Kingslayer in space. Photo courtesy of FOX
Warning: If you aren’t caught up through Season 5, one or two mild spoilers are ahead.
In last Sunday’s New York Times, Maureen Dowd interviewed Peter Dinklage from Game of Thrones and dropped a bit of trivia that’s fairly obscure even by Thrones‘ terms, where seemingly every background swineherd and sellsword has a Wikia page. Apparently playing Tyrion Lannister on GoT is the second time Dinklage has matched wits with Lena Headey, who plays his conniving sister Cersei; the first, Dowd wrote, was “a failed TV pilot in Canada about a cat-crazy math professor and a messed-up chick.”
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Now, that’s a bit like describing Game of Thrones as a show about seven families trying to decide whether to buy a chair—the pilot in question was actually 2006’s Ultra, in which Headey played the titular hard-luck superhero and Dinklage played the scientist, who theorizes that superheroes are a sort of Marxist corrective whereby the individual takes back the power invested in hierarchies through punctuated evolution. I’m afraid it isn’t as good as it sounds. But that wasn’t even Dinklage’s only unaired pilot: He also played Bob Hart in Testing Bob, which looks like it was meant to be 2005’s answer to All in the Family and Welcome Back Cotter (that is to say: a show about a cantankerous, broken-down high-school teacher).
Game of Thrones actors have worked a lot. Charles Dance was getting harpooned as a henchman in a James Bond movie long before he was getting crossbowed on the crapper as Tywin Lannister; Julian Glover (Grand Maester Pycelle) was in a Star Wars movie, a Bond movie, and an Indiana Jones movie; Rory the “Hound” McCann was spokes-stud for something called Scott’s Porage Oats. It makes sense that there would be some pilots buried in there (and, if you need a refresher, TV pilots are how people meet people).
The surprise, then, is that these pilots are such exquisite catastrophes. Game of Thrones is a uniquely demanding show, even when it comes to casting. There’s something very self-selecting about the actors playing a regicidal Danish man and a four-foot-fie dipsomaniac, so I guess it makes sense that these are not your average pilots. Here are some of the lost, unfinished, or otherwise permanently shelved television projects that starred the future lords and ladies of Westeros:
Ultra (2006):
Lena Headey strikes out for the big city to become a writer and becomes a superhero instead. Here’s how she breaks it down for us in one of the show’s many voiceovers: “New York was the center of the universe, and I was at the center of it. I made friends, got a part-time job, wrote whenever I could, chased the parties, and wrote some more. I was never bored, and there was nothing ahead but possibility.”
It’s not fair to say that the sole produced half-hour of Ultra is bad. I mean, it is bad, but mainly it stands out for a soundtrack that demonstrates the kind of on-the-nose logic you wouldn’t expect to see outside of an Elvis movie: Tom Petty’s “Learning to Fly” for the scene where Ultra learns to fly, songs about feeling the pity in New York City to make us forget we are obviously looking at Toronto, and “She Blinded Me with Science” after a visit from cryptic man sends her to Dinklage’s lab. There’s a lot of freeze-dried Mystery Men jokes sprinkled in, like the wannabe invisible woman who’s just in denial and how the superheroes don’t spend much time fighting, instead hiring PR firms and sign lucrative contracts. This sounds like interesting satire, but the tone of the show is awfully hard to pin down from the performances.
Cersei Lannister circa 2006 as New York City writer-cum-superhero Ultra. Photo courtesy of FOX
Headey and Dinklage in particular just look over it. And isn’t that what makes one-time coworkers into lifelong friends? Splitting a joint in the backlot and being all, “Fuck this shit, one day I’m going to have a chair made out of swords.” “Me too, and I’m going to tell the palace guards to spin around, close their eyes, and then I’ll be all, ‘Knowledge is not power, power is power,’ and if anyone ever disrespects you, I’ll have their head.” “You’re the best, Lena!” “No, you’re the best, Dink!”
