Castle just did one this season. At the start of the season Castle had gone missing, and turned up a couple episodes later under suspicious circumstances. It took Castle and Beckett a few episodes to get back to normal with each other. Then around episode 13 or 14, one aired that suddenly had them uneasy being around each other again. I kept thinking that I’d missed a week or something until I figured it out.
The first season of Happy Endings moved a couple of episodes about Dave and Alex to late in the season to avoid giving the impression it was the Dave and Alex show, but I think they may actually belong earlier in the continuity. It’s been a while.
For the TNG two parter featuring Spock, the second episode was filmed first to accommodate Leonard Nimoy’s schedule (he is hardly in the first part).
The new Doctor Who did this a few seasons back. It was series 6, the ‘split’ season that heavily featured the River Song / Silence story-line. The episode “Night Terrors” was originally intended to air in the first half of the season (spring), while the Neil Gaiman written “The Doctor’s Wife” was to have aired in the second half (fall.) Show runner Stephen Moffat switched them around, stating that he felt the first half needed a bit more levity to it (the Gaiman episode being a somewhat light-hearted romp - save for one very dark scene.)
A specific scene from “Night Terrors” was omitted so that it wouldn’t affect continuity (Amy would have had another vision of the Eye-patch Lady.) But still the theme of “Night Terrors” jarred with the second half of the series. The first half of the series ended on a cliffhanger in which Amy & Rory’s baby was abducted (but fated to grow up into River Song.) NT then aired after that cliffhanger, and is a stand-alone episode dealing with the parents of a troubled child learning that their “son” was really a sort of “Midwich Cuckoo” alien being. Amy & Rory should have had some kind of trauma in that episode about their own abducted child, but – nada. They dutifully assist the Doctor in solving the problem, get into trouble so the Doctor can save them, and all the routine stuff DW companion characters do. It just seemed bizarre that they could have been in that situation without even once mentioning their own eff-ed up parenting situation.
Going far enough back, Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part Two was completed and performed before Henry VI, Part One. Henry VI, Part Three was in the middle.
Matt Smith’s first season as the Doctor was shown out of production order on purpose. (Or I guess you could say it was filmed out of order.) Stephen Moffat wanted Smith’s first episode to be strong and establish him as the Doctor, so they filmed the first episode third or fourth in the production schedule. So he had three episodes of settling into the character before filming his first appearance.
This is really stretching the OP because it is a series of TV movies and they weren’t simply broadcast in the wrong order but they were actually filmed in the wrong order…
The eight Jesse Stone TV movies starring Tom Selleck based on books by Robert Parker. I thought Selleck’s acting was great and the first few films were really promising. Unfortunately they declined in quality as they went on.
However the first film, Stone Cold, has Stone as an alcoholic cop working a case in the fictional small town of Paradise, Massachusetts. The second film, Night Passage, is based on the first published book in the series and is set in its entirety before the events of Stone Cold. It has alcoholic LAPD cop Stone applying for the job in Paradise, getting it and then solving the mystery of his predecessor leaving the job.
TCMF-2L
The “test” episode of Law & Order, which I suppose is technically the pilot, is called “Everybody’s Favorite Bagman,” and features another DA, not Adam Schiff. The episode was shelved when the show was not picked up right away, and then when it did get picked up, and new pilot for the first season was filmed, “Prescription for Death,” and this is the official first episode: it’s the first that ever aired, and it still airs first in reruns when the show is presented in order. However, “Everybody’s Favorite Bagman” eventually ran as episode 6 in the first season. Steven Hill (Adam Schiff) is still in the opening credits.
Law & Order has rerun themes pretty often, though (there’s a “couples” one on today), so eps air out of order all the time. SVU has rerun themes on USA, too.
Much more annoying is when it airs just half of its two-parters with Homicide or SVU, especially Homicide, since that isn’t actually airing anywhere now.
The last season of the Drew Carey Show was shown in a completely messed up order. Granted, most people didn’t even know it was still airing at all, as ABC really had intended to cancel it a year and a half before but there was an ironclad contract and Carey wouldn’t give in and let them cancel it. So instead they burned the last season and a half of eps off randomly during the respective summers, with the last season in particular being hard to follow with a pregnancy storyline and some other stuff getting really muddled due to the order they aired them.
