I Watched The “Lost” Live-Action ‘Dilbert’ Pilot Episode, And It’s Clear Why It Didn’t Get Picked Up

The death of Dilbert creator Scott Adams in January at age 68 was followed by obituaries with a predictably wide range in tone. While some were charitable to the late cartoonist, most were less forgiving. Adams’s long leap into infamy on the back of countless racist, sexist, transphobic, and antisemitic statements, and his close association with right-wing politics, cost him dearly while he was still alive, including the eventual cancelation of his comic strip from most of the country’s remaining newspapers. The last decade of Adams’s life was a public and often bizarre downward spiral, culminating in feuds with some of the alt-health quacks who gave him medically unsound advice after his prostate cancer diagnosis. Most of the obits were dedicated to rehashing these late-career follies, only occasionally straying to examinations of his artistic legacy. 

I find myself interested in Adams damaging and/or capitalizing upon his artistic legacy in a different era: at the height of the strip’s popularity. In the late 1990s, Adams undertook tireless efforts to commercialize the Dilbert brand. From the highly successful Office Depot ad campaign to a million coffee mugs to lunchboxes to rubber masks to the ill-fated Dilberito—available in “Mexican” and “Indian” flavors!—Adams was a relentless promoter. Among the franchise detritus, one particularly intriguing tidbit has caught the attention of obscure media aficionados: a supposedly lost, live-action Dilbert sitcom pilot, which Adams wrote and directed for the Fox network.

Numerous articles have identified the pilot as lost media, but are light on details. A ghastly Dogbert animatronic puppet is the only artifact from the pilot that has made it into public view; it was featured on a segment of a local PBS station’s B-movie happy hour, having somehow landed in the collection of a movie prop museum in Florida.