Watch SHOWTIME’s House of Lies Pilot

As a measure of good faith, Showtime has released the pilot episode for its new half-hour comedy series, House of Lies, online for the world to get a taste of before its official premiere date of January 8. This is becoming the new big thing for networks to do when they want to draw attention to their series. Fox released the pilot for New Girl early and that show became a big hit when it finally premiered. Let’s hope House of Lies gets a similar reaction.

The episode can be viewed from various sources, including YouTube, Showtime’s website, iTunes and select On Demand channels. If you decide to wait for the episode to premiere on Jan. 8 you may want to stop reading, as I’m going to talk about the episode for a little bit. If you’re taking advantage of this opportunity to watch it, then feel free to express your feelings in the comments below.

As far as first episodes go, I can understand a lot of the issues that plague House of Lies. It falls victim to the pitfalls of “style over substance”, which is excusable as the whole point of a first episode is to wow your audience and that means an extra dose of pizzazz to win them over. Hopefully the rest of the season will tone down the quirks and focus on getting to know the characters better. A few of the main actors barely got any screen time, leaving their personalities undefined. But if these issues can be fixed, there’s plenty of potential here.