Unaired pilot episode, cut scene and promos

Unaired pilot episode

Young Americans (YA) was sold to The WB in the winter of 1999-2000 partly on the basis of a pilot episode filmed during the autumn of 1999 in and around Decatur, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta, and in large part at Agnes Scott College.   That pilot episode, written and directed by Steven Antin, has never been broadcast, and no authorized recording of it has ever been released. 

Some scenes of episode 1 of YA as broadcast are copied from the unaired pilot.  The rest of YA was filmed in Maryland (at Havre de Grace and in and around Baltimore) during the late spring and early summer of 2000.   However, most of the unaired pilot episode was not used in YA as broadcast and has never been broadcast.

Nevertheless, the unaired pilot episode of YA seems no longer to be publicly viewable online.  All recordings of it -- made not from TV broadcasts but from recordings circulated privately by people involved in YA's production -- seem to have been removed from online venues including YouTube for alleged infringement of a copyright on a never-broadcast pilot episode.

YA's unaired pilot is grossly inferior to YA as broadcast, including its first episode.  However, some aspects of the unaired pilot that are absent from YA as broadcast shed light on aspects of YA as broadcast.  

• The blatantly surreal ending of the unaired pilot, in which the protagonists all run off to engage in the imaginary sport of cow-tipping, foreshadows the subtler and more artful surrealism of YA as broadcast, including its surreal ending, in which the narrator changes tense to describe as long-ago events the events of a drama ostensibly set in the present -- per the "Summer 2000" banners hanging on the exterior of Rawley Academy for Boys in at least two episodes -- and previously narrated as occurring in the present.

• The 1950-vintage green pickup truck and the comparably old Pennzoil sign at the Banks family's gas station in the unaired pilot, filmed in Georgia in the autumn of 1999, show that the even larger set of similarly anachronistic antiques at the Banks family's gas station in YA as aired, filmed in Maryland more than half a year later, were no accident -- that Antin deliberately filled that gas station with props that conspicuously belied the drama's ostensible time setting in the present.

• The university fraternity sweatshirt that Scott Calhoun wears when, at the end of episode 3, he accepts that he must relate to Bella Banks as her putative brother, not as her lover,  is also shown in the unaired pilot.  Antin had that fraternity sweatshirt carted from Georgia to Maryland and stored for more than half a year for use to evoke brotherhood (fraternity) in a way so arcane that few of the most-teenaged viewers of a mass-audience TV teen drama could even notice it.

Consequently, this site offers access to a copy of the only recording of YA's unaired pilot episode, which can be viewed or downloaded by clicking on the link at the bottom of this page titled, "YA unaired pilot, 240p."  Regrettably, it is a low-resolution (240p) copy of poor visual quality.  It is a roughly 350-megabyte AVI file, perhaps better downloaded and viewed on a personal computer than on a mobile phone. 

Scene cut from episode 5

A scene cut from episode 5 of YA, omitted from all broadcasts of YA both in the U.S.A. and elsewhere, but present in the material cut from YA episode 5 given by the "Material Cut" subsection of  this site's "Scripts of YA" section, can be viewed on the "Rawley Revisited" YouTube channel (which is affiliated with this site), in a short video clip titled, "YA 5 - Cut scene, with critical commentary."  That video clip provides, in subtitles, that cut's scene's dialogue from the production script for episode 5.  As the "critical commentary" appended to that clip states, this cut scene was released in a TV Guide documentary, "The cast of 'Lost' before they were TV stars," first aired in May 2010, specifically in its segment about Ian Somerhalder, who played Hamilton Fleming in Young Americans. 

This scene cut from episode 5 seems noteworthy for three reasons:  

• First, it shows that some of the scenes absent from any hitherto broadcast version of YA but present in the scripts of YA transcribed on this "Rawley Revisited" site (most of which are fan-edited production scripts, not broadcast transcripts), were in fact filmed. 

