Serendipity Writes The Plot / Live-Action TV

Examples of Serendipity Writes the Plot in live-action TV shows.

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General Tropes

• Some TV shows do "Bottle Episodes" due to budget limitations. Some classic ones in Friends include "The One With the Blackout" (which was part of a NBC Thursday Night Crossover where all the New York shows, save Seinfeld had to deal with the effects of said blackout, something which director James Burrows admitted they used to make an episode on the cheap), and "The One Where No One Is Ready".
• In the same vein, some "Lower Deck Episodes" are done when the lead actors in a show's cast are occupied filming one episode, forcing the production staff to do another episode focusing on minor or original characters in order to stay on schedule. Doctor Who's "Doctor-lite episodes", in which the Doctor and his Companion generally only have a few minutes of screen time, are a good example.
• Your usual Game Show obviously does not have the budget to pay out a huge jackpot every episode. The programmes typically run on the assumption that they will have an average per-episode winning, and budget their prize pool accordingly. This therefore means that, while there is such a thing as insurance to cover overruns, productions can actually find themselves in trouble if too many people win big in quick succession. As a result, most game shows will have some kind of mechanic in them to reduce the likelihood of big jackpots being won.
  • The Progressive Jackpot is likely the most obvious method. It allows a show to have a small per-episode prize pool that is safe to be won frequently, while also providing the possibility for the jackpot to build up into something substantial.
  • The Bonus Round is a bit more subtle when it comes to its true purpose. Requiring winning contestants to pass a difficult final challenge to earn the jackpot, often with all-or-nothing stakes, is a solid way of cutting down the odds of them winning.
  • The Banker in Deal or No Deal is partially there to serve this purpose. Given a choice between a 50/50 chance of earning either £250,000 or 1p, or a guarantied £70,000, most people will likely choose to play it safe and accept the still-substantial Banker's offer, giving the show a lot of headroom when it comes to keeping a balanced average prize. As a piece of trivia, the original UK run of Deal or No Deal has a per-episode prize budget of £16,500.
  • With all that said, the opposite scenario, a show not having enough winners and generating a surplus of prize money, can also lead to production changes. Series 24 of Pointless featured an additional bonus round that added £500 to the jackpot for picking two Pointless answers from a list of six, introduced because the show was behind on its expected payouts.

Specific Examples

• Arrested Development:
  • When the show was revived by Netflix in 2013, the showrunners had to work with a notably smaller budget, which meant that many of the signature comedic setpieces from the original three seasons (the banana stand, the model home, the stair car, etc.) had to be reimagined, scaled back, or left out entirely. Among other things: the banana stand is implied to have gone out of business, the Sudden Valley development is finally finished (only to wind up abandoned after the housing market crash), and Michael sells the stair car and gets a job driving a Google Maps camera car instead. But since Season 4 is set seven years after the first three seasons, this ends up feeling pretty appropriate, contributing the to general sense that nothing in the Bluths' lives in the same anymore.
  • Season 4 also heavily changed the show's format into episodes heavily focusing on individual Bluths and heavily downplaying the usual interactions between the entire family. This was because, in the years between the original show and the revival, the vast majority of the cast's careers massively blew up (in most cases because of the show), and thus it became next to impossible to get their schedules to align and have them all present on set at any given time.
• Babylon 5 had the commander of the space station, Jeffrey Sinclair, played by Michael O'Hare, permanently replaced by John Sheridan at the beginning of the second season. This made some important overall changes to the overarching plot of the show since Sheridan had a very different personality and background. Originally it was hinted that this had been planned all along, but after O'Hare's death, it was revealed that during the course of the season he had been suffering from increasingly severe mental illness, which finally made it impossible for him to continue working.
• Baywatch's many infamous slow-motion running shots of the lifeguards came about because the producers wanted to save some money by stretching out the run time.
• Better Call Saul: Much like its parent show, the same "write as you go along" approach was utilized.
  • The very first episode was originally supposed to end with the reveal that the skateboarders Jimmy is working with accidentally targeted Howard instead of their target. However, the writers essentially asked themselves who the worst possible person they could've targeted would be, and thus they changed it from Howard to Tuco's grandma. This introduces the cartel into the storyline much earlier than originally planned, bringing in both the Salamancas and Nacho Varga immediately.
  • The first few episodes of season 1 were filmed before the writers decided that Chuck had potential as a villain, so Michael McKean spent the first four episodes believing that Chuck genuinely believed in Jimmy's potential as a lawyer and acting accordingly. This makes the reveal that Chuck secretly despises Jimmy come out of absolute nowhere and add more shock value to the twist. The twist also completely changed Howard Hamlin's motivation retroactively, and thus he became more of a foil to Jimmy rather than an antagonist.
  • The Cold Open for the episode "Hero" was essentially tacked on at the last minute when the final script of the episode was still too short, but its addition worked perfectly for setting up Jimmy's past in Cicero and his relationship with his buddy Marco that would eventually be explored further in "Marco".