Jamie Lannister’s got a brand new bag. Photo courtesy of FOX
Virtuality (2009):
Somebody clearly bet the farm on this sleekly produced FOX pilot (which aired as a TV movie) starring Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, the future Jaime Lannister, as the captain of a spaceship called Phaeton that is adrift in a galaxy of 2000s science-fiction clichés. You got your goofy cowboys-in-outer-space conceit, your crew-on-a-doomed-mission-to-nowhere, and your holodeck VR escapades (including some very specific fantasies).
Faceless (2006):
Sean Bean beats his own record for dying in everything he appears in by getting iced in the first few minutes of this Miami Vice–indebted pilot. The Bean is a one-time criminal prosecutor who survives his own death, comes back with a new face, and infiltrates the Korean/Russian/Mexican/Crips super mafia. Hard to see what anyone objected to here: Look at Boromir stepping into this elevator like he is the coolest motherfucker in town. Faceless really brings home what magnificent time capsules pilots are, frozen forever in the moment when, in this case, heroes dressed like ecstasy dealers, bad guys made intense phone calls on their cellular telephones in front of penthouse waterfalls, and every violent action scene was set to Moby for some reason. We have lost our way.
Liam Cunningham not as a futuristic cop. Photo courtesy of HBO
Police 2020 (1997):
From the very little I can learn about this doomed British crime show, Liam Cunningham, the future Onion Knight, played a cop in the year 2020. The only trace of this ever having existed appears to be a single review on IMDB, written in 2000, that describes the pilot as “a big disappointment to anyone who looks to the future with any optimism.”
Queen Margaery’s former life as a pantsuited British spy. Photo courtesy of FOX
Masterwork (2009):
Here we have a cheerier glimpse of what might have been in this un-seeable CSI clone from the Prison Break folks that would have starred Natalie Dormer pre-ice-cream-cone-dress as an MI-5 agent who solves international art crimes. This one may not actually even have even been finished before FOX pulled the plug.
The bowler-hatted future commander of the Second Sons. Photo courtesy of NBC
The Sixth Gun (2013):
Based on a series of comic books, this goth Western would have put the Bloomington vegan-looking Michiel Huisman (GoT’s Daario Naharis) to good use as Drake Sinclair, a bowler-sporting gunfighter commanded by the fabled Hanging Tree to seek six sacred pistols in the postbellum township of Brimstone. The pilot hasn’t surfaced, to my knowledge, so we may never know what possessed NBC to pass on this badass-sounding piece of kitsch, but I reckon it’s all for the best, since Huisman took the Thrones gig the following year along with his Sixth Gun co-star Pedro Pascal, which brings me to the piece de resistance of shitty pilots…
Wonder Woman (2011):
Unfathomable. However bad the world is, it still doesn’t deserve this mean-spirited “gritty” DC Comics reboot, every frame of which practically pants with nostalgia for the Bush administration. Impatient with truth/justice, Wonder Woman uses her golden lasso to “Abu-Gharib her quarry” (the show’s phrase, not mine). Instead of an invisible jet, she flies around in what looks like a drone. She refers to six dead teenagers as having come from “ghettoes” at a press conference, threatens to blackmail a senator who brings up how far her vigilantism stretches the Patriot Act, and laughs off the namby-pamby objections of Alan Dershowitz, the actual Alan Dershowitz, who appears on a television to say, “I don’t remember anything in the Unites States Constitution that says that a woman in a costume is exempt from the Bill of Rights.”
There’s not a hint of joy or irony anywhere in the production, save perhaps from Elizabeth Hurley as WW’s nemesis, who gloats, “The pharmaceutical industry has Congress by the balls… and, as you can imagine, their balls come particularly easy to me.” Poor Pedro Pascal is the show’s Commissioner Gordon, who pleads with her not to use torture information out of his suspects, and you just want to tell the poor guy not to worry, because in a few years, he’ll be in a better place, having his brains smashed apart by a giant in King’s Landing. Valar dohaeris, Pedro. All men must serve.
J. W. McCormack is a writer whose work has appeared in Bookforum, the Brooklyn Rail,Tin House, the New Inquiry, n+1, Publisher’s Weekly, and Conjunctions.
Game of Thrones premieres on April 24 on HBO.
