The television pilot is a precise form. It must establish character, world, tone, and conflict within roughly forty-five minutes, and it must do so with enough emotional pull that the viewer chooses to return. The most accomplished pilots, ‘Mad Men’, ‘Breaking Bad’, ‘Fleabag’, are masterpieces of compression. The contemporary literary novel has begun to borrow from this grammar. Opening chapters now perform a similar set of tasks: introduce the protagonist, establish stakes, suggest the larger architecture of the book to come, and end on a small cliffhanger that pulls the reader into the second chapter.
