Things On TV Shows That Were Never Carried Through

I see, to recall his alcoholism being a plot point at the start of Season 3, after Sam and Diane broke up for the first time in the Season 2 finale.

Blanche had a fat daughter.

Dorothy had a grandson by a black woman.

Sophia had a suicidal best friend she promised to help overcome her depression.

Rose had a problem with prescription pain pills.

The list is ENDLESS!

Any pregnancy by a well-loved female character.

[quote]Blanche had a fat daughter. Dorothy had a grandson by a black woman. Sophia had a suicidal best friend she promised to help overcome her depression. Rose had a problem with prescription pain pills. The list is ENDLESS!

The list on this show really was endless. Didn't Dorothy get a hearing aid in one episode? (My father has a hearing aid and it's a constant source of trouble for him. He has trouble hearing in a crowded restaurant). And didn't Dorothy have chronic fatigue syndrome at one point? But that never slowed her down.

And don't get me started on them eating cheesecake late at night but never getting any fatter or having acid reflux problems.

On Little House, there was always some townsperson with a problem (drug addiction, family issues, whatever). Their problems would be solved and then the characters were never seen or heard from again.

He was a drunk & relapsed after a few seasons

Marshal Dillon's relationship with Miss Kitty. 20 seasons and they never even took it to the kissing stage.

"My husband had died suddenly six months previously and I was working at a local bank, trying to make ends meet." That little line in the first episode of The Partridge Family is the only time Mr. Partridge is mentioned in four years.

And what about Mr Partidge’s parents and siblings? Did any of them ever make an appearance?

Sam’s alcoholism was mentioned off and on throughout the series. He fell off the wagon at least once and was tempted numerous times. He didn’t need to be preaching his 12 steps every episode for it to be a significant character detail.

John Boy could never have a good night because the Walton family could hear every movement in his bed.

Daphne was supposed to be a psychic the first season of Frasier, then they just dropped it.

"Dynasty" had a bad habit of letting stories and characters just get away unlike "Dallas" which was more tightly written.

Nick Toscani knocks Blake off his horse and leaves him for dead ... and vanishes forever.

Rita and her accomplice get in a terrible car accident and are said to have survived it but never get comeuppance.

Tracey is the office ho and schemes and schemes and just vanishes after one season.

R13 and the ugly Amanda just disappears never to return in any of the reunion storylines...

What about when THESE FRIENDS OF MINE returned for Season 2 with a new title (ELLEN) and a new supporting cast! No mention of Anita or Holly nor what ever happened to them. Weird.

R7 Miss Kitty was running a whore house. Matt was savoring the flavors upstairs. Why would he want to kiss the Madam?

The Doris Day show owns this thread. Every season a different set-up.

Chuck Cunningham

Mike Douglas and his wife (My Three Sons) (also Bub, who went to Ireland and was never heard from again)

The daughter on "Family Matters"

Ross' child that was being raised by a lesbian couple on Friends.

FYI: Sam Malone was made an alcoholic because NBC was very nervous about having a show set in a bar and seeming to promote drinking. So the writers made Sam a recovering alcoholic so that the lead at least was never seen drunk.

If you stop and think about it, though, it was extremely rare that any of the "Cheers" characters were seen sloppy-drunk, though frequent reference was made to their long hours hanging out at the bar, night after night.

[quote]Ross' child that was being raised by a lesbian couple on Friends.

I never got Marcel the Monkey. Were the writers pissed off at David Schwimmer and so gave him the dopiest thing they could think of?

Marcel walked off the show and went on to greater heights in Hollywood.

Nickelodeon's 'Drake & Josh' was usually surprisingly excellent with character and plot continuities, with later episodes calling back to throwaway gags or traits mentioned in prior seasons.

There was a lot dropped from the short, shaky first couple of seasons, however. As examples off the top of my head these elements were either retconned in later seasons or cut out/forgotten altogether: Josh writing for the school newspaper; Drake playing a cherry red Strat and having a female friend as a bassist in his band (they are all boys later on); Drake not having a driver's license and continually failing his test (he is driving around legally in season three without any mention of him passing his test); Josh's penchant for videogaming and talent in billiards; 'Crazy' Steve losing his job at the theatre Josh works at (they are co-workers in season three); appearances from Josh's 'Grammy' played by Randee Heller (though she is occasionally mentioned in later episodes); Drake & Josh's juvenile criminal record from selling stolen goods unknowingly as teens (in a tv movie some five years later they are charged again as adults and given a farcical criminal trial, and no mention is made of these previous offenses); and the boys' little sister Megan keeping dangerous pet snakes in her room which terrify them ( in season three she instead has a beloved hamster named Herve and also a sheep she "bought off the Internet").

Roseanne’s job in the hair salon. They spent so much time setting up those characters and that workplace and then it was gone with a single line of dialogue.

That's because the hair salon just didn't work in that show's universe, R24. Plus, Roseanne couldn't be a shampoo girl/hair sweeper-upper forever. The Rodbell's job was much better with characters and situations.

This happened all the time on The Sopranos, but I can't remember any specific instances.

