Is the tepid stuff we get on the tube all there is? What about the inspired, original shows that don’t make the cut? LA producers Beth Lapides and Greg Miller went searching for gold on the reject shelf and came up with an evening’s worth of strung-together unaired TV pilots, which they premiered at a West Hollywood nightclub under the title "The Other Network." The format is simple but effective: a writer or director behind each show introduces it, railing bitterly but humorously about the lame, shortsighted network that said no. Then we get an episode. What might have been . . .

Now it’s a movie. Next!, snubbed by Fox Television, is a Saturday Night Live clone, and Lookwell, co-written by Conan O’Brien, features one-time Batman star Adam West as a nincompoop has-been-actor-turned-amateur-detective, in the Leslie Nielsen vein. These two programs are okay, but we’ve seen them before. It hurts more to realize that ABC couldn’t find a place in its schedule for Judd Apatow’s North Hollywood, a smart, polished comedy show about three young actors trying to make a Hollywood career. And surely there would be a cult of sophisticated, obsessed viewers for the supremely strange Heat-Vision & Jack, which was written and directed by Ben Stiller: it’s about a crazy-ass ex-astronaut (the sublime Jack Black) who races about on his talking motorcycle (the voice of Owen Wilson) and has the most zany misadventures. This one might have been the most unusual TV show since Twin Peaks.