Reddit mentions of Writing the Pilot

The way I learned it in school was that your pilot is basically the template for every episode after it. It has to contain the characters, conflicts, themes, and fun that we're going to get from every episode of the show. Structurally, setting this kind of thing up can be difficult. I've been going back to Buffy and the X-Files recently, and Buffy actually starts with a two-parter.

The drawback to putting the inciting incident at the end of your first episode is... well, the inciting incident of your story is at the end of it. That means you're depending on the viewer to be invested in your world before they are your story.

Here's a slim, easy to read book we were assigned and that has been tremendously helpful to me since graduating. Right now I'm writing a pilot and using this a lot.