Most of these plots were created as one-offs, especially in reference to the comedies. RE: The Golden Girls: R4, no one wants endless Dorothy is deaf look at her endlessly fumble with her hearing aid jokes. That would stop the flow of the show dead in its tracks. Or the reminder of suicide every time Sophia's formerly suicidal friend enters a scene. Remember the two-parter about Dorothy's mystery illness? The laughs never stopped in those two eps because they never began. Some of these story ideas sound like the writers' own experience so they put it in the show for lack of an original story line.

It's also as if the writers/producers wanted to insert their social conscience into the show so they created these depressing eps like the time the girls ended up in the homeless shelter. Oh, the belly laughs I had during that episode. They never had any intention of following up these stories.

R25 to be fair, that was the season (2nd) where Roseanne was trying several jobs she hated (telemarketer, fast food) after quitting her long-term factory job in Season 1. Then, midway through Season 2 Jackie gets her the salon job that she ends up liking. But it was always going to be temporary. Roseanne had loftier aspirations than to sweep up hair forever. At the beginning of Season 3, she began working at Rodbell's, which was a big step up from shampoo girl.

My post was meant for R24, but I see that R25 beat me to it. Just as well.

You just noticed a post from 4 hours ago “beat you to it”?

Really?

Ralph Kramden was always trying to strike it rich on THE HONEYMOONERS. It NEVER panned out.

Diana Canova was supposed to have a scat fetish on I’m a Big Gal Now

In season 2 or 3 of Lost, Jack tells Ana Lucia that he wants to raise an army (to fight The Others, I think, it's been a while) and then nothing happens. He just abandoned the idea. I remember thinking that was weird.

When Lucy Ricardo is pregnant with Little Juanita. Only mentioned in a few episides then never again. Apparently, the episode where Lucy gets the full treatment at an abortion clinic she mistook for a beauty salon didn't go over too well.

R30 LOL! I started to type out my answer, but a friend dropped by unexpectedly so I didn't get to finish/send it until after he left. It was after I hit "Post" that I noticed others had posted in the interim.

I get that r25/r28, but it still was odd to me they developed that workplace over half a dozen episodes and then just dropped it. All the characters in the salon were given very distinct personalities, even more developed than the people at her factory job. It just always felt like they had bigger plans for that part of the show that were abandoned between seasons. I even wondered if they planned to spin off the salon off into its own show, obviously not with Roseanne as a regular but the potential for the Roseanne characters to pop in from time to time.

I’m not saying they weren’t wise to go with the mall cafe job instead since that gave her a great adversary in Martin Mull to play against. And one waitress coworker was cheaper than the three or four salon regulars. My suspicion is that whoever came up with the salon idea was fired by Roseanne and she demanded any of their ideas go with them.

[quote]I even wondered if they planned to spin off the salon off into its own show, obviously not with Roseanne as a regular but the potential for the Roseanne characters to pop in from time to time.

THE NANNY did that with the "Chatterbox" episode starring Patrick Cassidy and Tracy Nelson. The episode served as a pilot but wasn't picked up.

Yes usually those backdoor pilots are only a single episode so the salon stuff doesn’t fit in that regard. I guess I’m overthinking it. They tried something and it didn’t work so they tried something else. To be fair the salon characters always felt more stock sitcom-y than Roseanne usually featured so maybe that’s why those episodes stick out for me.

On Leave It To Beaver, Ward and June got Beaver a puppy at the end of one episode. It was never mentioned again.

On Andy Griffith, Andy is involved with lady druggist Ellie Walker for almost the whole first season, but she disappears and is never mentioned again.

[quote]The Doris Day show owns this thread. Every season a different set-up.

Yes! Definitely the worst for not carrying through.

Despite that, the first seasons did follow a logical progression. From living on the farm (Season 1), to getting a job and commuting to the city (Season 2), to finding an apartment in the city (Season 3), the changes made sense.

Season 4 was the WTF point where Doris's father, kids, dog, landlords, former coworkers - pretty much every last shred of familiarity - vanished with no explanation.

I really admired Doris Day, but what a drippy TV series.

In the second episode of Seinfeld, Kramer had a dog that was never seen or mentioned again.

The youngest daughter on Family Matters

What happened to the former spouses of Mike and Carol Brady?

[quote] Chuck Cunningham

We don't mention that name in this house any more.

We'd be here for 6 months if I talked about all of the things Teen Wolf dropped. So I'll just state the obvious, which would be the inconsistent characterization.

R37, that episode was horrible.

R43, I believe they were both widowed. I don't think they would have two divorced characters as the leads in a late 60s early 70s family sitcom.

One word: Coco.

Now that I think of it, there was Lucy and Uncle Ray's incestuous affair on Dallas. They changed course on that one really fast.

R12 really? I thought that got brought up in the later seasons because no one (especially Niles) believed her.

The youngest Barkley boy on Big Valley.

On Young & Restless, John Abbott and Mamie, the housekeeper (a black woman), had an affair. Then poof! Mamie was gone, never to be mentioned again.

Buzz and Sonya, the children of Vint, on Mama's Family. Vanished.