• Second, it shows that somewhere, presumably in the archives of Sony Entertainment Pictures (formerly Columbia Tri-Star), there are films of YA that include footage never yet broadcast.

• Third, this cut scene shows Hamilton Fleming helping Jaqueline (a.k.a. "Jake") Pratt to recover from the emotional problems that caused her, despite being a straight girl, to cross-dress and enroll in an all-boys' boarding school -- and to bring to that school a motorbike (which no student is allowed to keep at school), to post on the wall of her dorm room a "Vanishing Point" poster that celebrates highway suicide, to computer-hack for a hobby, and to switch schools every year.   In this cut scene, Hamilton challenges Jacqueline's habit of blaming her emotional problems on her feeling ignored by her mother.  Having just met and spent a day with Jacqueline's mother, Hamilton has learned, as earlier scenes of episode 5 show, that Jaqueline's mother does not ignore Jacqueline, as Jacqueline claims, but rather that Jacqueline doesn't want her mother in her life.  Hamilton seems to grasp that Jacqueline's emotional problems are rooted, not in her mother's ignoring her, as Jacqueline claims, but rather her mother's despair of being loved for more than just her body, against her mother's seeing in love nothing more than sex, which her mother evinces earlier in episode 5.  

It is in reaction to that despair of true love that Jacqueline has been pretending to be a boy at an all-boys' boarding school, hoping against hope that a straight boy will love her anyhow, will sacrifice his sexual gender-preference for her, will kiss the frog.  Hamilton has done exactly that in episode 4, thereby becoming -- in the tradition of "The Frog Prince," "Beauty and the Beast," and Chaucer's "Wife of Bath's Tale" -- proof that true love is possible, that compassion be so strong as to engender passion.  

In this cut scene of episode 5, Hamilton re-enacts a second true love story, a story that YA's narrating character, Will Krudski, told a girl during his spring 2000 appearance in Dawson's Creek:  Hamilton plays Orpheus, leading Jacqueline-as-Eurydice out of her emotional hell.

Promotional videos

Low-resolution copies of nearly two dozen short videos aired on The WB during the summer of 2000 to promote Young Americans to WB viewers can be accessed as 240p MPE files and downloaded from the "Young Americans" page of the Mr. Video Productions site at http://www.vidiot.com/YoungAm.

These short promotional videos apparently were made by The WB's marketing staff, not by Steven Antin or others involved in writing, directing, and producing YA.  The original voice-over audio and the choice of visual footage in these promotional videos seem to have been made by The WB's marketing staff.  Consequently, these videos -- like The WB's re-use of the "lake run" from episode 1 to preface every subsequent episode of YA as broadcast in the USA -- may not be indicative of Antin's intent in crafting YA.

"Fair use" claim (yet again):

No authorized recording or streaming of YA has ever been offered for sale.  If any authorized recording or streaming of YA were available for purchase, this site, "Rawley Revisited," would tell readers how to purchase it; this site would neither provide a link to another site where copies of viewer recordings of YA can be viewed or downloaded, nor make copies of viewer recordings of YA available for downloading.   

Moreover, YA seems not to have been broadcast or streamed anywhere in the world since around 2006.  If YA were often broadcast or streamed, this site would urge readers to watch its next broadcast or streaming; this site would neither provide a link to another site where copies of viewer recordings of YA can be viewed or downloaded, nor make copies of viewer recordings of YA available for downloading.

This site, "Rawley Revisited," seeks, without monetary or material compensation, to enhance appreciation of YA as a work of dramatic art, which is possible only if is possible to watch YA.  In the absence of any authorized recording or streaming or recent or expected future broadcast or streaming of YA, this site's posting of viewer recordings of YA and of links to other postings of viewer recordings of YA seems consistent with U.S. Code 17-107, which specifically permits as "fair use" the reproduction of copyrighted material "for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research." 

Ichabod Grubb

Posted March 2024

Last updated March 2024

YA unaired pilot,240p