There’s a lot of references made to sitcoms having the same plots recycled or stolen from earlier shows. I was wondering if would could list them with specific examples.
For instance. There’s an episode of *Perfect Strangers * where Balki is approached about becoming a pop singer. He even makes a video. When the video airs his voice has been redubbed with an actual singer. It turns out they just wanted Balki’s ethnic look. A few years later Friends had an episode where the same thing happened to Phoebe.
Anyway, to add to the ‘nothing new under the sun’ part of this, I’ve been listening a lot to old radio programs recently. There were a few ‘Great Guildersleeve’ plots / adventures that literally got recycled -on the same show- some year or two after being first aired.
An example from MAS*H of the same plot with different endings, reflecting the show’s wussification, I mean, evolution. In an early Trapper ep, Hawkeye and Trapper spike a colonel’s drink to make it appear he has appendicitis, so they can operate and get him off the front line because his casualty rate is so high. In a later BJ ep, Hawkeye and BJ spike a colonel’s drink so Hawkeye can operate and get him off the front line because his casualty rate is so high. Except BJ refuses to go along with the operation, saying that cutting into a healthy body is mutilation. The moral of the story being that poisoning someone is an OK thing for a doctor to do but unnecessary surgery isn’t. Or something.
There are only so many plots in the universe - when a TV series meets an untimely cancellation, the plots get fragmented and float around Hollywood until bits of them coalesce into new… wait… there’s something awfully familiar about this theory…
Or how about the episode where a letter or answering machine message is sent in anger or error by one of the cast to their boss, girlfriend, (fill-in-the-blank).
They then have to sneak into that persons residence/office to intercept the message before they get it.
I’ve seen this on I Love Lucy, Laverne & Shirley, Seinfeld, Perfect Strangers, Three’s Company, Friends, etc.
Not really a plot, just a comedy bit: in an episode of “All in the Family”, Archie and Michael have a prolonged argument over whether it’s better to put on “a sock and a sock and a shoe and a shoe” or “a sock and a shoe and a sock and a shoe”. My dad swore he’d heard the exact same dialogue in a radio comedy show back in the 1930s or '40s.
(As a result of that episode, I actually changed the way I put on socks and shoes.)
[quoteFor instance. There’s an episode of Perfect Strangers where Balki is approached about becoming a pop singer. He even makes a video. When the video airs his voice has been redubbed with an actual singer. It turns out they just wanted Balki’s ethnic look. A few years later Friends had an episode where the same thing happened to Phoebe.[/quote]
I was watching a sitcom about ten years ago (I don’t recall the name) when Melissa Ethridge/Jill Sobule/Ani DiFranco were all big on the charts. The show had a female singer, who was straight, being seen by a big record company executive, who liked her music and offered her a big contract. But it became clear the executive thought the singer was a lesbian. So to keep her record deal, the singer decided to pretend she was gay. And I was thinking to myself, “I guess there are new sitcom plots - this never would have happened to Lucy.”
Not a sitcom, but once when I was sick and had to watch local TV all day (ugh), I watched an episode of ‘Police Woman’ where the baddies kidnap the bank president’s family in their own house and make him go there and get money to ensure their safety.
Police Woman caught the baddies and all was well with the world.
A few hours of boredom later, I got to watch the same plot again. Except this time it was TJ Hooker at the helm! They caught the baddies and William Shatner held forth loudly and proudly on the consequences of crime.
It may have been an old plot that was later recycled on “Perfect Stranger” and “Friends” but don’t forget that something like that had just happened it real life. (Does the name Milli Vanilli ring a bell?)
Bewitched recycled the same plots during the same series! There was an episode early on in which lovable bumbler Aunt Clara somehow agrees to baybsit a trouble child, uses some mild (and bumbled) witchcraft which lets the kid know she’s a witch, the parents get angry and sue, and when it’s time for the verdict the elderly judge asks her if she’ll babysit for his grandson. A few years later, the lovable bumbler Esmerelda somehow agrees to babysit a trouble child yadda yadda blabba blab babysit for his grandson. THE SAME SCRIPT BASICALLY!