On the subject of Roseanne's hair salon, weren't those characters and episodes written by Tom Arnold? It's been a long while since I watched the show, but that's what I recall. Also, iIrc, those episodes were around the same time Roseanne and Tom's marriage was ending. Could be a factor?

[quote] I believe they were both widowed. I don't think they would have two divorced characters as the leads in a late 60s early 70s family sitcom.

In the pilot, Mike says very clearly he's a recent widower. They never explained what happened to Carol's husband. When they were planning the show, they intended to have Mike be a widower and have Carol be a divorcée, but then they realized it would complicate things too much (people would be wondering why he never came by to visit the girls, and wouldn't see Mike as a full father to the girls), so they decided never to make it clear what happened to the girls' father. Basically by the 2nd season they seem to forget that Mike is not the girkls' biological father and that Carol is not the boy's biological mother anyway.

Suzanne Sugarbaker got profoundly obese, but they just replaced her with Julia Duffy rather than deal with Suzanne’s inevitable descent into hypertension and diabetes.

R52, I didn't forget. Ever.

Shuttup Bobby, It's not about you. it's about me and my problems.

Jan Brady wearing glasses (there was an episode about it) then, in later episodes, not wearing glasses.

The Staten Island Ferry episode of I Love Lucy, where Ethel has just obtained yet another botched abortion. The doctor clearly commits her to five weeks of bed rest, but there she is only a day or two later commandeering the ferry into the open ocean, whipped up by prolonged gale conditions, in order to help Fred and Lucy get their sea legs.

[quote]Basically by the 2nd season they seem to forget that Mike is not the girkls' biological father and that Carol is not the boy's biological mother anyway.

Near the end of season two, Carol writes an article and Mike mentions a "second marriage." In the backdoor pilot "Kelly Kids" the neighbor says "In a way you adopted three boys and you adopted three girls." (Which is vague and could allow some weird conclusions).

[quote]Buzz and Sonya, the children of Vint, on Mama's Family. Vanished

They mention that on the first episode of the syndicated series, Mama says "No Buzz and Sonia" clearly saying they aren't around but that's all. The syndicated series also gives Naomi a lot more ex husbands.

[quote]On Leave It To Beaver, Ward and June got Beaver a puppy at the end of one episode. It was never mentioned again

While never specifically address, there are at least two episodes where the boys want a pet and Ward says "we had a dog but you boys didn't take care of it, so we had to give it away."

[quote]Mike Douglas and his wife (My Three Sons) (also Bub, who went to Ireland and was never heard from again)

It was mentioned a few times by Steve that "Mike was back 'East'," when his Bryant Park friends came to LA and when Robbie took Katie back for a visit. And Bub was mentioned in passing as going back to Ireland and Uncle Charley would reference his brother but not much. It was assumed Bub was living back there.

[quote]Didn't Dorothy get a hearing aid in one episode?

And Dorothy says "I'm wearing it right now and you can't even tell." So we are to assume she was wearing it. Not all hearing aids give people trouble.

On The Apprentice, Donald Trump was supposed to be a successful business mogul. They were never able to bring that nonsense to bear.

While we're on the topic of The Brady Bunch...

Didn't they deal with Carol's ex husband in the second Brady Bunch movie?

[quote]On the subject of Roseanne's hair salon, weren't those characters and episodes written by Tom Arnold? It's been a long while since I watched the show, but that's what I recall. Also, iIrc, those episodes were around the same time Roseanne and Tom's marriage was ending. Could be a factor?

Huh?

Roseanne worked in the hair salon in Season 2. She married Arnold around Season 4 and didn't divorce him until around Season 7.

R62 actually, Roseanne married Tom Arnold in the middle of Season 2 (1989-1990), just a few days after divorcing her first husband of 15 years! She and Arnold split up toward the end of Season 6 (1993-1994). This was after they introduced a third person (a young female assistant) into their marriage the previous year. Remember that publicity stunt 'wedding'?

Re characters in recovery, I sometimes think TV writers are too quick to go for relapse stories when they don't know what else to do with a character. Like Trish on Jessica Jones; after the first season her arc felt increasingly forced and moved her away from what made her interesting to me.

Sorry, bit of a tangent.

What's with the bizarre I Love Lucy/abortion troll?

Thank you, R65.

Back when "Dallas" aired and repeats of serial shows were infrequent in syndication, the writers hoped that people would just forget about the Lucy and Ray affair in the first season. Ray wasn't revealed to be a relative until the third season, I believe. Now that "Dallas" was released on DVD and we have the internet, we can all say, "iiiieeewwww" together.

Daphne remained psychic throughout Frasier, R12. Example: Just before she was due to marry Donny she had a dream about her true love (whose face she couldn't see) with a dragon, and we learned later in the episode that the gift Roz had given Niles, which he didn't unwrap till the end, was a dragon statuette.

Was Fallon in the spaceship ever satisfactorily wrapped up?

And what would "satisfactorily" look like in that situation, R69?

Downton Abbey:

Why did we never hear about or meet Branson's mother from Ireland? She was the one who thought he and Sybil "foolish" to marry. Sybil lived with her in Ireland while the "banns" were read.

Did Richard Carlisle ever publish Mary's scandalous story after she broke up with him and ended up not only not going to America but marrying Matthew?

