Salvaged Story / Live-Action TV

• The Angel episode "The Girl in Question" was reviled by the fans for many reasons but mostly because Buffy was revealed to be dating an unseen figure named "The Immortal" who happened to be an old rival of Buffy's previous lovers Angel and Spike. This was for a long time the last thing known about her in the entire Buffyverse. The comic continuation revealed that this Buffy was actually another slayer impersonating her and that Andrew Wells lied to Angel and Spike as a prank.
• The Big Bang Theory:
  • In Season 11, Raj finally calls Howard out for constantly making cruel and sometimes racist jokes at Raj's expense. And unlike in earlier seasons where the audience was meant to feel bad that Howard gets called out (such as when Penny justifiably called Howard out for harassing her constantly, only to apologize to Howard later for making him feel bad) it's made clear Raj is right to stand up for himself, and it's primarily Howard who should change his behavior.
  • Finally, Sheldon's behavior toward Bert and Geology led to Bert rejecting him and not accepting his apology.
  • In the third season when Leonard and Penny started dating, Sheldon tried using positive reinforcement techniques on Penny to correct annoying behavior, which involved giving her a chocolate treat whenever she did something he approved of. He later told Leonard he could speed up the process through negative reinforcement, specifically claiming electric shocks. This was actually one of the show's few technical blunders, as positive/negative reinforcement is not positive stimuli vs. negative stimuli, but the addition of something (the chocolate) vs. the removal of something (changing behavior due to the LACK of something). At conventions fans called out the writers on this mistake, and in the eighth season episode "The Focus Attenuation" Sheldon corrects someone on the improper use of positive/negative reinforcement and actually end up referencing an identical mistake made in Ghostbusters (1984).
  • The final Halloween episode had both Sheldon and Bernadette be called out on how mean they are to other people. It also explained that Bernadette became mean over time as a defense against being picked on over her height and bonding with Sheldon, as he too was picked on for being too smart at such a young age.
  • "The Tam Turbulence" addresses the complaints of Tam (Sheldon's high school friend from Young Sheldon) not appearing at Sheldon's wedding, nor having ever appeared or been mentioned in the show previously. It's explained that Sheldon was angry at Tam for choosing to stay in Texas rather than move to California with him, and thus, Sheldon never mentioned Tam to any of his friends in Pasadena (it's also a case of Real Life Writes the Plot to a certain extent, since Young Sheldon only started airing during the penultimate season of its parent show—in other words, Tam couldn't have been mentioned much earlier).
  • After years of alienating fans by strongly implying that women simply can't be into nerdy things like comic books, season 11 introduces the character of Denise, who's a tall, attractive young woman who also has an encyclopedic knowledge of comic books.
• The Community episode "Repilot" dismisses the entirety of the widely-hated Season 4 (the only season not overseen by Dan Harmon) by claiming that the school had suffered a massive gas leak, explaining everyone's inconsistent and decidedly Out of Character behavior.
• The eighth season finale of the 1980's version of Dallas saw Bobby Ewing being killed off. The ninth season was not well-received by a large portion of the fandom, so through circumstances too complicated to mention here, the character was brought back in the last moment's of that year's finale, leaving everyone to wonder how that was possible. The 10th season premiere revealed that the entire "Bobby's dead" arc had been a bad dream of his then-wife Pam. This development was met with mixed feelings by the fans, some of whom were glad status quo had been restored, others of whom were unhappy that the storyline of the previous season had been discarded.
• Dear White People: While not necessarily a direct response to critics, the second season does touch on the prejudice and bigotry within the POC and LGBT communities, addressing criticisms of the first season's more myopic and somewhat simplistic approach.
• The third season finale of Game of Thrones has a scene where Daenerys is lifted aloft by the jubilant army of slaves she has just freed. Since the slaves are mostly played by dark-skinned Moroccans and Daenerys by the very light-skinned Emilia Clarke, this comes across as rather questionable; series 4 ameliorated this somewhat by repeating the scene with a much more diverse group of former slaves.
• Glee: In episode 1.20 "Theatricality", new teenage stepbrothers Kurt and Finn are about to share a bedroom. Kurt has an unreciprocated, somewhat obsessive, crush on Finn and there's a Hopeless Suitor dynamic. Finn knows this and is uncomfortable about them rooming together. It escalates, and Finn looses his temper and calls Kurt "faggy." Kurt's father Burt overhears this exchange and goes on a Papa Bear rant defending his gay son. Finn is punished; Kurt is not. This event later gets callbacks when Burt brings it up again. In hindsight, he echoes fan sentiments about the event: while Finn was wrong to say that, it wasn't the black-and-white Gay Aesop moment he initially treated it as.
  • In episode 2.04 "Duets", Burt points out that Kurt's contribution to the situation was also iffy.
    Burt: Maybe Finn has a point. [...] I was talking to Carole, and you weren't totally honest with me. She told me that you had a crush on Finn and you weren't afraid to show it. Is this true? [...] You gotta understand, most guys don't know how to deal with unwanted advances.
  • In episode 5.03 "The Quarterback", Burt admits that he overreacted and reframes his reaction as being more about him than Finn.
    Burt: Y'know, I was right in principle — but, y'know, c'mon, the kid didn't have a prejudiced bone in his body. I knew what he meant when he was calling it "faggy." I wasn't teaching him a lesson in tolerance; I was teaching myself one. He was just unlucky enough to be there for it.
• At the end of Season Four of Good Times, Esther Rolle left the series (largely because of dissatisfaction with the Uncle Tomfoolery of the character of J.J.), which was explained by her character Florida marrying a new beau named Carl and moving to Arizona for his health. Ratings tanked in Season Five, and the producers begged Rolle to return. She agreed on the condition of better scripts, a higher salary, and the elimination of Carl's character—she explained that the devoutly-Christian Florida moving on so quickly from her husband James's sudden death, especially with an atheist, made her deeply uncomfortable. The showrunners agreed, and in Season Six, Florida returns with barely any mention of Carl. An uncut version of the premiere shows her smiling sadly when asked about him, suggesting that he died, but it's never made clear, and his existence is basically written out permanently beyond the occasional comment.
• Primeval: New World: One of the fanbase complaints about the original Primeval series' Seasonal Rot was the introduction of apocalyptic bad futures from the third season onward, which fans felt took away from the show's more naturalistic approach to the past and future in the first two seasons (where the future was largely shrouded in mystery, but natural-seeming animals presumed to come from distant post-human time periods emerged through Anomalies just as animals coming from distant pre-human time periods routinely emerged from the past). New World largely reverts to the original format of keeping the future mysterious, if only by virtue of its first and only season featuring zero Anomalies or creatures connected to the future at all (except for a claim by Henderson Hall to have witnessed an ecological apocalypse in the future, which might or might not have been him speaking in metaphor).
• Supernatural: The intended series finale at the end of Season 5 had Dean taken in by an old flame, Lisa, and heavily implied that he would wind up living a normal life with her and her son. The series did continue, however, with Season 6 exploring the conflict between Dean's desire to be a family man and help Lisa raise her son and his desire to continue hunting with this resurrected brother, Sam. Many fans, as well as the writers, felt hamstrung by Dean having a wife and stepchild, but the show firmly established that Dean loved them. Moreover, the series had been heavily criticized for killing off/fridging love interests. So, at the end of the sixth season, Dean realizes his lifestyle is too dangerous for Lisa and Ben, so he asks Castiel to wipe their memories of him. Castiel agrees, and Dean makes Sam promise never to mention Lisa or Ben again. This functionally removes them from the series.

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