Very many sitcoms of the 50s and 60s had plots where:
The couple found out they weren’t legally married.
Someone gets hit on the head and gets amnesia.
You knew The Debbie Reynolds Show was doomed to failure because those were the plots of the first two episodes.
There are also all the Christmas episodes that are revamps of “A Christmas Carol” or “It’s a Wonderful Life.”
Perry Mason used basically the same plot in every episode: Perry’s client would be suspected of murder, and Perry would get the real killer to confess on the stand in the final few minutes. House is similar: there’s a bizarre disease; House tries a bunch of diagnoses until he gets a bit of information that shows him the right one. But shows like that can be entertaining for reasons other than the plot.
Could this be because of the switch to color from Black and white in the run of the series? IIRC even Dragnet reused old B&W scripts because many TV producers realized people did not want to see “old” B&W episodes, so they “improved” the old episodes that they thought would not be likely to be shown again in the future.
Oh yeah, that is a popular one. They did that very memorably on The Dick van Dyke Show and The Simpsons as well.
It’s not a whole plot, but there was an episode of Frasier once where for some mixed up reason the plumber (or whoever) had to speak to the gardener in German who spoke to the cook in French who spoke to Niles in Spanish who spoke to Frasier in English, all of this causing much fun and confusion. That was lifted straight out of one of the I Love Lucy episodes when they were on their European vacation. The plot surrounding the joke was different though, so maybe it’s more of an “homage.”
I’ll forgive every other show thats copied this formula, just because of the Blackadder Christmas Carol.
That and Scrooged are the only Christmas programming I’ll watch.
I’ve mentioned on the Board before that I have a Pet Theory. It goes like this:
You can tell which basic plot ideas were being used in How to Write a Screenplay courses in LA a couople of years earlier by looking at the plots of sitcoms. My thinking is that the harried screenwriters, finding themselves with a lot of teleplays to write find themselves short on ideas and invariably reach back into their past experience for ideas, and end up recycling old homework assignments. This explains why the same basic idea shows up in a lot of shows at the same time, then vanishes.
One example is the “Our Hero/Heroine Gets Audited” I recall seeing this on several shows in the late 1960s/early 1970s, but I haven’t seen it on any shows in ages. I can just visualize the Screenwriting course teacher saying something like :" Imagine your characters in a stressful situation and imagine how they’d respond. Take something that’s not normally part of their lives like…oh, say, a tax audit. Remember, you’re not trying to make up jokes about taxes, you’re ttrying to make the humor flow from the way your character would naturally respond in this situation. What would they do that’s different from anyone else? And remember, the essence of drama is conflict!"
Five years later they’re all writing about High School Reunions.
Several episodes of “Charlie’s Angels” recycled scripts from “The Mod Squad.” I think both shows were Aaron Spelling productions, so it wasn’t plagiarism. It was just a case of a producer too cheap to pay for new storylines!
One blatant case: there was an episode in which Peggy Lipton/Jaclyn Smith was a close friend to a retarded boy. Peggy/Jaclyn connected with the boy by telling him fairy tales about an enchanted princess. Peggy/Jaclyn was assaulted by a bad guy, and put into a coma. The retarded boy, who was the only witness, had to dodge the bad guys who were after him, while he gathered items he’d heard about in Peggy/Jaclyn’s stories, items he thought would magically heal her. Just as the bad guys are about to get the kid, PEggy/Jaclyn wakes up, and rescues the kid with her partners.
I’m not even reading on to see if anyone else caught this - they both stole this idea from the Brady Bunch when Greg became Johnny Bravo because he fit the suit!
I think I saw this plot on The Incredible Hulk, Quantum Leap, and Wonder Woman. TV is a lot like the old ‘B’ Serials: “I don’t want it good, I want it by Tuesday.”