How could annoying Miss Bunting the school teacher afford her own car? (Branson stopped to help her roadside when she was having car trouble).

Did The Brady Bunch ever explain what happened to the girls' pet cat Fluffy?

[quote]All the characters in the salon were given very distinct personalities, even more developed than the people at her factory job. It just always felt like they had bigger plans for that part of the show that were abandoned between seasons.

Remember the Asian woman? She was always making very dark jokes. I always thought that Roseanne must have seen this woman do standup and brought her on the show. Then got tired of her and just chucked the whole salon idea to get rid of the Asian comic.

[quote]Chuck Cunningham We don't mention that name in this house any more. —Marian Cunningham, icily

Was Chuck gay, Marian? Is that why he was sent away?

There’s no such thing as gay, r74. We’ve never heard of any such thing.

R73 wow, your mind immediately goes to racism? There were other white people in the salon that were also let go.

R73, that actress also had a supporting role in She-Devil so I assume she and Roseanne were friends. If Tom Arnold married Roseanne during that season and was elevated to producer or whatever his title was starting in season 3 he may very well have been the one to kill the salon storyline. He may be a tool but the show was at its peak while he was working on it. Not saying he deserves all the credit but once he left and Roseanne was left with no one to rein her in the series really jumped the shark. Everyone cites the final season as the JTS moment but it had been on the decline for much longer than that.

Adam finally being shown to have power in "Bewitched." It was in an episode that aired in the last season, so they never had a chance to revisit it.

Mel Sharples never again mentioned his cousin Telly

Mary Richards's two new neighbors (played by Mary Kay Place and Penny Marshall) when she moved to the post-Rhoda apartment building.

On The Big Bang Theory Leonard had a relationship with a character played by Sara Rue that lasted a few episodes, but they broke up with no explanation given (and no mention of her afterwards).

Downton Abbey also had bad follow throughs for other stories. The sexy Turk who died in Mary's bed. They could have milked that and had Thomas a s a suspect (which I thought they would do) but no, he just ... died. Too much of a plot contrivance just so Edith could have something to hold against Mary.

The death of Mr. Bates' ex-wife had another poor follow through. "All's well, and good! She just poisoned herself!"

The first season of Mom was all about the kids and the restaurant where French Stewart was the chef. They’re pretty much history now, though the daughter reappeared at one point.

How about the guy who wanted to rape Natalie on "the Facts of Life"? He never came back to finish the job

[quote]Adam finally being shown to have power in "Bewitched." It was in an episode that aired in the last season, so they never had a chance to revisit it.

When they did the Tabitha reboot, Adam had no powers at all.

[quote][R73] wow, your mind immediately goes to racism? There were other white people in the salon that were also let go.

r76, I truly didn't mean to sound racist. She is the only character for me that stood out in the salon. I honestly don't remember the others. It just seemed like the salon was there to showcase her dark humor.

But then they did the same with the loose meat restaurant. Finally, the Connors were successful and then they ruined it.

What about the brother who went upstairs and never came back down?? Richie Cunningham’s?

That’s my absolute favorite!

[quote]Basically by the 2nd season they seem to forget that Mike is not the girkls' biological father and that Carol is not the boy's biological mother anyway.

That created a blooper in a later episode. Carol is worried about something one of the boys did and says, "I was worried when you got your first bicycle." By the start of the show, all the boys were old enough to already have had a bike which Carol wouldn't have been around to know about.

[quote]Did The Brady Bunch ever explain what happened to the girls' pet cat Fluffy?

Where do you think the movie Fatal Attraction got the idea of the pet rabbit in the boiling water? I boiled the family pet years before. The difference is that I served it up to them in the form of my special dish Chicken Chow Mein. I didn't want to do it, but Sam and I were having a fight that week and I didn't get my regular slab of meat. You think Mike Brady brought home enough money to put meat on the table for 9 people? No way. I had to service Sam to get it, and in a sub-zero meat locker, it's hard to get a man up.

As a means of actually following through, at least in the episode on AIDS in "Designing Women," the episode ended with his funeral. They didn't just introduce a guy with AIDS and never see him again like so many shows did, there was closure, as sad as it was.

The funny thing is, I didn't die of AIDS, I just slipped and fell down the basement stairs.

WW R91!

[quote]By the start of the show, all the boys were old enough to already have had a bike which Carol wouldn't have been around to know about.

But their lives together didn’t begin when the show began. I assume they were dating prior to their marriage and Bobby would’ve been young enough to get his first bike.

There was one particularly poignant episode of Cheers showing Sam struggling with sobriety. He loans his good luck charm that he held onto as a reminder of his commitment to not drink to a friend, who promptly loses it. It was the cap from the last bottle of beer Sam had ever drunk and he had held it in his pocket always, sometimes gripping it hard enough to leave ridges in his hand when he wanted a drink. After feeling like he couldn't stay sober, Sam and Diane are alone in the bar when he takes a bottle of beer, removes the cap, and then leaves the bottle untouched.

On Seinfeld, Geoege talks about his brother; Elaine talks to her sister on the phone about her nephew seeing Elaine's (aka "Nip") infamous Christmas card photo. For the remainder of the show, it seemed like the 4 main characters were only children.