  • Kim Wexler was originally going to be far more straight-laced and moral than Jimmy, to the point of potentially serving as his genuine Morality Pet, but Rhea Seehorn added in a smirk to some of Jimmy's antics early in season one. This small decision completely changed Kim's character for the rest of the show and turned the two of them into a genuine partnership, rather than her going along with him grudgingly.
  • The flashback scene from "Inflatable" featuring a young Jimmy and his father in the convenience store was originally meant to be in season one, but it ultimately got shelved for time. This meant that when Chuck eventually told Kim the story of how Jimmy would steal from the till during season 2, they were able to put it there instead and prove that while Chuck might be jealous and petty, he's not necessarily wrong about Jimmy either.
  • The Season 1 finale was written before they had any idea whether or not they would be renewed, which is why Jimmy seems to fully descend into the Saul Goodman persona at the end of the season. When they did get renewed, they realized they had more time to play with Jimmy before he fell completely, so Season 2 features him dialing back and rationalizing his brief episode as due to his grief for Marco's death.
  • Gould and Gilligan played tug-of-war over whether or not to introduce Lalo Salamanca for four whole seasons; while Gould wanted to add him from day one, Gilligan was nervous that, after they had used one of Saul's offhand lines from Breaking Bad to introduce the character of Nacho Varga, using the same line to justify Lalo's existence would feel too much like a copout (Gilligan also felt that "we don't need to explain every mystery"). Eventually, they got Tony Dalton to sign on and basically build the character himself, which managed to win Gilligan over. The result is Lalo entering the show after Hector's stroke and taking the Big Bad spot for the rest of the series.
  • Gene's phone call to Ed the Vacuum Repair Guy was originally meant to be a one-sided phone call, with only Gene's side being shown. However, when Robert Forster came back for El Camino, the crew decided to get him back in the role while they had him around, so the other side of the call was added. This was incredibly fortuitous, as Forster tragically passed away in between filming and release, meaning this scene is his last performance ever.
  • Despite Hank Schrader having many opportunities for a cameo appearance across the first four seasons, he never actually appeared because Dean Norris was completely uninterested in returning, feeling that Hank's story had already been completed; additionally, Peter Gould didn't feel comfortable writing a part for Hank after his creator, Vince Gilligan, had left the writer's room for the show. Both eventually came around to the idea of a return in time for the filming of season 5, and thus we get a multi-episode arc showing how Krazy-8 became his snitch.
  • In Season 5, the fixer Saul uses to get some dirt on Kevin Wachtell is Mr. X, a fixer played by Steven Ogg who had previously appeared in season 1 as a hired goon that Mike got into an altercation with. This was meant to be the re-introduction of Bill Burr as Patrick Kuby, but Burr was unavailable for filming due to commitments, necessitating the re-use of Ogg.
  • Season 6 was heavily affected by both COVID-19 restrictions as well as Bob Odenkirk's near-fatal heart attack. The restrictions brought filming to a halt, and even when they returned, Laura Fraser was unable to return as Lydia Rodarte-Quale despite a planned appearance from her, and Odenkirk's heart attack halted filming once more and necessitated splitting the season into two. The result is that Howard's execution at the end of "Plan and Execution" while Jimmy and Kim watch became one of the show's most legendary cliffhangers across its entire run, as fans had to wait over a month to see what happened next.
  • The revelation that Howard is a triathlete from the pictures at his memorial came about purely because Patrick Fabian posts a lot of pictures of himself doing various athletic activities on his Instagram account and the crew thought it'd be a fun detail to throw in. One of the pictures even had to be edited because it had Tony Dalton (Lalo Salamanca, Howard's murderer) in it.
  • For Walt and Jesse's cameo in the episode "Breaking Bad", the crew wanted the new scene to feature two things: they wanted to have Lalo mentioned somehow, and they needed a scene where they could cover up Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul's aging. The result is the cameo taking place just after the two kidnap Saul in the desert, as it's set at night, Walt and Jesse are wearing ski masks (which also covers up Cranston's unshaved head), and Jesse asks about Lalo because Saul had just mentioned him during the original scene.
• Blackadder Goes Forth was originally meant to end with Blackadder sneaking away from the charge into No Man’s Land. Limited filming time, a director with no experience shooting action, and nothing for a stunt co-ordinator in the budget made the charge scene unusable, but the explosion effects were so terrifying for the actors that Rowan Atkinson refused to do any retakes. While the film editor cycled through the footage trying to figure out what to do, he realized slowing it down made it far more effective. So they slowed the footage, replaced the audio with the theme tune played as a Lonely Piano Piece, and, when an explosion obscured the actors from view, crossfaded to a still of some poppies. The result was an immediately famous (and infamous) hard-hitting Downer Ending.
• Boardwalk Empire:
  • Season 1 ends with the Commodore deciding to go against Nucky. The plan for Season 2 was to give him a large part as the year's Big Bad; however, Dabney Coleman was diagnosed with throat cancer shortly before filming, and the treatment rendered him unable to speak for long periods of time. The season was then retooled with the Commodore being relegated after suffering a paralyzing stroke and Jimmy stepping up as the new leader of the conspiracy, a position for which he was not prepared in the least. This, in turn, had other, long-reaching repercussions: the writers found that they couldn't possibly have Nucky pardoning Jimmy if he was the one that tried to overthrow and then kill him, and so the season ended with Nucky killing Jimmy and the show sacrificing its second-billed star, Michael Pitt, after only two years.
