What Went Wrong With The Original Gilligan's Island Pilot

CBS

In the realm of television, shooting a pilot is by no means a guarantee of going to series. The broadcast landscape is littered with failed one-and-done ventures like "Heat Vision and Jack," "Lookwell" and the "Beverly Hills Cop" series starring Brandon T. Jackson. If network executives don't like the way a promising concept plays once its up on its feet and before a camera, they'll nix it without a second thought. So it's important for show creators to put their best foot forward with that pilot, lest they join those aforementioned shows and hundreds of others on the scrap heap.

Amazingly, some shows can slap together a disastrous pilot and still make it to series. "Game of Thrones" famously stumbled out of the gate (forcing the producers to recast Daenerys Targaryen). Meanwhile, on the other end of the tonal spectrum, "Gilligan's Island" encountered choppy waters on its way to smooth three-season sailing (which could have lasted longer had CBS honcho William S. Paley's wife not lobbied for its cancellation as a means of saving "Gunsmoke").

The pilot was such a headache for CBS that they ultimately scrapped it and went straight to series without airing it. What was the problem? What wasn't?

CBS

Years ago in an interview with the Buffalo News, Gilligan himself, Bob Denver, spilled the beans on the pilot's many pitfalls. One of the most famous slip-ups came in casting, where Ginger, Mary Ann and the Professor were initially played by, respectively, Kit Smythe, Nancy McCarthy (as an anti-Mary Ann airhead named Bunny) and John Gabriel. Series creator Sherwood Schwartz wisely obeyed his network's demands and recast with Tina Louise, Dawn Wells and Russell Johnson.

The writing of the pilot (which was literally painful for Schwartz) hit a snag when they began filming and realized it was two minutes short. "By this time, we'd had four different directors," said Denver. "And I don't know how many times Sherwood had rewritten the reshot scene." They also wanted to shoot a scene depicting the sinking of the relaunched "S.S. Minnow," but that was kiboshed by the show's beachside location. According to Denver, "Even Navy frogmen wouldn't work in the surf at the location we'd picked."

Once the recast series was finally ready to premiere on CBS in the fall of 1964, the network buried the pilot and led with the first episode featuring the cast we know and love today. The pilot wouldn't be aired until 1992, when TBS pulled it out of mothballs and finally let fans behold the miscast wreckage.

It's a miracle "Gilligan's Island" survived that pilot. Credit the network and Schwartz with knowing they had lightning in a bottle – they just had to find the lightning.