When John Brunton at Insight Productions wanted to delve more deeply into the comedy community to find his next pilot, he and his team tried a different approach.

“We wanted to get more aggressive in terms of our comedy slate,” says Insight producer Shannon Farr. “We have comedy in development, but we just really wanted to ramp up that part of the company.”

Insight is no stranger to the comedy world, with such series as Hatching, Matching & Dispatching and Open Mike with Mike Bullard in its library. With this new initiative, two of the prodco’s team members came up with a way to see a TV pilot performed live before even entering development.

To that end, Brunton brought on Heather Muir as a comedy consultant, whose work has primarily been as in casting (Howie Do It, Hotbox, The Jon Dore Television Show). She collaborated with Gary Rideout Jr. owner of the self-explanatory Toronto establishment Comedy Bar, and Pilot Week was born — a week for comedians to perform their TV pilot pitch live.

“It’s one thing when someone sends you a pitch by e-mail, but this gave us the opportunity to go out and see how serious they are,” says Muir. “A lot of comics talk the talk, let’s see if they’re going to walk the walk. It was fascinating to watch the different comedians how they interpreted their concept and present it live on stage in front of an audience.”

Insight first accepted brief pilot synopses, and was overwhelmed with more than 240 submissions. The prodco narrowed it down the list to 21 pilots ranging from scripted, game shows and mock reality, which were then performed over seven days at Comedy Bar.

Pilot Week came together quickly, recalls Farr and Muir, as they met with Rideout in July and the performances took place during the first week of August. The Insight development team was on hand at all the performances, looking for originality, presentation, strong writing, saleability and, ultimately, determining whether or not it would make a good TV show.

Farr observes that some of the performances were better off for the stage. “You look at it and you go, ‘how would we execute that on TV?’ Are the laughs coming from breaking down the fourth wall and are there opportunities to do that on camera?” she says.

“Some relied heavily on audience interaction and obviously you can do that on TV and on the stage, but when you’re relying on that, I think it’s harder to engage a TV audience.”

It took a few weeks to decide the winner, but the Real Housewives parody Bowling Trophy Wives written by Second City alumni Lauren Ash, Leslie Seiler and Bruce Pirrie took home the grand prize — $1,000 cash and a pilot development deal.

Insight is also in discussions with other comedians from that week, and thanks to the success of the event, both Farr and Muir are eager to repeat Pilot Week in 2011.

—

Photo courtesy of Paula Whitlock