I think it was in season 2 of Fringe where they aired a previously pulled season 1 episode, which made things quite weird as one of the characters had since been killed off later in season 1.
The Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode “Earshot” was delayed for weeks because of the Columbine school shooting. It finally was aired several weeks after the season finale.
It wasn’t just that. NBC deliberately ran The Man Trap (the episode about the Salt Vampire) first, even though it was never intended to be a first episode because they thought audiences would find it more acceptable, for some reason. As a result, the audience wasn’t given an introduction to the characters and the situation (as they would have, if the second pilot, Where no man has gone before, had been run first), but was dropped into the series in media res. Maybe some people were hopelessly confused. I loved it, myself. It was infinitely better than that stupid Lost in Space.
If you’re looking for a current example, the episodes of Scorpion have been broadcast out of order. The first fifteen episodes were broadcast in this order: 1, 3, 2, 5, 4, 6, 7, 8, 10, 9, 11, 12, 13, 15, 14. You’ll sometimes notice details that are out of sequence.
In the late '70s, a local New York station aired the British sitcom Father Dear Father in reverse order. When I started watching it, it was about a middle-aged writer who lived with his two daughters and son-in-law. After a while, they showed the episode where the older daughter got married. After that, the couple dated for a while, then they met, and after that he was gone.
Fox did it again with Almost Human. Because the characters’ growth was jumbled, the relationships between them were all over the place - one week two people would be friendly, the next week they’d hate each other, then friendly again the next week. The show had a setting that wasn’t fully explained (what or why was the Wall, and was it keeping things out, or in?), so adding addition confusion about the characters didn’t help at all.
The aired matches weren’t exactly out of order; it was that WCW taped a significant number of matches for later airing, and synchronized the title changes in the tapings to upcoming “live” PPV title changes. This backfired on the company when fans who attended the tapings posted the “title changes” online, so it was clear which belts would be won by which wrestlers at which PPVs.
I can think of a couple of out-of-order series, although I wouldn’t say that either one was “famously” out of order:
Happy Days had some unaired episodes it burned off in the summer after the “finale”, so there were a few episodes where Joanie and Chachi weren’t married yet that aired after their marriage.
Nickelodeon’s Hey Arnold! had an episode where a new kid joined Arnold’s class, but he had already appeared in the class (unmentioned) in an earlier episode.
Finally remembered it!
In The Handicap Spot (episode production number 420), Jerry mentions that he’s thinking about getting a yo-yo. In The Junior Mint (episode 421) Jerry is shown using a Blue Imperial yo-yo.
But the latter was aired two episodes before the former.
I can finally get some sleep tonight.
On Gilligan’s Island, the castaways’ first day on the island wasn’t shown as an intact episode. The first few minutes were used as a prologue for “Two On A Raft”, and the rest was used as a flashback during the Christmas episode.
In the late 70s, NBC aired the opening of part three of a miniseries called “Small Change”. Why is that noteworthy? Because they were supposed to air part two that night and had to stop the show twenty minutes in! I’ve heard the same thing happened to the “Holocaust” miniseries in the same era, but haven’t seen any footage of this.
The intended last episode of I Dream of Jeannie finally has Dr. Bellows finding out Jeannie’s secret. It is also a clip show of sorts, intended to wrap things up nicely.
However, due to NBC’s waffling on renewing the show, it instead was turned into a “it was all a dream” episode that was the 2nd to last episode aired. Supposedly airs as the last episode in syndication.
It bugs me when I see a hair style change that gets reverted and then changed again.
Bewitched switched episodes around a lot in the first five years to cover for Dick York being absent due to back pain. There used to be a document online showing the filming and broadcast dates for the series.
The Monkees showed their pilot episode as episode #10. They had a jalopy, not the Monkeemobile. In season 2, you can tell some episodes were shot in series 1 by their hair styles (e.g., Micky with straight hair, not curly, Peter with hair parted on the side, not in the middle, etc.)