  • In Season 3, Owen Sleater is killed during an attempt to murder Joe Masseria in a public bath. However, the day before shooting was to begin, a piece of plaster from the ceiling fell and they had to delay the scene for security reasons. Meanwhile, a preliminary cut of the episode with every other scene included was completed, and showrunner Terence Winter realized that the lack of the fight scene made the episode better, since now the viewers would learn that the hit had failed at the same time as the other characters: when Masseria sends Owen's body to them in a box.
• Breaking Bad: The series is legendary from a writing standpoint because, with the exception of Season 2, it was all written as they went along:
  • The series was envisioned as taking place in San Bernardino, California, with the crew simply choosing to shoot in Albuquerque because the city offered incredible incentives for filmmakers who worked there. After realizing how much of a pain it was to try to make New Mexico look like California, the crew decided to just have the show be set in Albuquerque, allowing them to make the now-iconic desert scenes.
  • Krazy-8 was originally supposed to actually die in the pilot instead of being revealed to be Not Quite Dead, but the crew liked working with his actor Max Arciniega so much that they decided to keep him around a little longer. As a result, Walt killing him becomes a far more premeditated act, changing it from self-defense to premeditated murder.
  • The writer's strike cut the first season unexpectedly short with only eight episodes instead of the planned thirteen. Fans tend to rejoice for this, because if Season 1 had ended the way that Vince Gilligan originally planned, Jesse would've been killed at the end of it; the space between Seasons 1 and 2 made Vince decide that Aaron Paul had too much potential, and Jesse was ultimately spared. Additionally, while he didn't go into too much detail, Vince revealed in 2018 that the writers strike ultimately spared Hank's life as well, at least until season 5B.
  • Tuco was originally meant to last much longer as a Big Bad, but ultimately Raymond Cruz was too uncomfortable with the character to play him for too long. As a result, Hank kills him via Boom, Headshot! early in Season 2, freeing up the story for Gus to come along as well as creating the storyline of Hank recovering from killing someone (the storyline that he would then carry for the rest of the show).
  • Saul Goodman's few Beneath the Mask moments showing a lack of confidence in his actions and even some hidden moral standards were largely added by Bob Odenkirk, who was a big source of ideas for Saul's character across the show. These moments, though small and hidden across the series, added up quickly, and they eventually paved the way for him to headline the prequel show.
  • Season 2 has a subplot where Jesse gets kicked out of his late aunt's house, which happened because the house got new owners who didn't give them permission to film there. As a result, the season premiere featured a set of the kitchen with the RV blocking the view out the window, before they could work up to this development. They would regain permission prior to the filming of season 3, so they wrote a subplot of Jesse using Saul to buy the house back from his parents.
  • Gus Fring was originally meant to be a one-episode character, but Giancarlo Esposito decided to play the character "as though he had a secret." It got the viewers' attention, so he was brought back for a second episode, which solidified him as an Ensemble Dark Horse — and gave Esposito all the cards when he told executives that he would only come back if he were made a main character. And thus, one of the most iconic television antagonists of all time was born.
  • In the Season 2 finale "ABQ", the original plans were for Saul Goodman to clean up the scene after Jesse's girlfriend Jane overdoses. Bob Odenkirk was unavailable for filming because of a commitment to appear in How I Met Your Mother, so they brought in Jonathan Banks as Mike Ehrmantraut, because they admired his work in Wiseguy. Banks himself thought he would come on and do the role for just that episode, but had been impressed by working alongside Aaron Paul in that scene, and with the overall direction that Vince Gilligan had given for the episode once it aired, so Mike, like Gus, also became a more fleshed out character, and co-lead for Better Call Saul. ^note The creators admitted that, in hindsight, this would have been incredibly Out of Character for Saul anyway, and as such greatly approved of the change even before Banks signed on for more.
  • The Season 4 finale "Face Off" ends on a very conclusive note, with Hector and Gus dead, the ambiguity of Walt staying in the meth trade, and The Reveal that Walt poisoned Brock, because they ultimately weren't sure whether or not they were going to get renewed for another season. When they did get renewed, they preemptively declared it the last one to avoid this problem repeating itself, leading to the much beloved Season 5 and record-breaking finale.
  • One of the saddest moments came about by pure coincidence. In "Ozymandias", Walt kidnaps his daughter and is changing her in a gas station bathroom. When he tries to get her to say "dada", she instead says mama, causing Walt to realize that even his infant daughter had turned against him and make him leave her at a fire station. The scene was originally meant to have Walt make this realization on his own, but Holly's actress saw her mother just off camera and called out for her; Bryan Cranston stayed in character and rolled with it, creating one of the harshest scenes in the entire show.
