Didnt Seaquest have some strange thing happen? Can’t remember it at the moment.
They got rid of most of the cast that was over 30 and replaced them with younger people.
Season 2 ended with the seaQuest being destroyed on an alien planet. Season 3 began with the entire crew waking up in random locations back on Earth 10 years later and the seaQuest was found in a corn field in Kansas.
Re: the Trek reboot, which I hated in almost every way..
Kirk being Uhura’s Academy classmate didn’t bother me. They were clearly about the same age in TOS. Even in the original series he was a young captain – early 30s. Just not RIDICULOUSLY young.
Shore leave in Hong Kong will fuck you up!
Yep, thats weird enough to peg my wierdometer.
Good one.
And of course the last season of Roseanne.
The Star Trek TNG films went a little out of their way to reunite the old cast too, particularly the random appearances of Worf, who was by that time supposed to be Federation Ambassador to the Klingon Empire.
Generations: Worf is still part of the bridge crew. Heads to DS9 shortly after.
First Contact: Worf commands the Defiant (which is home-based at DEEP Space Nine, approximately three city blocks and two left turns from Earth), gets his chestnuts pulled out of the fire by the Ent-E. Okay, fine… but then he just takes the post on the Ent-E bridge like he never left. I can understand Picard wanting to use Worf’s skills but they didn’t even try to explain how he gets to just take someone else’s job. They could have done it easily too. Have the Tactical/head of security redshirt be the first one to investigate the strange goings-on and have him be the first to be eaten by the Borg. Instant job opening and not all that contrived!
Insurrection: “Hey Worf, what are you doing here?!” (He’s supposed to be at DS9) “I was at the Contrivance Colony helping them install Contrivance generators. They seem to be working!”
Nemesis: Worf is there for the wedding. But Worf has also apparently given up his post as Ambassador and is back to being Tactical. He must have dirty pictures of the Admiral in charge of personnel or something. He resigns from Starfleet whenever he has a duel to settle or when he gets bored and wants to hang out at a monastery or…
What? Just cause he went all ‘Shoot the Moon’ on Cuddy?! Broads will do that to ya. I thought him smugly hobbling away & whistling a happy tune afterwards was ole’ Dr Greg at his finest! Fuck you, fuck the world, me me ME!!! I’m still anticipating the new season *and *sorry that it’ll be the last.
And I’m an old-school Star Trek fan (well, almost, first watched TOS in syndication in the 70s) but every complaint I’ve read so far, ah, gotta call “Get a life will you people” on them. None of them keep me up nights. Or make me not wanna watch any of the shows or movies (except Voyager, but that’s a different story).
And I though JJ Abrams take on it was brilliant. He did the impossible: Brought ST to the masses while still throwing trekie-nerds (myself included) more than enough bones to accept it.
Eureka. Sure, it’s a semi-campy sic-fi comedy, but charming with great characters. However, it seams they struggle every season with their large-arc stories. They’re usually huge duds, and it seems even the writers are bored with it. Or paint themselves in a corner, and go all deus ex machina at the end. Also, secondary characters seem to come and go, and with Stark, go forever (who was a BIG loss to the chemistry of the show).
This last season was the biggest reset, with:
the main gang getting transported back into time, to the 40s, when Eureka was a military camp for science R&D. Eventually they get back to their own time, but of course, they find it’s very close to the Eureka they left, but with minor and major changes, all obviously designed so the writers could free themselves from having to stick with already established characters and relationship threads, that became duds or dead ends.
However, I thought despite the obvious contrivance, it was actually successful, imho… for the most part, and got the show back on track a bit.
You’re right on Nemesis, but I’d say there was no contrivance in Worf taking over at Tactical in First Contact (beyond the simple fact of him being in command of Defiant rather than Sisko). With the possible exception of Dr. Crusher, Picard doesn’t have to explain to anybody on board the Enterprise why he assigns a given officer to a given post. Whatever lieutenant was assigned to tactical before Worf got there would simply nod and say, “Yes, sir,” when Picard announced the (obviously temporary) change.
ETA: And of course, in Insurrection, they deliberately didn’t show the explanation – the wisest course, I think. 
Even on the show, Worf was often in command of the Defiant, which makes sense considering Sisko is the commanding officer of Deep Space Nine and is usually needed there more than on some random sortie by the attached starship. Deep Space Nine was the only Trek to really get that part right. The captain should stay put.
Oh, I agree. I seem to recall an episode in which it’s made clear that part of Worf’s specific duties include command of the Defiant ahead of anyone other than Sisko. But I think if the Defiant had been at DS9 when the invasion alert went out, Sisko would have commanded the mission personally.
Even that makes sense, though. DS9 is far enough from Earth that the Defiant would not have been in the battle at all if it had been at berthed there at the time. Thus they must have been diverted from some other, more workaday mission to get joint the fleet, so Worf would have been more likely to be in charge.
On Melrose Place, Dr. Peter Burns tries to kill Heather Locklear’s character. He later comes back, after a short stint in prison, and the two end up falling in love with each other with no mention whatsoever of his murder attempt beyond the first couple of episodes after he returns.
Most of the examples given so far are from fairly recent TV shows. Older TV shows were actually worse. Today even obscure shows have hardcore fans who create websites and message boards where every nitpicky detail is argued about, so the show’s creators know that they will be castigated for failing to be consistent. In the early days of TV it was assumed that TV shows could be run like radio shows, where it was possible to change the actor who played a character whenever the producers felt like it. One notorious example was The Aldrich Family, which ran from 1949 to 1953:
Over those four years, there were five different actors playing Henry Aldrich, with each new one being swapped in with no explanation.
An obscure but particularly bad example was the 1980-1981 show I’m a Big Girl Now:
This show only ran one season. The main character worked at a political think tank as the show began. The episodes took place both at her workplace and at her home. After just a few episodes, the producers looked at the bad ratings and decided that it was hopeless to set any episodes of the show at the think tank, since nobody had any idea how to write about anything done there. They decided that they might be able to write plausible episodes about a newspaper. So from one week to the next, with no explanation whatsoever, the workplace turned into a newspaper office. There was no claim that anybody quit and changed jobs, let alone careers. The entire hierachy of the office moved with the main character. The boss remained the boss and all the coworkers remained coworkers.
And there was probably none worse than the Doris Day Show which abruptly changed formats and sometimes even the entire cast with each succeeding season.
Season one - Doris Day is a widow who moves away from San Francisco to raise her two sons on her father’s farm.
Season two - Doris begins commuting to SF to work as a secretary for a flashy, glam magazine. She still lives on the farm with her two sons and father though.
Season three - Doris and her two sons move into an apartment in SF over an Italian restaurant, and she still works as a secretary for the mag.
Season four - Doris is a swinging single, her sons simply disappear as if they never existed, and Doris is a writer at the mag - and has been for a long while, with no mention of her ever having worked as a secretary there.
What about Seven Bundy on Married with Children?