Back in October news broke that NBC’s midseason drama series Day One was being cut from the originally ordered 13 episode series to a two-hour pilot plus two episodes – making a 4 hour mini-series. The show, chronicling life on earth after a global catastrophe, was originally set to air following the Winter Olympics. However NBC have yet again changed the episode order…
Now Day One is set to air as a TV movie only, as a backdoor pilot to a prospective new series – which is the same story we were given with Fox’s Virtuality, and a series for that never emerged… Angela Bromstad, president of prime-time entertainment at NBC and Universal Media Studios, broke the news at an interview during the Television Critics Association winter press tour:
Day One is going to air as a two-hour movie. We looked at after V launched and after FlashForward launched with a strong initial thing. We didn’t want to come on after that. As we sat down with [executive producer] Jesse [Alexander] and talked about more of the mythology, there’s just concern about sustaining that. We’ve only shot the two-hour pilot, it will be a pilot where you could see where it could go in series, but there will be a resolve at the end of the two hours.
Bromstad did say that should the pilot “perform” then there is the possibility of the show going to a full series, but in my opinion it doesn’t look good for Day One at this point, which is a shame as it seems like a pretty good concept – plus it stars one of my favourite Canadian actresses, Carly Pope.
