Dilbert's Bizarre Live-Action TV Pilot Is Impossible To Watch Today

For decades, "Dilbert" was one of the most popular comic strips in the United States. Created by Scott Adams, who died of pancreatic cancer today (January 13, 2026) at the age of 68, it was a light-hearted workplace satire that captured the absurdities and annoyances of a dull office job. To anyone who'd ever dealt with micromanaging bosses who issue memos on the daily packed with mind-numbing corporate-speak, the appeal of "Dilbert" was obvious. For a while, it was wholly obnoxious and occasionally amusing.

In the late 1990s, at the peak of the franchise's popularity, when you could find "Dilbert" strips pinned to office bulletin boards or taped to water coolers, Fox ordered a pilot for a live-action sitcom adaptation (hoping, no doubt, for a strip-to-TV success like ABC's "The Addams Family"). Adams wrote and directed the pilot, while the network got him to cast an actor who could've "played a (romantic) leading man" as Dilbert himself (as Adams told the Chicago Tribute) ... which is not what the character looks like in the strip. Meanwhile, Dilbert's four-legged consultant Dogbert was brought to life by an animatronic.

None of this sounds promising, so it's hardly a surprise that the pilot was never picked up (though the UPN had more luck with its "Dilbert" animated series, which ran for 30 episodes from 1999-2000). And while failed pilots are occasionally aired or leaked like Ben Stiller's magnificent "Heat Vision and Jack," this live-action "Dilbert" adaptation has remained firmly under lock and key. You can't find it anywhere online, and there's no real demand for it now, save for the desire of some to relentlessly mock its probable awfulness. 

But why is the "Dilbert" pilot ripe for hate watching? Well, because Adams personally held hateful views and wasn't shy about sharing them.

By the early 2000s, Adams was an outspoken political conservative, which was no big deal until he wrote a blog post in 2003 that questioned the Holocaust death toll. Though he was rebuked for this, he was anything but chastened. In 2011, he compared women to children and mentally disabled people. Then, in 2016, he vociferously supported Donald J. Trump for U.S. President, even after the candidate's "grab them by the p****" comment was leaked. He was also, unsurprisingly, an anti-vaxxer during the Covid pandemic. And he eventually worked his views into the "Dilbert" comic strip, including one that found workers' performance reviews being replaced by "wokeness scores." 

"Dilbert" remained syndicated in national newspapers until 2023, which is when Adams, reacting to a Rasmussen poll that found only a slight majority of Black Americans agreed with the saying "It's okay to be white," called Black Americans a "hate group." He subsequently urged white people to "get the hell away" from them. In response, Andrews McMeel Syndication dropped the strip, forcing Adams to publish "Dilbert" as a webcomic on his own website.

So, don't expect anyone to honor Adams' blemished memory by releasing the unaired "Dilbert" pilot, and you can probably consider that proposed live-action "Dilbert" movie dead as well (though all two seasons of the animated series are available to buy on Prime Video). If you're morbidly curious to get a sense of just how bad the pilot was, you can see the Dogbert animatronic on an episode of PBS' "Nightmare Theatre."