So, trying to get the most money out of my Netflix streaming video subscription that I bought for the Marvel/Netflix series, I started watching the Numb3rs TV series that ran from 2005-2010.
I had never watched this show before, but I was immediately struck by a feeling of deja vu that I had seen several of the episodes before.
In particular, I felt like I’d seen some of them duplicated on episodes of CSI, White Collar and Hawaii Five O.
The Numb3rs episode “Provenance” for example, was repeated in the White Collar episode “The Portrait.”
I know ideas get reused but these almost seem like a total case of plagiarism. Is this common? Anyone else notice this?
Is it similar plots or actual plagiarism?
Similar plots is easy to explain the same way the there can be two volcano movies and the asteroid hitting the earth movies made about the same time-- shit happens.
Or are there scenes that are the same in each version?
Recycled plots happen a lot…Brady Bunch, Perfect Strangers and Friends all used the “we like your look, but not your voice” pop singer plot.
It happens enough that TV Tropes has a page about it.
I personally remember that an inflatable life raft in a closed room was a plot point in episodes of I Married Joan, the Dick Van Dyke Show and WKRP in Cincinnatti.
Sometimes it gets out of hand. Bewitched recycled a lot of Aunt Clara’s business and gave it to Esmerelda.
Sometimes entire series are built on it. The Flintstones was the Honeymooners. Laverne and Shriley were Lucy and Ethel.
Both episodes I mentioned—Provenance and The Portrait—involved a painting being stolen from a small museum where it had been on loan from a private collector. The painting turned out to have been stolen by the Nazis but the lone surviving family member of the family from whom it was stolen lost a court case trying to prove it.
So the writer’s for both had read an article about how art stolen by the nazis ended up in museums and the original owners had been trying to get them back for decades? Can you be called a plagiarist if you use the same inspirational material for a similar artistic medium?
Was the book The Lady in Gold and then the movie The Woman in Gold…rips offs too?
Going way back. I remember episodes of “Alias Smith and Jones” and Run for your Life" which both turned on the same obscure card game (Montana Red Dog).
Saw them fairly close together on a rerun channel, did a little research and they were written by the same person.
Yeah, I think the minimum qualification should be that the same writer was involved in both scripts. Otherwise, it’s just ripping from the same headlines.
I’ve said this before on this Board – I suspect that what happens sometimes is that writers are stuck with a deadline and a dearth of scripts, so they fall back on old writing-school assignments. “OK – write a script about your character being audited by the IRS. Make it funny.” Years later, Audited by the IRS episodes shoiw up in a bunch of sitcoms. or A Raft Inflates in a Closet. or I Forgot Our Anniversary and have to improvise a Gift.
Gomer Pyle reworked a number of scripts from Andy Griffith almost scene for scene (e.g., the “You have saved my life, I am eternally grateful!” episode).
“IRS audit,” “X’s birthday,” “Y’s coming to visit,” “Z’s driver’s test,” “Jury duty,” “Assembly-line job,” “Can’t let the neighbors know”… all of these (and more!) have been done on TV ad nauseam.