  • During Saul's rant in "Granite State", he says that the best case scenario for him is managing a Cinnabon in Omaha - which, as Better Call Saul indicates, ends up being his fate. Originally, he was going to say Hot Topic instead (and thus would likely have been working there in BCS), but when the crew discovered that Hot Topic actually sold Breaking Bad merch, they changed the store to avoid any appearance of self-promotion.
  • In "Felina", the writers struggled with how Walt would ultimately get his money to his family, which ended up being solved by, of all things, a fan letter. A fan wrote to Vince Gilligan asking what would happen to Gretchen and Elliot Schwartz, characters who (by that point) hadn't appeared since Season 2, and that gave them the idea to have Walt blackmail them into giving his son the money.
• Chilling Adventures of Sabrina had to significantly reduce Salem's role as compared to other media in the franchise, due to Kiernan Shipka (who plays Sabrina) having a severe cat allergy.
• Charmed:
  • Prue's telekinetic powers evolved from being directed by her squinting her eyes to being directed through her hands. This was done in order to save money on film used to zoom in on Shannen Doherty's eyes when Prue uses her powers.
  • The plot of Phoebe losing her active powers during season six was set up to save the money needed for the wire work used to make her levitate.
  • In the second season, it was revealed that the sisters' mother, Patty, had a forbidden romance with her Whitelighter, setting up a parallel to Piper and Leo's relationship. While nothing else was meant to come of this development, it came in mighty handy when Shannen Doherty left. The writers needed to replace Prue with a new sister, and hey, that's a convenient excuse for why Patty might have kept her a secret...
  • Demons becoming less monstrous and more human-looking as the series progressed was done to save on CG and make up effects, and explained as Upper Level Demons (whom the Sisters faced more of as they grew as Witches) looking more human to better blend in.
• Community:
  • Jeff and Annie's Will They or Won't They? dynamic wasn't initially planned as part of the show, but was written in after the showrunners realized that Joel McHale had much better chemistry with Alison Brie than he did with Gillian Jacobs (Britta), who was originally supposed to be his primary love interest. Conversely: the writers never planned on Britta and Troy becoming a couple, but wrote it in when they realized that Donald Glover had better chemistry with Gillian Jacobs than he did with Alison Brie (who was originally supposed to be his primary love interest).
  • It's fairly well-documented that Pierce's death happened due to Chevy Chase's creative differences with creator Dan Harmon, which ultimately led to him leaving the show after Season 4. Similarly: Star-Burns' (apparent) death late in Season 3 happened because Dino Stamatopoulos quit the show in protest after Harmon was fired by NBC, and refused to return unless he was reinstated; that's also why Star-Burns is revealed to be alive after all in Season 5, which was the season where Harmon returned.
  • The writers initially planned for Troy and Pierce to become best friends over the course of the show, establishing an odd Intergenerational Friendship between the two. This idea was scrapped when it turned out that Chevy Chase didn't get along with most of his castmates. But when Donald Glover and Danny Pudi unexpectedly hit it off and became very good friends off-set, the writers decided to make Troy and Abed best friends instead—leading to one of the most memorable and iconic relationships on the show.
  • The Season 1 episode "Modern Warfare" (the first "paintball episode") was one of the most popular and critically acclaimed episodes in the show's history, but it was also a production nightmare—since it left the entire set spattered with paint, which had to be cleaned up before the rest of Season 1 could be filmed. To avoid running into the same problem with the next paintball episode, the showrunners decided to make it the finale of Season 2, allowing them to drench the set with as much paint as they wanted. The result was "A Fistful of Paintballs" and "For a Few Paintballs More", an epic two-parter about a full-on paintball war between Greendale and City College, which is widely considered to be the show's best season finale.
• Criminal Minds: Will LaMontagne Jr. was initially just meant to be one of the show's many one-off characters. However, when A.J. Cook got pregnant during the third season, the writers decided to incorporate her pregnancy into the plot and have JJ also be pregnant instead of going the normal Hide Your Pregnancy route. Therefore, they had to give JJ a Love Interest quick and, remembering the Ship Tease she had with Will in his introduction episode, brought him back and revealed that JJ had been secretly dating him for the past year. He's since become a recurring character on the show, eventually marrying and having another child (another one of Cook's pregnancies; both of JJ's sons are played by Cook's actual children) with her.
• The Crystal Maze was intended to be a version of Fort Boyard for the UK. When the fort proved unavailable, Channel 4 asked their set designer if he could construct a similar setting. He replied he could, but it would be just as easy to have multiple zones with different themes. They liked the idea.
• Doctor Who:
  • The TARDIS was originally going to be a big, magnificent vehicle. Except the show lacked the funding, so they said that it can disguise itself as anything it wants. Then that turned out to be too expensive, so it stayed as a police call box with a tongue-in-cheek handwave that the chameleon circuit feature was broken. "They said 'we've got a police box from Dixon of Dock Green — let's make a box that's bigger on the inside', and thus was born the single best idea in all of fiction," — Steven Moffat.^note Steven Moffat is mistaken — the Police Box prop was built especially for Doctor Who and was not from Dixon of Dock Green.