On One Day at a Time there was an episode where during Ann's 35th birthday she winds up with a case of IBS and winds up in the bathroom the entire show. They never mentioned her IBS again...

[quote]The funny thing is, I didn't die of AIDS, I just slipped and fell down the basement stairs.

But then he went on to become PRESIDENT! And my LOVER!

[quote]Rita and her accomplice get in a terrible car accident and are said to have survived it but never get comeuppance.

That plotline was supposed to last even longer (if you can imagine!), but viewer reaction was so bad that they had to get those characters (Rita and George Hamilton) off-screen, fast. Simultaneously, Alexis' story in which she wanted to be Queen of Moldavia was also airing, and that was also universally hated. Aaron Spelling had to waste a lot of money rewriting scripts and canning already shot footage just to put an immediate end to both of those storylines.

Here's a photo of Alexis being crowned Queen of Moldavia, which never aired.

[quote] Downton Abbey also had bad follow throughs for other stories.

That reminds me of Edith's publisher boyfriend who is the biological father of her daughter. He disappeared under mysterious circumstances in pre-Nazi Munich. I thought that they started an intriguing political plot. But it was a non-starter. He was just gone and that was it. Not even sure they resolved his disappearance in a throw away line. Did they?

There was an episode of Seinfeld where Jerry and Elaine go to her sister's house for dinner. Her sister served mutton which neither of them would eat.

That was her cousin, r100.

Jerry has the last laugh though, he stole Grandma Mema’s napkins.

On both "Three's Company" and "The Golden Girls" the roommates get pets which are never seen or heard from after that episode.

R103, we say Cindy several times until they wrote her out in the following season.

Lol, r104!

In True Blood- Dane DeHaan played a were-panther or tiger or something, or just a homeless kid. Can't remember. But Jason Stackhouse visited him for two or three episodes, then the character just disappeared. I think they realized that storyline sucked and abandoned it.

[quote] He [Tom Arnold] may be a tool but the show was at its peak while he was working on it.

Yes, I agree. Those were peak times on the Roseanne Show, with Tom Arnold. I especially liked his chemistry with his "girlfriend," Sandra Bernhardt.

One really dumb and unbelievable plot in Downton Abbey was Edith writing a non-anonymous letter to the Turkish Ambassador exposing Mary. Somehow, the parents (Lord & Lady Grantham) were never that curious about how Mary's secret got disseminated. The plot just dissolved. Those 2, Mary & Edith, should have come to blows over that.

Jason Stackhouse was delicious

This is going waaaaaay back to the early 1950s. There was an insipid sitcom called [italic]Ethel and Albert,[/italic] starring Peg Lynch and Alan Bunce. It was one of the most forgettable, throw-away programs ever. I was a very little boy at the time, but when you're a little kid in the early days of TV you'll watch anything.

Okay. There was one episode in which Ethel was asked if the couple had any children, to which Ethel replies, "we had a daughter, Susie…(pause)…but we lost her." There was no reference to "Susie" before or since, and I always wondered what the hell that was all about. Why would you mention a dead child, who had nothing to do with the plot, in a sitcom?

I think Downton deserves more mention here. It's really not a good show. there were plot lines that dragged on and on with no satisfactory conclusion. O'Brien's departure... Bates' dead wife (Christ that was endless)... Edith's departed lover/father of her child (even more endless)... the mysterious Crawley during the WWI period...

How does Julian Fellowes get work after that mess?

R111 not to mention the whole mess with Baxter and the man who made her rob her former lady of the house, which is built up to this huge crescendo and then....nothing. Charges are dropped and you never even see the handsome man who led Baxter into crime. Either it's bad writing or they couldn't cast the person they wanted for the role but either way....dumb.

I would have remembered a Mima

Also, Downton had Ed Speelers and yet never had him spunking down any of the other male character's throats....

A big one was The Danny Thomas Show aka Make Room for Daddy.

Danny was married to Margaret Jean Hagen) and they had two kids. When the show started it's 5th season, Margaret had died. That whole year had Danny dating a bevy of women. He seemed to take a liking to Kathy, played by Marjorie Lord, and he proposed. Kathy has a little girl, and season 6 opens with Danny and Kathy returning from their honeymoon.

But, over time, the show was retconned. The events of the first six seasons seem to never have existed. Suddenly, Kathy was the kids mother all along, and all three kids were Danny and Kathy biological children.

I remember watching it in syndication when I was a kid. The syndication package omitted the first five seasons, so I never knew about Jean Hagen having been on the show till much later.

Friday Night Lights had few things that were dropped. In season 2, Buddy took in a kid named Santiago whose family had been deported. The next season Santiago was gone. In season 3, one of the assistant coaches at East Dillon High was spotted at a gay bar by Taylor's daughter. The show never revisited that minor storyline.

[italic]Family Matters[/italic] never explained why Carl Winslow never had Urkel arrested for stalking his daughter.

Margaux’s family going broke and getting rich again on [italic]Punky Brewster[/italic] was worth at least a two-parter, considering the title character’s introduction was worth a three-episode story arc and her adoption by Henry was worth a five-episode one.

