Blink was good, but mostly I hate these kinds of episodes, and I hated this one. It’s supposed to be funny or provide perspective or something. All I know is, the beloved characters I came to see are being pushed aside in favor of some nobody. And I am expected to care about their issues.
It’s also why I never watched Rozencraft and Guilderstern.
The older Sherlock Holmes series (starring Jeremy Brett) had one episode where Sherlock was mysteriously missing. Sherlock appears only very briefly at the end, and his brother Mycroft helped Watson solve the case. This was near the end, when Jeremy Brett was dying, and even in the very brief scene where he did appear he looked like death warmed over.
Reminds me of Coach on Cheers! It was so sad when he passed away! 
Robert Reed wasn’t in the last episode of Brady Bunch, for a sufficiently generous interpretation of “main character”.
One Matlock episode entitled “The P.I.” was an attempt to serve as a pilot for a detective show featuring George Peppard and Tracy Nelson. The show never materialized (Peppard died), and Andy Griffith only appears in the opening sequence for a couple minutes.
Mr. Ed had a couple of these. One I remember is Pine Lake Lodge.
Another was Moko- about an (animated) Martian that changes people’s personalities.
Not much TV is worse than an episode of Mr. Ed without Mr. Ed.
There was an episode of Quincy, M.E. in which Quincy himself did not appear, because Jack Klugman thought the script was so bad he refused to appear in it.
[QUOTE=Wikipedia]
In the episode “Has Anybody Here Seen Quincy?”, Dr. Asten talks to Quincy twice on the phone, but Quincy’s voice is not heard and he is not seen on screen. The reason Klugman did not take part in the episode is because he disliked the script written by Michael Sloan and Glen A. Larson for the episode; a body brought into the morgue turns out to still be alive. Although these cases do happen in real life, Klugman thought it laughable that a medical examiner of Quincy’s expertise would fail to notice it.
[/QUOTE]
While looking for info on this episode, I discovered that TVTropes has a page devoted to this thread’s topic: Absentee Actor.
Burn Notice had one of these. Michael & the other main characters were in the episode for like a minute or two at the beginning, and the rest of the episode was some other group of characters (IIRC) in the Louisiana bayous. I figured it was supposed to be a spinoff.
ETA: NCIS: Los Angeles had an episode featuring the “Red Squad” which was obviously supposed to be one of these “Back Door pilots.” I think the Red Squad was supposed be a roving team, with no fixed geographic local.
After Dick York finally collapsed on the set of Bewitched because of his bad back, the season finished out with Darrin phoning Sam from business trips all over the country. Pity they didn’t let the series die then and there, rather than bringing in Dick Sargent. 
Nope. And not the one where he gets targeted at his weekly haircut. 
It was just a regular case where a group of real estate swindlers were being poisoned with conus textile one by one. It was a case made for a high dosage of patented McGarrett putdowns of the baddies, but instead they all came from Danno. Made Dan look way out of character.
McGarrett was there, but he didn’t have the meat of the episode. It smelled like last minute reassignment of lines because Lord wasn’t there all week or something.
Walking Dead had a short run of episodes following the side adventure of a villain.
Magnum PI did one of those “backdoor pilots” called “Two Birds of a Feather” in which Magnum and company barely appeared.
Both Jock and Miss Ellie had prolonged absences on Dallas, followed by feeble attempts to replace them with new actors. (Barbara Bel Geddes eventually came back; Jim Davis had of course passed away long before.)
The cartoon “Adventure Time With Finn and Jake” has several episodes now without Finn and Jake. I can’t find a list, tho.
I believe the last regular run episode of Green Acres - “The Ex-Secretary” was of the “planned pilot” type (and IMDB agrees). Lisa & Oliver only appear briefly together, and later Oliver is only sporadically seen on the phone (up the pole - was bell wire really that hard to get in the 1960s).
Speaking of The Brady Bunch, they also had one of those “backdoor pilot” episodes, with Ken Berry as a friend of Mike Brady’s, who had adopted three kids of three different races. It likewise never went to series, leaving this bizarre episode where the Bradys step aside to make room for these strangers.
The weirdest moment, for me, is when one of the characters mentions Archie Bunker. A jarring reminder that despite their vast differences in style and level of naivete, The Brady Bunch and All in the Family were contemporaries for about four years.
No, but the locals were completely inept in doing things like installing telephones! (Ever wonder how the Douglases endured Midwestern winters with an entire wall missing from their bedroom? :dubious: )
Michael Richards didn’t appear in 2 episodes of Seinfeld, “The Chinese Restaurant” and “The Pen”. Jason Alexander also didn’t appear in “The Pen”. Julia Louis-Dreyfus didn’t appear in the pilot episode and “The Trip”.
I read a story somewhere that I can’t seem to find that one of them, forgot who but it was one of the guys, was really angry at the writers for not including him in an episode and sorta yelled at them and told them to never leave him out again. Does anyone know who I’m talking about?
The Dick Tracy Show was an entire series where the main character only appeared in cameos. They started out with Dick Tracy saying, “OK, Chief. I’ll get on it right away,” then calling one of his detectives, who would then go out on the case. At a certain point, the detective would say “Hold everything” (forcing everything to freeze, including bullets in flight) and call Tracy, who would have a line or two. Then, at the end of the show, Tracy would call the detective to tell him “good job.” He had less than a minute of screen time and no more than five lines per episode.
A bit of a different kind of example, but Amy Schumer is barely in the recent and very highly-regarded “12 Angry Men” episode of Inside Amy Schumer.