Watch Adam West and Conan O'Brien's Hilarious Forgotten Pilot 'Lookwell'

When Adam West passed away this weekend at the age of 88, the most easily referenced facet of the late actor's legacy was his iconic stint during the 1960s portraying Batman, both in the ABC series and in the 1968 feature film. But West enjoyed a healthy presence in pop culture in the decades following Batman because of his own willingness to have a laugh at himself and, more broadly, the nature of celebrity and its relationship to acting. His myriad voice work, from Batman properties to the highly satirical Animaniacs to his own hilarious self-portrayal in Family Guy, pulled off the rare feat of employing self-referentiality as comedy without lapsing into cloying or vainglorious territory. He could take a joke, and he could make one, too.

And perhaps the best joke West ever made was in the form of Lookwell, his 1991 pilot with Conan O'Brien and ace comedy writer Robert Smigel. A single-camera sitcom centered around the titular character and one-time TV actor's misguided attempts to solve crimes and bust perps, the pilot aired once on NBC and was never picked up, despite a level of interest in developing it into a series from then-network chairman Brandon Tartikoff.

But like many things, Lookwell has enjoyed a healthy second life via streams of varying quality the internet, and the major players involved in crafting the pilot have expressed a fondness for it since. In 2000, O'Brien mentioned during a Harvard commencement speech that the show "was going to change all the rules" of comedy on TV, and in a 2013 interview with the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, West said that Lookwell "was able to capture a bit of my nonsense and my sense of absurdity, so I really enjoyed that…It's the funniest pilot that never got sold."

By watching Lookwell in 2017, it's impressive to see why the show would've been ahead of its time had it gotten picked up: the single-camera format was, at that point, not at all common practice when it came to network TV sitcoms, about 15 years from reaching mass presence through shows like Arrested Development, The Office, and Parks & Recreation. The comedy still feels fresh, too, encapsulating a knowing and largely good-natured skewering of the struggles that come with being left behind by television's embrace of the now, as well as a caricature of self-serious Hollywood types and anyone who's ever referred to acting as a "calling" similar to, well, crime-fighting.

I've watched the Lookwell pilot probably 30 times over the years, and its charms have not worn off—from the mesmerizing end-credits scene of Lookwell enjoying a frozen ice pop on the couch, to an early appearance by renowned director Todd Field, who spent decades as a character actor before choosing a seat behind the camera instead. But Lookwell would be nothing without West, whose sense of comic timing elevates his character beyond mere caricature and towards something realer and more human.

There's a moment near the end of the episode where the cops point out to Lookwell that he's possibly bungled their covert sting operation. A look of confusion hits West's face as he begins muttering to himself—suggesting that after 20 minutes of increasingly delusional behavior, he's experiencing a moment of clarity regarding his own place in the world, and it doesn't feel good. It's a moment of empathy amidst the chaos of absurdity, and West sells it with just the right amount of sadness—an exhibit of range from an actor who showed more sides of himself than anyone asked him to.

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