to Take Orders from a Woman
Mad Men shot its pilot a full year before its second episode, and you might be able to see cast members visibly age from the first episode to the next. You also might notice changes in various characters’ roles in the office or notice that the pilot promises more nudity or swear words than the rest of the series will deliver.
The basics of ad men selling marketing is still there. Don Draper suggests drawing customers to a department store with coupons, while the client suggests presenting the store as desirable by doubling down on how expensive it is. Later in the series, it’ll usually be the client who wants easy sales and Don who innovatively digs deeper into the importance of image.
Unsatisfied with how the meeting’s going, Don says, “This is ridiculous. I’m not gonna let a woman talk to me like this. This meeting is over. Good luck, Miss Menken.” And he walks out.
The show is telling us this is the sexist 1960s, and Don Draper cannot be contained. But it will find more elegant ways to do that in the episodes to come, and once you know the rest of the series, this tantrum looks silly.
In the future, Don will have several female clients without feeling scandalized that feedback should come to him from a woman. And no, it’s not because he learns to treat women better or becomes more professional as the series progresses — he becomes worse on both accounts. It’s because that sort of exchange was always a fairly routine thing for these ad guys to encounter.
Carmela Soprano Grabs an AK-47
Mad Men and The Sopranos share a lot of links. Mad Men’s showrunner Matthew Weiner wrote for The Sopranos, and he landed the Sopranos job by submitting his script for the Mad Men pilot (which he originally wrote all the way back in 2000).
Like Mad Men, The Sopranos shot its pilot a year before the rest of the show. Characters look and sound different in the pilot, with the difference sometimes due to actual plastic surgery. The style of narration over action is different here and is surely influenced by Goodfellas. And then there’s this scene, which happens to namedrop Goodfellas, where Carmela totes an AK-47.
Carmela mistakes daughter Meadow for an intruder and immediately takes out an assault rifle that’s roughly as big as she is. This was great for promos, which told viewers, “The Sopranos are a family, but they’re also a family, if you catch our drift.” But Carmela will not be backing up Tony in one shoot-out per season, as this scene indicated might be the case.
We will later see that Carmela has a gun in the house for protection, but it’s a pistol, which is a handier choice for any homeowner. The AK-47 vanishes after the pilot — before returning four seasons later, now with the far more reasonable job of shooting bears.
Johnny Rose’s Potty Mouth
Unlike the other shows on this list, Schitt’s Creek is a comedy. Actually, all four of these shows are filled with comedy, but Schitt’s Creek is the only one officially marketed as a comedy. Even so, in Eugene Levy’s character Johnny Rose, we have a character who’s fairly restrained. Often, that’s one source of the comedy.
It’s a little jarring then to go back to the pilot and see him quickly lose patience with guest-who-won’t-leave Roland and yell, “Roland, would you get the fuck out?!?!”
The rest of the family are shocked, and Johnny himself labels it an overreaction. But as the top comment on that video says, “This is the scene that sold me.” So, the line did its job.
Roman Roy Tortures A Little League Player
In the Succession pilot, the family is playing baseball (already a little surprising, compared to anything we’ll see them do after this), when Kendall has to take a call, leaving them a player short. Roman recruits a little boy, a son of the groundskeeper, to fill in. He offers the kid a million dollars if he can hit a home run.
To show he means it, Roman goes to his wife — who’ll later be retconned into his ex-wife or something — and asks her to take out their checkbook. We have no time to wonder to ourselves whether multimillionaires really still walk around with checkbooks in their purses in the year 2018, or whether they keep that sum in their personal checking account rather than elsewhere, because Roman fills the check out, and the game is on. The boy nearly does complete a home run, but spoilsport Tom tags him out. Roman now rips the check into little pieces, while laughing.
The scene serves its purpose at drawing us in and making clear that these characters aren’t nice. In fact, many viewers are convinced it perfectly introduces you to the characters, but that might not be true based on what we later see. It’s doubtful whether Roman really would take such pleasure in this stunt.
Oh, the issue isn’t that Roman is too kind for this. The issue is it’s hard to buy that he’d consider this groundskeeper’s son even worthy of his notice. Later, when Roman briefly goes undercover as a trainee, he doesn’t shout, “So long, losers” when he leaves. He just stops thinking about them completely, and that’s how they show us what a dick he is.
A Roman torture game would have to be the sort of thing he could look back on as wild, not just sad. Tattooing Kendall’s name on a hobo’s forehead? Yeah, that’s crazy. “One time, I offered a million dollars if a kid hit a home run, but then he didn’t”? We know how cruel it was because we were there, but it wouldn’t make for much of a story.
The episode zooms tight on the kid’s face and even later cuts to him at home. This is probably the only time in the whole series that they show us the point-of-view of a “normal” person, because the episode had to make sure we knew this was sad, and that we knew the show knew it was sad. Later, for example, when Kendall fires the staff of a website, right after soliciting ideas from them about how to expand the site in the future, they don’t need a scene of the laid-off employees wallowing at home to make clear what happened.
Not that, uh, that website scene hit especially close-to-home for us or anything.
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