History EarlyInstallmentWeirdness / TVShowsNumbersToF

*** The first season is grounded closer to reality; villains tend to be drug pushers or a CorruptCorporateExecutive and fight off Oliver with simple firearms. "The List" tends to dominate the first half of the season, giving the show a MonsterOfTheWeek feel before "The Undertaking" arc sets in. Superpowered individuals don't begin to pop up until the second season, when ComicBook/{{Deathstroke}} and the Mirakuru are introduced (technically, Slade Wilson debuted in season 1, but didn't start to become his comic character until season 2), while the term "metahuman" is first used in the ''Series/{{The Flash|2014}}'' spinoff.

** The first season appears to rely a lot more on {{GirlsVsBoysPlot}}s, often pairing the three girls and three boys together, and when they're all gathered they often discuss differences between men and women.

** In "[[{{Recap/BuffyTheVampireSlayerS1E3TheWitch}} The Witch]]" (season 1, episode 3), Giles seems unfamiliar with magicks, saying "Pretty good for my first [spell-]casting, eh?" and such—which is totally at odds with his rebellious Hellblazer youth period as established in Season 2's [[Recap/BuffyTheVampireSlayerS2E8TheDarkAge "The Dark Age"]]. It may be due to the fact that Giles had been trying to keep the fact he "spent the sixties in an electric-kool-aid-funky-Satan groove" (as Buffy later put it) a secret.

** In "[[{{Recap/BuffyTheVampireSlayerS1E3TheWitch}} The Witch]]" (season 1, episode 3), Giles seems unfamiliar with magicks, saying "Pretty good for my first [spell-]casting, eh?" and such—which is totally at odds with his rebellious Hellblazer youth period. It may be due to the fact that Giles had been trying to keep his past a secret.

** When a pack of vamps chase Buffy and Angel into the Summers house (in the episode "Angel"), one of the pursuers gets his hand through the door before Buffy slams the door on his wrist and Angel tells her the vamps won't be able to come through the closed door without an invitation. It's later established that without an invitation, an invisible forcefield fills the doorway – like a membrane – keeping vampires out. Angel even leans against one such forcefield at one point, and falls when it disappears. The henchvamp shouldn't have been able to get his arm across the threshold like that.

** When a pack of vamps chase Buffy and Angel into the Summers house (in the episode "Angel"), one of the pursuers gets his hand through the door before Buffy slams the door on his wrist and Angels tells her the vamps won't be able to come through the closed door without an invitation. It's later established that without an invitation, an invisible forcefield fills the doorway – like a membrane – keeping vampires out. Angel even leans against one such forcefield at one point. The henchvamp shouldn't have been able to get his arm across the threshold like that.

* ''Series/FortBoyard'': Certain things only happened in the first UK series:
** The gold was referred to as "golden doubloons", which would often not be heard over the teams cheering at their winnings. In later series, it was simply "gold".
** In the first series, there were three visits to the Professor; later series only had two.

** The companion variety also followed a very rigid formula in the first two seasons; with one or two female companions and at least one male companion to act as the Doctor's muscle. As Creator/JonPertwee's run began and the show became much more action-oriented (the Third Doctor being 6′3″ ''and'' a martial arts master), this was ultimately dropped, and more variety was given to the cast of companions as the Doctor continued to be played by physically imposing actors.

** At the end of the second episode, "Day One," Carter accepts an invite back to a female patient's house after she stalks him back to his car. This is at odds with his later characterization as someone who LikesOlderWomen and subverts the {{Casanova}} stereotype (he typically tries to be friends with his potential romances first before making the leap). Early episodes would also depict him as a ButtMonkey, who is routinely mocked by other staffers, suffers several pratfalls (being shocked by a defibrilator, fearing he has an STD, having the staff wrap his leg in a cast during a snowstorm, and being the "butt" of a joke where Nurse Haleh and Deb Chen pretended to do a rectal exam on him). Tellingly, most NaiveNewcomer characters are never subjected to the same kind of treatment as Carter was, and their training is played much more realistically and reserved.

* The ''{{Franchise/Degrassi}}'' franchise had several examples of this.