  • In the original script of "The Brain of Morbius", Morbius's new body was cobbled together by his devoted robot servant. But it was the cheap story of the season, so they couldn't afford a robot costume as well as Morbius's body. So it was heavily rewritten to make the robot a human mad scientist (played by Philip Madoc, resulting in a classic story).
  • In "Dalek", the titular Dalek spends much of the episode rampaging through the alien museum while being shot by dozens of security guards. The special effects team noted that this would require a lot of Bullet Spark effects to properly sell the Dalek's implacability, which wasn't practical on the time and budget they had. The solution: Give the Dalek a forcefield that melts bullets, established in a single CG shot, and never worry about showing bullet impacts ever again.
  • In "The Sontaran Stratagem", after the scene where the Doctor uses a Logic Bomb on the ATMOS device and jumps out of the car, the latter was supposed to explode. Unfortunately, they didn't have the budget. So the writer decided to have reality ensuing and have the device just fizzle out harmlessly while the Doctor looks disappointed.
  • During filming of the 2009 Easter Special "Planet of the Dead", the double-decker bus used was damaged during shipping to Dubai, which was incorporated into the story (with the bus being damaged while traveling through the worm-hole to San Helios).
    Russell T Davies: I wasn't at all worried when I saw the photographs, I just thought "Oh well, that's what happens when a bus goes through a wormhole."
  • Originally, the First Doctor's regeneration into the Second was to be performed as a cliffhanger. William Hartnell would have his face covered by a cloak, and Episode Four of "The Tenth Planet" would end. In the first episode of "The Power of the Daleks", the cloak would be removed to reveal Patrick Troughton's face. However, the vision mixer discovered that the mixing board was acting up the day of filming in a way that allowed for a controlled overexpose of the image almost to a full white screen. She and the episode's director took advantage of this, quickly called Troughton in, and made the iconic shot of William Hartnell essentially "morphing" into Patrick Troughton.
  • Donna Noble's father Geoffrey Noble was originally supposed to be a supporting character in Series 4 of the new series, but he was said to have died offscreen between the events of "The Runaway Bride" and "Partners in Crime" because his actor, Howard Attfield, became too ill to continue after filming his scenes for "Partners in Crime", and died of cancer not long after. Forced to come up with a replacement character to fill the "father figure" role with almost no notice at all, the producers hired Bernard Cribbins, who had just appeared as a minor character in "Voyage of the Damned", and was retconned into being Donna's grandfather Wilfred Mott.
  • In a related vein: If Wilfred's role had been filled by Geoffrey, it's unlikely that the Doctor would have taken him on as a companion at the climax of "The End of Time", since Geoffrey would presumably have stayed behind to comfort his wife and daughter during the Master's battle with Rassilon (whereas the aloof Wilfred, who was clearly closer with his granddaughter Donna than with her mother, had earlier bonded enough with the Tenth Doctor to accompany him during his last adventure).
  • Matt Smith had to shave his hair off for his role in Lost River, but didn't grow it back in time to sport the Doctor's signature hairstyle, meaning he had to wear a wig over a bald-cap in "The Time of the Doctor". Instead of painstakingly hiding the wig, the Doctor actually takes it off in the episode, and even uses it to smuggle a TARDIS-key into the containment field. Once he enters the truth field and starts spouting truths whether he wants to or not, he mentions that he's wearing a wig multiple times.
    • Even better: the In-Universe-explanation for why he shaved his hair off is because he got bored one day.
  • The Third Doctor had a habit of holding Jo Grant's hand when they ran from the monsters together, because Katy Manning normally wore glasses and was Blind Without 'Em, and the first time she tried running without being guided by him she went hurtling into a tree. This became an iconic enough image that there is a Call-Back to it in the first episode of the revival series, "Rose", in which the Doctor asking Rose to take his hand is a big deal and serves to symbolize her becoming the companion.
  • The Retool that the show went through at the start of the Third Doctor era, in which the Doctor was exiled on Earth and spent much of his time working with UNIT to fight off more local threats, was heavily inspired by the tighter budget and a mandate to begin filming in colour that the show was facing. The largely outdoor location shooting of Jon Pertwee's run reduced the amount of set and costume design work that the show needed, the focus on UNIT gave the show a recurring crew of supporting characters that allowed production to be far more flexible with casting, and the lush countryside setting that the show adopted turned out to be a great showcase for the benefits of colour television. The shift to on-location filming also took advantage of the fact that the BBC's sports and news crews had more experience with colour than their counterparts in the scripted drama departments.
  • The show lost budget between Season 4 and Season 5, by which time the producers had decided to concentrate on Horror and no longer had the benefit of "historicals" as cheap episodes (which could take advantage of Prop Recycling and a BBC crew skilled at Costume Drama). The result of this was the development of the "Base Under Siege" story format, iconically associated with the Second Doctor — tightly plotted, suspenseful horror where the Doctor enters an isolated place besieged by something malevolent and helps the people within fight back against it. This format meant they barely needed to show the monster, and sometimes didn't even need a monster at all — one story uses Deadly Gas, and another uses torrents of white foam.