R88 has proved conclusively what many of us suspected: that that floozy Carol was banging Mike before their spouses were even dead.

So, I was a cynical 7 year-old.

R106 was this after he was tied up and raped??

R106 was he that character that wanders naked into some cougar’s house and she takes advantage of him? Or am I having a false memory? Lmfao

[quote]Buddy took in a kid named Santiago whose family had been deported. The next season Santiago was gone.

ICE came for him, too.

[quote]When they did the Tabitha reboot, Adam had no powers at all.

Both kids were also adults instead of being pre-teens.

[quote]This is going waaaaaay back to the early 1950s. There was an insipid sitcom called Ethel and Albert, starring Peg Lynch and Alan Bunce. It was one of the most forgettable, throw-away programs ever. I was a very little boy at the time, but when you're a little kid in the early days of TV you'll watch anything.

That show began as a radio program; Peg Lynch created it and wrote the scripts. Richard Widmark played Albert for a time in 1944. There was a follow-up radio program in the late '50s called "The Couple Next Door." They play it frequently on the SiriusXM Radio Classics channel. I agree with you that the show is the ultimate "show about nothing" (although I've never seen the TV version.) Not a comedy, not a soap, not a drama ... I don't know how to characterize it.

I have never understood the love for Downton Abbey because the incredibly ridiculous plotting destroys any credibility it has as a quality drama series. To add to the example cited above, Edith's letter to the Turkish ambassador would have exposed the entire family to scandal and disgrace, so Edith herself would have been tainted by association. For someone with limited prospects such as herself, this would have doomed her to spinsterhood.

Fellowes wrote a novel called "Snobs" that was a primer on the complicated relationships and codes of behavior that exist amongst the upper class. He understands it yet still felt the need to present DA as the ultimate arbiter of manners and proper behavior when it was definitely not.

Downton Abbey was a well-written feature length film or tv movie that was drawn out into a seven series tv show. The first two episodes of the first series were great, after that it turned into a soap opera and not a well-written one at that. With that said, I watched it in its entirety because I thought the interiors of the house were nice.

[quote]I have never understood the love for Downton Abbey because the incredibly ridiculous plotting destroys any credibility it has as a quality drama series.

Now you know why Angela Lansbury turned it down, and it was not just for fear of upstaging Maggie Smith.

[quote]one of the assistant coaches at East Dillon High was spotted at a gay bar by Taylor's daughter. The show never revisited that minor storyline.

Actually, I loved how they let that go. When I saw it I thought "Oh fuck, here. we go wth a very special episode about that coach dealing with his homosexuality," but just ignoring it like it was no big deal was pretty evolved.

[quote] Downton Abbey was a well-written feature length film or tv movie that was drawn out into a seven series tv show. The first two episodes of the first series were great, after that it turned into a soap opera and not a well-written one at that. With that said, I watched it in its entirety because I thought the interiors of the house were nice.

I think it had a little bit more in it - maybe two seasons worth of solid story in the first three years.

But the entire final 3 seasons were all treading water until the final scenes - and the long awaited Mary and Edith confrontation. (Although I **LIVED** for Edith calling Hairy Mary a bitch.)

she got your number, hussy

However, usually, Edith was either crying or whimpering.

Vera kept on saying she was going to put away the straws but every week she kept right on throwing them.

R124 I think Peg Lynch died recently, didn't she? I remember reading about the show in her obit,.

Hyacinth Bucket's mansion attic apartment with the compact kitchenette?

Dorothy Kilgallen never admitted her mask had holes in it.

The Pussy Cat Song

[quote] I never got Marcel the Monkey. Were the writers pissed off at David Schwimmer and so gave him the dopiest thing they could think of?

There are many sitcoms that have the original idea to have characters with pets, but as with "The Brady Bunch" and "The Partridge Family," it starts off as a good idea and then the whole thing about wrangling the pet becomes much more trouble than its worth. usually they just drop the pet altogether without explaining what happened to it.

Marcel the money was especially a problem. It kept shitting all over the place offstage, and though they got a diaper for it it didn't wear one onstage--and kept shitting there too. Worse, it started biting the actors. I've heard they got together and demanded it be taken off the show. the writers at least wrote an explanation for its disappearance (in the show's first season, Marcel was "discovered" as a monkey for the movies, and was used in a disaster film about the Ebola virus).

[quote]much more trouble than its worth.

Oh, dear!

oops wrong thread

On "The Golden Girls" Dorothy's twenty-something ne'er do well musician son falls in love with and wants to marry a forty something black woman. Both Dorothy and the woman's family are up in arms about the incongruity of the relationship and are totally against it. Then the woman announces that she's pregnant. And Dorothy and the woman's family do an abrupt about face, totally accepting the relationship because they want "to see the baby." But if I recall correctly the woman was never seen again, and Dorothy never "saw" the baby, either. I vaguely recall it being mentioned that the woman had left her son (with baby in tow, I suppose) but the storyline of Dorothy's son and his middle aged African American wife and their bi-racial baby (was it a boy or girl?) was never mentioned again.

r22 Marcel can be seen in the upcoming Ryan Murphy series "Nurse Ratched". All I can tell you is he plays a monkey.

