Stillman told Grantland that he originally wrote an hour-long pilot, and when he wasn't satisfied with the second half, Amazon told him to just shoot the first, and it plays that way.

There's wry banter and a fantastic sense of place, but it really doesn't function as the first episode of a TV show, because it just stops at the half-hour mark. That said, “Cosmopolitans” isn't as satisfying a viewing experience as “Transparent” was. Like “Transparent,” I can imagine “Cosmopolitans” attracting a small but very passionate audience. “The Cosmopolitans” feels exactly like the first half-hour of a Whit Stillman film (of which there have been precious few), even beyond the Chloe Sevigny cameo. Both shows would have very few homes available to them ( maybe HBO would have considered one or both, filling one of their token “we don't think this is commercial at all, but we like it” slots like “Enlightened” and “Tremé” have in the past), and both are clearly the unfiltered work of their creators. You can see a through line, for instance, between “Transparent” (Jill Soloway's story of an aging man who begins a gender transition, and the adult children reacting to that) and the new “The Cosmopolitans,” the Whit Stillman-created tale of a group of young American expats (one of them played by Adam Brody) living in Paris. But the third batch – two hour-long dramas and three half-hour comedies – do offer some clues, as well as some things to get excited about and some things to be disappointed by. Since only two Amazon shows have actually presented full seasons so far, and since Amazon ordered virtually all of its second batch of pilots, it's hard to identify too many patterns in what Amazon executives and Amazon customers are looking for in their shows. At this rate, they may be ordering some shows before a word's even been written, and traveling back in time to cancel others before the creator has even thought of the idea. That was in February, and while none of those new shows has debuted – “Transparent,” the best of the bunch, will premiere all of its episodes, Netflix-style, on September 26 – Amazon yesterday unveiled its third pilot season, even as there's already news about casting for the fourth wave of Amazon pilots.

The second batch of pilots were unveiled less than a year later, and Amazon ordered almost all of them – other than “Rebels,” the pro football comedy that no one seemed to like – to series. The original batch of Amazon pilots were presented to the public in April of last year of those, only “Alpha House” (which got renewed for a second season) and “Betas” (which remains in limbo) got picked up. Amazon keeps accelerating the pace and output of its “pilot season” process.

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