• Drag Race:
  • The COVID-19 lockdowns complicated matters for the entire franchise: forcing the Season 12 reunion and finale to be filmed via Zoom, halting production of UK Season 2 for seven months, etc. The one positive change that resulted from this involved the show's long-awaited Australian spin-off. It had to be filmed in New Zealand due to the country having fewer Covid restrictions in place, and the show responded by inviting New Zealand queens to compete as well. As a result, the show was retitled RuPaul's Drag Race Down Under (as opposed to just Australia). Post-pandemic, the show continues to be filmed in New Zealand with Kiwi queens competing alongside the Aussies.
  • RuPaul's Drag Race: The show's famous Once a Season "Snatch Game" challenge is a Match Game parody where the queens give their best celebrity impersonation and comedic improvisation. Some Snatch Games go better than others, but in Season 14, the entire cast bombed the challenge except Deja Skye, whose hilarious Lil' Jon impersonation netted her an easy win. Ru decided that all the other queens were up for elimination, and the next episode was entirely dedicated to them lip-syncing for their lives in a round-robin tournament where the losing queens would have to continue lip-syncing until one was ultimately eliminated. The "Lip-Sync LaLaPaRuZa Smackdown" became the highest-rated episode of the season. It was so popular, the challenge was brought back for Season 15 even without the context of every contestant being up for elimination.
  • RuPaul's Drag Race Down Under: The first season's first episode has RuPaul judging the runway fashion show while out of drag, wearing a shirt and jacket. A Holding Both Sides of the Conversation sequence follows, with a second RuPaul onstage, alone in full drag, talking to RuPaul in the jacket, who's sitting with the other judges. He explains that his drag makeup was lost in transit, so he's filming the week's episode entirely out of drag. Later, once the makeup was located or replaced, the onstage sequence was filmed and added to the scene.
• Frasier:
  • Jane Leeves' second pregnancy came at the perfect time, plot-wise, for Niles and Daphne to have a baby in the final season, just ahead of schedule enough for Daphne to give birth in the finale.
  • "Ham Radio" has an In-Universe example. KACL runs a radio drama with Frasier directing and the various radio show hosts as actors. Bulldog comes down with a debilitating case of stage fright during the live broadcast leaving him unable to speak, so Frasier explains that his character is mute. He also explains that the character wears a bell on his head and the sound effects man rings a small bell to simulate the character shaking his head. And when Niles "kills" the cast of characters, the sound effects man again rings the bell when Bulldog's character is killed.
• Friends: During the filming of the aforementioned "The One Where No One is Ready" (see the above entry about Bottle Episodes), Matt LeBlanc dislocated his shoulder during a take of the bit where Joey and Chandler race to claim the chair in Monica's living room, forcing him to wear a sling for several weeks. Rather than delay production, the writers wrote the injury in the show by featuring an opening scene in the next episode where Joey injures himself offscreen from jumping on his bed.
• Parodied in an episode of Israeli sitcom HaPijamot, elaborating several What If? cases. At the end of the episode, they show ‘the story that would have happened if we had No Budget’, showing Asian work immigrants playing the eponymous band, and ‘the story that would have happened if we had No Budget at all’, showing the set with no actors.
• The Joe Schmo Show was a spoof of competition-based Reality Shows, with the concept being that the entire cast were actors who were in on the joke except for one guy: Matt Kennedy Gould, a genuine nobody who participated in the show and assumed that all the interactions were real. The show was initially structured around putting him in silly and bizarre scenarios to overall make him look ridiculous, but over time, he genuinely started to form camaraderie with his fellow "contestants", becoming visibly upset when "Earl" (Franklin Dennis Jones) — his closest friend — was voted off, leading the producers to scramble a goofy sumo wrestling match rigged in his favor to cheer him up... which then accidentally resulted in "Dr. Pat" (a then-unknown Kristen Wiig) getting injured and requiring real-life medical evacuation, which left Matt so guilty that he gave the match's vacation package award to her. From there on out, the show ended up being further rigged in his favor and painting him in the best possible light as everyone else involved (producers, actors, and the audience at home) were too charmed by how likeable Matt was to keep up a potentially mean-spirited charade, though they still waited until the finale after he won to reveal the act (and fortunately, he ended up being a good sport about it).
• Kamen Rider:
  • The original show famously switched main characters for nearly half its run, introducing a second Kamen Rider who took over the series as the original hero, Takeshi Hongou, went off to "fight evil overseas". As one can probably guess, this was caused by Hiroshi Fujioka badly breaking his leg during a stunt, forcing the emergency appearance of a second main character to keep the show going until his return. The existence of multiple Riders, however, would go on to massively shape both the rest of the show and the future of the series. The actor for new hero Hayato Ichimonji also didn't have a motorcycle license, which led them to replace the activation cue for the Transformation Sequence from catching wind currents in his belt while driving to doing a dramatic pose and screaming "Transform!", which would quickly become the defining trope of the entire franchise.