On "The Jeffersons" the Willis family had an African American looking daughter Jenny and a white son that George Jefferson called "the zebra that lost his stripes." He was on one episode of the show where he and Jenny clash because she resents him for looking white. Of course they make up at the end of the episode. But did the son ever appear again? Or was he just a one time thing? Seems odd that that Tom and HElen Willis would have a son who never appeared again.

R142 yeah that was weird. Jenny was an African-American actress. The guy who played her brother was a white guy. It doesn't work that way.

[quote]usually they just drop the pet altogether without explaining what happened to it.

See also: the chick and the duck

The character of Allan Willis, the white Willis son, came back for a few more episodes but was played by different actor. So I guess they did follow up on the character somewhat.

Akalaitis' gambling problem on Nurse Jackie. Built up for two episodes then never referenced again.

Reba has a bunch of little careers like a school teacher but they were always dropped quickly till at the end she and Van went into real estate.

On Roseanne, I think they dropped the Hair Salon because all those ladies were getting a lot of great lines that normally would go to Roseanne. She was too often the straight person to their funny lies. Roseanne don't play that.

On Melrose, after Matt was gay bashed, he decided that he was going to take action (I remember Jake and him high fiving on it). We never know what he did or how it was resolved. Not a word.

The Sam Malone thing - it was the basis of the whole show and character - a former drunk baseball star buys a bar...

Not to drag in soaps - but OLTL - Blair was half asian, it was a huge plot point. When she was recast she was Kassie Depavia who was as far from asian as could be.

[quote]The Sam Malone thing - it was the basis of the whole show and character - a former drunk baseball star buys a bar...

Um, ok. And...?

I thought someone else (Sam's business manager perhaps?) bought Sam the bar to keep him from drinking away all his money.

In one episode, Big is seen at Belmont putting $200 on Carrie to win, but we don’t see the race or even learn the outcome. Bummer.

[quote]The character of Allan Willis, the white Willis son, came back for a few more episodes but was played by different actor. So I guess they did follow up on the character somewhat.

Except they recast him with Jay Hammer who looked more like he was part Native American than part black.

I think Sam's "business manager" was the Coach, R153, so that's doubtful.

Pretty sure he did buy the bar himself. Anyway, it's quite true that there were numerous storylines throughout the series where his alcoholism was relevant.

Not exactly what OP asked for but the first two seasons of The Good Wife, Dallas Roberts had a prominent recurring role as Alicia's gay brother. They didn't write him off but he basically disappeared until late in the the final season when he got one or two brief appearances, like several of the recurring actors who had appeared over the course of the show but also kind of vanished.

But not me. I didn't get a final season cameo. I won an Emmy for The Good Wife a year before Juliana did and she just wasn't having that.

[quote]she got your number, hussy

Just as a side note:

R130's clip shows why Julian Fellowes was such a poor writer. The actress nails the first line "I know you as a nasty, scheming bitch." And it shocks the audience to hear Edith say that. We don't expect her character to be that way. And that is enough.

But Fellowes had to have her say it again and not even Maggie Smith could have pulled off that second "You're a bitch." It's overkill.

The closeted gay cop on The Shield. They didn't know what to do with that plotline.

Why do we never find out what movie Ricky stars in after Don Juan is shelved?

Kristen's bizarre death on "Dallas." Were we just supposed to believe she came to Southfork, confronted JR and then fell off the balcony into the pool and drowned while JR was there? Or was JR there? I don't think the writers could even come up with a satisfying explanation and just used "she fell" to clear it up.

It was about as satisfying as the "Mr. Bates' wife cooked a poison pie and ate it to kill herself" solution on "Downton."

r161, that's a good observation. That's what they do on soap operas all the time. If an actor wants to leave the show they just kill that character off and don't look back.

I remember watching the British soap EastEnders. They killed off Den Watts and then years later wanted to bring him back. They spent an entire episode just having him explain to his daughter why she thought she saw his body go into the ground at his funeral. "Sharon, you saw *a* body go into the ground but it wasn't *my* body." What? She was so overcome with grief that she saw the wrong body go into the ground? It was the most mixed up episode I ever saw of anything.

Yeah, the Kristin thing on Dallas was dumb. She was gone for almost an entire season, the came back to extort money from several gentlemen, then died in the pool. At the beginning of the next season it was established that she may or not have been a coke head, all of a sudden out of control falling down a balcony. There was no built up and no lasting repercussion whatsoever. I think that cliffhanger was wrapped up after two episodes. Pretty lame.

I think they were trying to catch the lightning in a bottle that was “Who shot JR?” and failed.

When Chief Kanisky died on [italic]Gimme A Break![/italic], they never gave a specific cause of death, although anyone who watched up to that point could make an educated guess. They never even said who the new chief of police was, and even Officer Simpson’s subsequent appearances seemed to be for no reason other than “just because” and he was dropped after the move to New York.

R163 It wasn’t wrapped up in a couple of episodes, it was wrapped up in the first half of that episode.