** ''Kids of Degrassi'' also had none of the complex morality that would define the later iterations of the franchise, and could come off as boring or simplistic compared to ''Junior High'' episodes.
** ''Degrassi Junior High'' relied on some unbelievable conceits to further the plot, a notion which did not follow through to any of the later series. The big finale of ''Junior High'' involved an explosion (albeit [[{{Foreshadowing}} foreshadowed]]) in the school's boiler room that forced the students to evacuate and change campuses.
** Spike's unplanned pregnancy was the huge turning point of ''Junior High'' (and the franchise), but it's hard to see what the big deal is compared to ''Degrassi High'' and ''Series/DegrassiTheNextGeneration'', where several members of the female cast (including Spike, again) end up dealing with the same issue (and it is even portrayed as, at best, a subplot instead of the main focus).
** ''School's Out'', the made-for-TV movie that followed ''Degrassi High'' (and the immediate precursor to ''Series/DegrassiTheNextGeneration''), featured a level of DarkerAndEdgier that, to this day, still hasn't been matched by the latter in terms of single-episode shock value. Joey proposes to Caitlin and they have sex for the first time, just as Joey cheats on her with a classmate. The classmate discovers that she's pregnant and decides to have an abortion. Wheels and Lucy get into a car crash that results in the death of a young boy, and he goes to jail (and Lucy is blinded) as a result. It was also the first (and only) installment of the series to include both nudity and the word "fuck" (used twice). Interestingly, ''Next Generation'' disregarded a number of the plot points in this installment.

** ''Degrassi Junior High'' relied on some unbelievable conceits to further the plot, a notion which did not follow through to any of the later series. The big finale of ''Junior High'' involved an explosion (albeit [[{{Foreshadowing}} foreshadowed]]) in the school's boiler room that forced the students to evacuate and change campuses. In addition, the majority of the plots were quaint compared to ''Series/DegrassiHigh'''s DarkerAndEdgier source material - in ''Junior High'', most episodes usually had one or more couples going on chaste dates at local Toronto landmarks, or having violent actions mostly occur off-screen.

** The first couple episodes actually portray ''Monica'' as the show's lead. Granted, Friends was always meant to be an ensemble series (Schwimmer himself reportedly refused to do the show unless it was such), but the writers have openly stated that they originally weren't sure of how to properly make such a series. And so, in the first few episodes, Monica is portrayed as the everywoman lead while the other five characters are portrayed as her "wacky group of friends." She was even listed as the show's lead character when The Pilot was screened for critics. The show's ensemble format didn't really take off until "The One With George Stephanopoulos."

** Regeneration is one of the most iconic tropes of the series and yet it took the writers a long time to figure out what it was and how it worked. The Second Doctor ambiguously remarks that he's "been renewed" and implies it was a function of the TARDIS rather than of his body. The Third Doctor was forced to change his form by the Time Lords offscreen, in a manner achieved ambiguously. The regeneration of the Third to the Fourth Doctor marked the first time that regeneration had been explicitly analogized to death of the old self (due to a producer who decided to combine it with his Buddhist beliefs), although some writers seemed to think that the Fourth Doctor was actually playing a ''younger'' version of the Third Doctor, TheOtherDarrin style (such as the Target novelization, where the Brigadier watches the Doctor change and observes that although he gets younger his features stay mostly the same except his hair suddenly turning into twisty curls). The twelve-regeneration limit wasn't established until [[Recap/DoctorWhoS14E3TheDeadlyAssassin "The Deadly Assassin"]], where it's key to the Master's motivation.

** At one point in the first season, Martin says that Lilith is much weirder than Maris. Eleven seasons later, Lilith is a fairly sympathetic recurring character (she's still the butt of jokes from Niles and Martin, but they now seem like playful exaggeration), while Maris was so strange [[TakeOurWordForIt no human actress could portray her]] and she was once mistaken for a hatrack.

** The opening scenes includes Leonard solving a receptionist's crossword puzzle on sight while explaining the logic behind some clues, a gag you'd expect of Sheldon. The same scene their motivation for donating sperm is money for an internet speed upgrade when across the rest of the series money is never presented as an issue and they're shown to live comfortably. Banter in the stairwell also states Sheldon was sent to boarding school (for his work on lasers), something the rest of the series and the prequel show contradict.

** The main set for Miami Metro Homicide wasn't established until after the pilot. Initially, the characters are shown working in a much larger and open office space and Dexter didn't have a backroom. Presumably, the writers needed a convenient excuse to have Dexter access police databases for criminals he was targeting without having his colleagues literally watching over his shoulder.

** An interesting variant of this is with the characters' sexual orientations. Willow's coming out was written quite well and it doesn't come across as contradicting her earlier character necessarily, though NoBisexuals seems to be in effect and previously she had been shown having a crush on Xander, going out with Oz and even making out with Xander when she was going out with Oz (of course it is TruthInTelevision that some gay people have heterosexual relationships before coming out). Even after meeting Tara, she mentions having once had a crush on Giles and says that Dracula is sexy, but is otherwise treated as being all lesbian now. However, the writers did admit that they decided they wanted to make a character gay and it wasn't set in stone, with Xander apparently under consideration also. Given his early characterisation constantly hitting on/staring at girls (especially Buffy) and his (hidden) MasochismTango relationship with Cordelia, this could have been very jarring.