  • Kamen Rider Stronger's partner, Electro-Wave Human Tackle, was a Faux Action Girl who could barely handle anything more than two Mooks in most of her fights. The lack of intensity in her action scenes was due to her actress being asthmatic.^note Sadly, her actress would die of a severe asthma attack years later.
  • The titular character of Kamen Rider Kiva is rather notorious for unlocking his Super Mode final form unusually early (episode 24, for something that normally happens in the mid-30s to early 40s) and almost entirely ignoring his previous forms from that point on. The reason was that the original Kiva suit and early upgrades, with their Fashionable Asymmetry, focus on form over function, and chained-up look obtained by putting actual metal chains on the suit, were incredibly taxing on lead suit actor Seiji Takaiwa. Kiva Emperor was thus brought out earlier than usual to prevent crippling the franchise's best stuntman, with the original suit only brought back for shorter, less action-heavy scenes.
  • Kamen Rider Double was originally going to be set in a flooded city called Suito; but constraints of budget and technical ability made this change to Fuuto, an ecologically-friendly "Windy City" which runs on wind power. The wind turbines became an iconic image within the show, and both Double and the original Kamen Rider have a long-standing use of the word 'Cyclone', so it's very apt, especially since Double was intended to be a partial throwback to the Shōwa era Riders.
• The Last of Us (2023) relocated the events of the original video game's Pittsburgh levels to Kansas City, after the crew deemed the latter easier to recreate in Calgary, as Pittsburgh has an extremely hilly terrain whereas the Midwestern US is every bit as flat as the Canadian Prairie.
• The creators of Lewis created a new pathologist character for the new series. However, then they decided they needed one more character from Inspector Morse to tie the continuity together — and it turned out that the only regular actor from Morse who wasn't dead, retired, or just plain unavailable was one Clare Holman, who had played pathologist Dr. Laura Hobson. The new pathologist character was summarily scrapped, her lines from the pilot were given to Hobson, and we got nine more years (and a delightful Lewis/Hobson romance) out of the delightfully snarky and levelheaded Laura. Nobody is sorry about this.
• Lost:
  • The original plan for the Pilot was for Jack to be a Decoy Protagonist and die at the end, alongside being played by a big-name actor (Michael Keaton) to make it clear that Anyone Can Die; Kate would then step up as the leader of the survivors. The producers convinced the writers not to go through with it, and Keaton didn't want to commit to a full series and dropped out; the result was Matthew Fox signing on, Jack becoming the show's main character, the plane's pilot being killed in his place after giving his exposition on why rescue isn't coming, and Kate's intended story as a woman separated from her husband was given to new character Rose.
  • As filming was concluding on Season 1, the crew realized that the rising tides of Oahu were eventually going to submerge the fuselage set completely, meaning that they needed a reason to get the survivors away from the fuselage permanently. They eventually settled for putting the real-world reason into the story, and thus the survivors had to move further up the beach and create a second camp to avoid a suddenly rising tide.
  • In "Numbers", Hurley witnesses a man fall out of a window; several seasons later, it was revealed that Locke was paralyzed when he was pushed out of a window. The producers admitted that it would've been a fun idea to reveal that the man Hurley saw falling was actually Locke's paralyzing incident, but the timeline had already set the events three years apart from each other, so this potential connection was dropped.
  • In season 2's "Two For The Road", Michael kills Ana Lucia when he moves to free "Henry Gale" from his captivity. Ana Lucia was always intended to die during the season (Michelle Rodriguez had only signed on for one season from the start), which made this moment the right place to do it - however, fan reaction to her character had been pretty negative, so the producers didn't think that her death alone would have enough of a punch. Thus, Libby comes into the Hatch at the exact wrong time and startles Michael into shooting her too, with the next episode actually showing her death. This also had more consequences down the road; Cynthia Watros didn't appreciate her character getting killed off before her story could be told, and thus while the writers wanted to explore her past posthumously, most of her planned appearances fell through until season six's flash-sideways timeline.
    Damon Lindeloff: I have learned that if you kill someone off the show, they are less likely to cooperate with you.
  • In the season two finale, Walt and Michael leave the Island after the latter betrays the survivors. Originally, Walt was meant to stay on the Island and have his mysterious powers actually analyzed and revealed, but Malcolm David Kelly could only look ten years old for so long when only months were passing In-Universe, so they had to write him out earlier than anticipated. They still managed to have him come back in periods where it made sense for him to be older; in one case, it's in a vision (and the fact that he looks older is lampshaded), while the three-year Time Skip mid-series put him at the perfect age to make sporadic appearances until the end of the show.
  • In the first two seasons, the producers received complaints that the show didn't focus on any of the survivors outside of the main group, so the team introduced Nikki and Paulo, two new survivors who began chumming with the main cast basically out of nowhere. They had a multi-episode arc planned, but they were universally despised almost immediately, so the writers wrapped up their arc in "Exposé", killed them both, and moved the show on without them. The writers learned from this mistake and thus future main characters were introduced far slower rather than being shoved in right away, especially the freighter crew from season four; they kept the trend going for the future and only made Ilana and Frank main characters after they had already been on the show for quite some time.