Didn’t they film all the female characters (at the time) floating in the swimming pool? It was the cliffhanger that followed the ‘who shot JR season’ so they were trying to gain the same publicity.

But the whole thing was confusing, I thought she was supposed to have been on MDMA and fell through the balcony and drowned. But it was left ambiguous because it was to be assumed JR witnessed her fall and did nothing.

What about Mary Jo on Designing Women deciding to have a baby and even going to a sperm bank to lose the child early on. Then nothing more is mentioned of her wanting a baby.

Annie Potts was furious because she was pregnant in real life and she had told Linda Bloodworth-Thomason during season 5 she wanted another baby. Bloodworth-Thomason had promised her any pregnancy would be written in for the character, then when Potts did fall pregnant, she was told it wouldn’t be written in because Murphy Brown was also pregnant as were some other sit-com characters at the time. Therefore, it would be too much for Designing Women to also have a pregnancy plot.

After Delta Burke and Jean Smart left, Potts had signed on for two more seasons, but told the network she would not be returning if there was a season 8. Even though the ratings were poor to justify cancelling, the show would never have gone to an 8th season as the network wouldn’t continue with yet another major cast change.

[quote]There was no built up and no lasting repercussion whatsoever.

Ahem.

Well, r168, that was another thing. Nobody asked about the baby's whereabouts when Kristin died. You would think that J.R. would look for his presumed son. Or Sue Ellen would look for the orphaned nephew. Or mother Shepherd? Nobody even bothered to think about the baby.

That’s because they were more concerned with finding Jock Ewing - they didn’t - and Pam’s sanity over being unable to carry a child to term.

The baby’s daddy, Jeff Farraday, finally resurfaced around 1988. J.R. found him to blackmail Bobby. When he found out about it, Bobby responded by strangling J.R. and trying to drown him in the pool.

Oh, and the drug Kristin was on was PCP.

R167 I'd never heard any of that. Interesting.

I could see CBS not wanting to have Mary Jo play out a pregnancy story. More than anything, I think it was the fact that the character of Charlene had just spent most of a season being pregnant and giving birth, so it made sense to not want to have so similar a story so close.

Well, I'll be damned. Here it is.

(And I thought I knew all re: DW)

R173 I’m not currently in US, so for some reason I cannot read that article. But Yep, Potts was pregnant throughout season 6 and had to miss the last few episodes of that season when she had her second son.

But Annie Potts apparently felt really let down by the Thomasons who’d promised long before, her pregnancy would be written into the show. I think she was likely more angry they’d made a promise to her during a turbulent time on set, effectively to keep her on side and get her to sign on for several more seasons, when she knew she wanted another baby and may have left at season 5.

The whole ‘Delta Burke Was Fired’ line was stirred up more by the Thomasons as the four actresses 5 year option contracts were finishing by season 5 and all the women could renegotiate or leave the series. Delta Burke and Gerald McCraney were making noises about the way Harry Thomason was behaving and the McCraney’s knew Roseanne and Tom Arnold had just successfully got the network to remove the creators and producers from their show. The Thomasons were long ahead of the game and convinced Hal Holbrook to sign onto their other show Evening Shade. He didn’t want the gig, but said the money was too good to turn down. But this caused he and his wife Dixie Carter to both be employed by The Thomasons. Therefore Dixie and Hal would not side with Delta when she tried to fight the women’s corner. Delta then made the choice to be interviewed by Barbara Walters and say she wasn’t happy with the way the Thomasons were behaving. Burke knew if she got the three other women on side the network would remove the Thomasons. Both Annie Potts and Jean Smart would have walked away. But the Thomasons promised Annie the baby storyline and convinced her to sign on for more seasons. Jean Smart wanted out and wouldn’t renew. Then towards the end of season 5 the Thomasons waited for Delta to be offset and told the cast they had to vote on whether Delta’s contract was renewed by the network and she stayed, but they would leave or she go and they stay. So how else could Potts and Carter vote? They didn’t renew Delta’s contract for season 6. But it was made out she was fired.

Annie Potts falls pregnant early in season 6 (as expected) and the producers tell her they won’t write it in. So she’s been duped. Potts was always quite vocal about how she disliked the direction the show went in after Delta and Jean left. She felt imposing replacement poorly constructed characters on the audience was insulting. Ironically, Season 6 ratings were actually the best the series had, it would have easily retained its top Monday night slot. But CBS had to deal with Duffy being replaced by another actress and knew Annie Potts wouldn’t do an eighth season. Therefore, in season 7 they moved the show into the Friday night death slot to kill it off. The cast changes had become an embarrassment and the quality of the show nose dived.

R165 You are correct, they never actually give a cause of death.

However, in the first episode without him, when everyone is still mourning, I recall Nell going though his things, and angrily coming across his gun, and the metal box he kept his gun in, and her saying "damnit." I for sure got the idea he was killed in the line of duty. But you are correct, it was never stated outright.

R147 Actually, I think that was great. Many divorced women, who have never had a career, follow similar paths. Reba, had spent years as a homemaker, with her only outside work being in her husband's dental practice. It makes sense that she would have many different jobs before finding one that worked.

DId they ever do anything with the transexual plot line on Ally McBeal or just move past it?