Cutting the first episode and starting with a spotlight?

[Johan Granberg]

I have previously played one full five episode season-game and one that was cut short because of what I think was the result of a rushed pitch session. The first game was totally mega awesome, one my best roleplaying experiences ever. The second one was kind of "meh" because we couldn't really find a good balance of seriousness/humour and everything became sort of weak. Comedy in roleplaying is hard! Anyway, that's my brief PTA history. Here's my question:

Has anyone tried starting a season with a spotlight episode? And if so are there any nice tricks one can use to make this work smoothly? Due to time constraints we're going to have only four sessions to our disposal this time, but everyone seems dead set on PTA. Thus I'm thinking about just skipping the introductory episode, 'cause the way I see it it's in the spotlights that the game really shines. I do feel like I'm in need of some healthy advice though. Right now I'm thinking that the most important thing would be to establish a couple of things in the pitch, like cool stuff that happened in the first ep. Maybe let each player come up with a nice scene and then do the "Next week on..." thing before starting the session. What do you think, any ideas? Oh yeah, I know I asked if anyone had tried doing it but of course I appreciate advice even if you didn't actually try it. Come on.

[BlackSheep]

I was in a forum-based teen supers game, and that's exactly what we did.  One of the protagonists had an issue about fitting in - he was an out-of-towner and the newest member of the team - so the first scene of the game was him turning up in the middle of a mission and (thanks to a classic comics-style misunderstanding) getting into a brawl with some of his future team-mates.  The rest of the episode centred around his attempts to fix that first impression, and culminated in him getting booted off the team (but not the show).