Turned Down: Nine Hits That Were Rejected Before They Made It

While researching the quizzes on this site, one pattern kept coming up. A surprising number of the most popular shows, books and manga of the last thirty years were turned down at least once, and often by several people. The reasons given at the time are revealing. Again and again, the thing the gatekeepers wanted removed turned out to be the thing audiences loved most.

Here are nine of those stories, with the facts drawn from the sources behind each quiz.

Harry Potter: twelve publishers said no

J. K. Rowling finished Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone in 1995. Christopher Little, the second literary agent she approached, agreed to represent her, and the manuscript then went to publishers. Twelve of them rejected it before Bloomsbury took it on. Even then, the publisher made one more change: it asked for a gender-neutral pen name, fearing that boys would not read a book they knew had been written by a woman. Rowling added a "K" from her grandmother Kathleen's name.

More on the books' path to publication is in the Harry Potter quiz.

One Piece: three rejections at Weekly Shōnen Jump

Eiichiro Oda's pirate manga has since become the best-selling manga series ever, but Weekly Shōnen Jump rejected it three times. Its original editor, Takanori Asada, later explained how it finally got through. The editor-in-chief, Kazuhiko Torishima, thought it "incomplete", and the team argued for two hours. He gave in partly because Asada was so "annoyingly earnest" that a colleague warned that another rejection would crush them both. See the One Piece quiz.

Stranger Things: about fifteen networks passed

The Duffer Brothers took their pitch to about fifteen cable networks, and every one gave the same note: a story led by children would not work. They were told either to make it a children's show or to drop the kids and focus on the police chief, Hopper. Shawn Levy's company 21 Laps bought the rights in early 2015, and Netflix bought the whole first season after reading the pilot. The children the networks wanted to cut became the heart of the show. The Stranger Things quiz has more.

Breaking Bad: Showtime, HBO, TNT and FX all said no

Vince Gilligan's pitch about a chemistry teacher turned drug manufacturer did the rounds before AMC took it. Showtime passed because it already had Weeds. HBO and TNT passed as well. FX got as far as talks about a pilot, but it already had three dramas with male leads and chose Dirt, a crime series centred on a woman, instead. AMC, which wanted original shows to sit alongside Mad Men, was keen from the first meeting.

There is a twist. Around 2010, when AMC was considering ending the show after season three, FX came back and offered to make two more seasons. That offer helped change AMC's mind. Read more in the Breaking Bad quiz.

The Sopranos: "Does he have to go to a psychiatrist?"

David Chase first imagined his story as a film about "a mobster in therapy having problems with his mother". When he and Brad Grey pitched it as a series, Fox showed interest but passed after reading the pilot script. CBS liked the crime but balked at the premise and asked, "Does he have to go to a psychiatrist?" HBO's Chris Albrecht paid for the pilot in 1997, Chase directed it himself, and HBO ordered a full season that December. The therapy CBS wanted gone is how the show begins: Tony's panic attacks send him to Dr. Melfi in the first episode. See the Sopranos quiz.

Seinfeld: the "weak" pilot

The Seinfeld Chronicles aired as a 23-minute pilot on 5 July 1989 and tested so badly that NBC left it off the schedule. An NBC memo called it "weak". Test viewers said you "can't get too excited about two guys going to the laundromat". The production company, Castle Rock, could not find another buyer, and Fox had already declined.

It was rescued by Rick Ludwin, NBC's head of late night and specials, who cancelled a Bob Hope special and used the money to order four more episodes, the smallest sitcom order in television history. Years later, Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David found the memo and hung it in a bathroom on the set. By the end, NBC was offering Seinfeld $5 million an episode for a tenth season, and he turned it down. The Seinfeld quiz covers the full story.

Squid Game: "too grotesque"

Hwang Dong-hyuk wrote Squid Game in 2009 as a film script, at a time when he was struggling with debt and reading Japanese survival manga in a Seoul comic café. Producers called it too grotesque and unrealistic. It stayed unmade for about ten years until Netflix, which was expanding into Korean productions, took it on around 2019. Within 28 days of release it had been seen by more than 142 million member households. See the Squid Game quiz.

Demon Slayer: a draft that was too dark

Before Demon Slayer, Koyoharu Gotouge drew an earlier version called Kisatsu no Nagare. It was rejected as too dark and serious, though its three chapters were later printed in the first fanbook. Even the working title for the reworked series, Kisatsu no Yaiba, was changed because the character for "kill" felt too blunt. The finished series went on to be Japan's best-selling manga. More in the Demon Slayer quiz.

The Mandalorian: the series that came after one that was too expensive

George Lucas began developing a live-action Star Wars series called Underworld in 2009, and more than 50 scripts were written by 2012. It was dropped as too expensive to make. After Disney bought Lucasfilm, a new live-action series was announced for Disney+ in 2017, and Jon Favreau signed on to write and run it in 2018. The Mandalorian quiz covers the new filming technology that was built for it.

What these stories have in common

Read side by side, the rejections follow a pattern. The networks that turned down Stranger Things objected to the children. CBS objected to the therapy in The Sopranos. NBC's testers objected to the everyday, nothing-much-happens quality of Seinfeld. Producers objected to the cruelty of Squid Game. In each case the objection pointed straight at what made the show different, and in each case the creators kept it.

The other common thread is a single person willing to take a chance: a second literary agent, an editor who would not stop arguing, a late-night executive with a spare budget. Most of these hits survived because one person said yes after many had said no.

Sources: the English Wikipedia articles on Harry Potter, One Piece, Stranger Things, Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, Seinfeld, Squid Game, Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba and The Mandalorian, as cited in each quiz's answer key.