The ones where you know all of the characters and plotlines intimately enough that barring a bit of creative leeway from the writers to fit a certain plot in, that a change happens in the show that is so out there that you have to double-check your own sources (memory, television listings, etc) to make sure your are not the one who missed a step.
I never really have been much of an avid TV series watcher. I have watched all of the MASH series, CSI:LV , and Buffy mainly because of the semi-marathon-ish way the run them like 2 or 3 times per day 5 days a week.
The only times I can think of are two instances from Buffy. The first time was when Dawn came into the picture. You never really got an explanation until a few episodes later. For a few days it had me doing plenty of mental justification trying to fit her in. The other was the musical episode they had, although the explanation was in the episode. From opening credits to closing they never lost stride and kept into the musical theme. I laughed out loud at the absurdity of it once I realized it what was actually happening.
There was a Friends episode where Monica was fat and Chandler was trying to date her while Joey was a famous actor and Rachel was trying to seduce him and made a fool of herself, iirc. I never did get an explanation for that one although I wasn’t really one to follow Friends and could have missed something.
I was a child when SOAP was running, and although it could have been my immature mind, it seemed to me that the series was full of WTF moments. I could be confusing it with the interracial and church scandal uproar going on about it. I just never understood it.
Although “Friends” was never my favorite show, it did have the most egregious WTF?? moment I can think of off the top of my head. The “nap” episode - in which Joey & Ross (or Chandler, I can’t remember which one) both fell asleep while watching tv and awoke on top of each other, in a position that sets off lots of “hilarious” gay panic. Then throughout the rest of the episode, they go back & forth over whether to do it again.
I keep picturing the staff meeting in which this script was cooked up:
Writer 1: Well we know what Rachel is going to do this week. How are we going to fill out the rest of the episode?
Writer 2: Ahhh, let’s just throw in some gay panic stuff for the B plot. Guys panicking over their sexuality is ALWAYS funny.
W1: Brilliant! But how exactly will the gay panic play out?
W2: Tell you what. Let’s snort a few lines first, THEN we’ll write up the gay panic B-plot.
That '70s Show had a WTF moment this season. Red has always been a Korean war veteran, he’s extremely proud of his record at killing communists. But this season he suddenly became a World War II veteran.
I noticed yesterday that they’re moving the show to Thursday nights from Wednesday, which is probably the final dagger in my interest in this show.
That was a “what might have been” episode, where they were imagining what their lives might have been like if:
-Chandler hadn’t given up on writing
-Joey hadn’t gottened fired from Days of our Lives
-Monica had never lost all that weight
-Rachel had stayed married to Barry
-Phoebe had taken that job as a stockbroker
and
-Ross was still married to (gay but not aware of it) Carole
Here’s mine: I’m in the middle of watching season one of Veronica Mars on DVD (it’s excellent), and she’s kinda sorta dating this deputy sheriff. But, despite the fact that we’re watching every episode in order, my friend and I both completely missed wherever she met him. So suddenly, from our perspective, she’s talking to this total stranger about how she used him to further her sleuthing, but after using him, she fell for him, and we’re both like “whaaaaa?”.
Well, isn’t it possible for him to be both? I’m pretty sure participating in WWII didn’t bar you from participating in the Korean War, which was about 5 years later. Unless they said somewhere that his birthday was in 1934 or something, in which case, serving in WWII would be problematic.
Oh, and the first “WTF?” moment that comes to mind for me is Babylon 5. Back when I was a very casual fan of it (as in, I saw most of the first season, then was only able to catch the show sporadically after that), I turned on the TV one time to wonder why this pretty-faced chump was running the station (not realizing that Commander Sinclair had become an ambassador, and Captain Sheridan was the new top hat), and then on another occasion, I wondered why Jesus was suddenly helping them fight the Shadows (What? I think Marcus looks kinda like Jesus! :smack: )
Really, to fully appreciate how much Babylon 5 changes as the plot progresses, you have to watch enough of the first season to get familiar, then only watch one or two episodes for each of the next few seasons.
Guess I’m telling my age here again, but in the TV series, “Jungle Jim” it was only into the first or one of the first eps where Johnny Weismuller was slogging through the jungle and they had this sound from a KOOKABURRA to make it even more “jungle-ey.”
I was at most 5 or 6 years old at the time, but even then I knew what a Kookaburra sounded like, and I damn well know it was native to Australia. Parents had no clue what I was ranting about.
Heck, that may have been the start of my looking at TV shows and movies with a very critical eye…
The greatest WTF moment in the history of television HAS to be when Buffy catches Dawn messing around in her bedroom at the end of “Buffy vs. Dracula.”
OH yes. I had only started watching Buffy the previous season, and I’d missed a few episodes, and was completely baffled. Had I missed something vital?
Reminds me: I’d only seen Buffy a few times when “Superstar” aired. The opening credits were a major “WTF?” moment.
They didn’t try very hard with continuity with this series, maybe that was part of it. Many of the main characters just acted stranger and stranger as the show went on.
In addition some of the storylines were quite surreal, involving demonic possesion, alien abductions and the like.
They weren’t favorites, but I did used to watch the *Hercules *and *Xena *shows pretty regularly. At least until they ran out of mythological plotlines. It was sort of:
Oh, he’s aTrojan War veteran. Okay. Doesn’t violate the spirit of the mythos, really. Just because some ancient didn’t get around to conflating the two, doesn’t mean the show can’t. And who’s that he’s fighting? Ah, Julius Caesar. Cool. WTF.
How about that episode in the last season where Herc and his buddy were two guys in revolutionary France? I checked the TV guide to make sure I had the right show, and then I officially concluded that the producers were riding a dead horse.
My favorite episode was the one with the entire cast (minus Kevin Sorbo) playing the studio execs, frantically trying to figure out what to do because the star hasn’t shown up yet. Some shows are just fun when they jump the shark. I guess I just didn’t watch Hecules enough to get tired of the jumping.
I didn’t see that one, so I can’t comment. I really didn’t mind the myth-mash in the early seasons. Hey all sorts of things could happen in the mists of prehistory. But Caesar? Did anyone notice that guy escaping from Troy? Had arms? Was a man? I think his name was Aeneas? Founder of the Roman race?
It’s been a while since I watched anything from season 1, but he does appear in one of the episodes immediately preceding that one. Veronica uses the “oh I’m an innocent schoolgirl !” routine on him to gain access to some police files without having to go through Lamb.
Soap! Don’t you get it? Soap! Folks, it was a parody of soap operas, that’s why it was called Soap!
Therefore, characters did extremely unlikely things in increasingly outlandish situations. Personalities established quite firmly would suddenly change.
In other words, the whole series was intended to be one WTF moment after another.
The funniest part of a lot of it was that long after the show ended, actual soap operas started to include plots not dissimilar to what appeared on Soap.