  • If it weren't for the Writer's Strike, Daniel, Charlotte, and Miles may not have been main characters in season four. They were originally meant to have their arcs concluded within a single season (though what their fates would've been if that had happened is unknown), but the writer's strike truncated season four and forced their arcs to be multi-season. Thus, they were promoted to main character status and kept it for the rest of their respective runs.
  • Mr. Eko was originally meant to last far past his death in season 3, with him and Locke having a "yin and yang" style rivalry that would discuss the show's philosophical themes. However, for an unclear reason, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje decided to quit the show early, so Eko's character arc gets wrapped up just before his death in "The Cost of Living". To keep up the philosophical conflict they wanted, Eko's role was added to Jack, creating the Jack vs. Locke philosophical battle that would then run the show for the next two seasons, and would even carry over to the Man in Black after Locke died.
  • In the middle of season three, the writers began running out of ideas for flashbacks, so "Stranger in a Strange Land" focuses on the origins of Jack's shoulder tattoo; these were Matthew Fox's real tattoos, and they even have a different real-life translation from the one given in the show. An entire hour about Jack's tattoo was considered such a waste of an episode that it singlehandedly truncated the rest of the show; before this episode, ABC was willing to take the show to as much as ten seasons, but the fact that the writers straight up ran out of things to write about gave the producers the ammo they needed to negotiate it down to six.
  • "Through the Looking Glass" has Jack learn that his ex-wife Sarah is pregnant. This was not originally planned, but Julie Bowen was pregnant at the time and they decided to keep it in to further emphasize how much she's moved on without him.
  • If season six had lasted as long as the previous seasons, Ilana would've been revealed to be Jacob's daughter, explaining why she became such a crucial member of his forces and why she seems to understand so much about the Island despite having never been there before. Unfortunately, the season's runtime got slashed to the point that it couldn't be worked in, so they solved the problem by abruptly killing her off.
  • "The New Man In Charge" was largely written to finally solve some of the mysteries and plot points that fans were begging for. In particular, it finally answers the question of where the polar bears came from, and they took the opportunity to give Walt and Michael's final arcs some closure by revealing that Hurley's bringing Walt to the Island to save his dad's soul, meaning that Michael won't be stuck on the Island for eternity as some had speculated.
• The distinctive animated sequences in Monty Python's Flying Circus were the result of Terry Gilliam looking for a cheap and fast way to do them. As part of working under the government broadcast company BBC the production had free access to an image bank of paintings, old photographs and the like, which Gilliam then applied with a simple cut and paste method.
• The 13-episode live-action TV series about The Moomins has the overarching plot of the king deciding that the Moomins' bohemian lifestyle doesn't fit in a modern welfare state and that they, as an "ethnic minority" need to be integrated into "normal" society. The most startling change is that he decides their noses are too big and orders them off — which leads to one of the most memorable (and Nightmare Fuelish) aspects of this series, namely that the actors in the Moomin suits take off the overdimensioned Moomin heads/masks they're wearing, revealing their normal human heads underneath. This is not only what the series is remembered for today but is also a pretty effective demonstration of how the Moomins' individuality is threatened by the integration process... but really, the reason behind is probably just as much that the Moomin heads were big, awkward and difficult to deal with on the set — it's extremely clear that the actors can barely see when wearing them, leading to a lot of clumsiness and fumbling around. Removing the heads allowed the actors to move about much more freely.
• This trope is basically Power Rangers' MO. The show recycles footage from Super Sentai, so large parts of the plot are dictated by what appears in the Sentai footage (when it's not doing a straight-up adaptation, of course).
  • Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers is a particularly noticeable example, since it came out when the producers were still getting used to adapting Super Sentai footage. The show turned out to be a bigger hit than anyone expected, so they had to figure out a way to keep it going after they ran out of stock footage from Kyōryū Sentai Zyuranger for the battle sequences. Though they eventually commissioned more stock footage from Toei for Season 2, their shoestring budget still forced them to get creative with their limited footage; Season 3 featured the Rangers losing their powers and becoming ninjas (since they had to wear some sort of costumes for the fight scenes, and color-coded ninja robes were the only ones that the show could afford) and then getting turned into children and having a team of alien allies take over Ranger duties (so that they could replace Zyuranger stock footage with footage from Ninja Sentai Kakuranger).
  • Things also got complicated when the Sixth Ranger Tommy Oliver ended up becoming a Breakout Character; they quickly ran out of stock footage of his Japanese counterpart Burai the Dragon Ranger, since he had rather limited screen time in Zyuranger, but Tommy was far too popular to simply write out of the show. The solution? They wrote a story where Tommy's Green Ranger powers were drained by Rita Repulsa, forcing Zordon to grant him a new set of powers as the White Ranger, with footage of Kōshinsei the Fang Ranger from Gosei Sentai Dairanger cleverly spliced in to make it look like he and the Green Ranger were the same person. Luckily for the producers, this fit Tommy's Heel–Face Turn story arc perfectly: it became well-established that the Green Ranger was his Superpowered Evil Side created by Rita, with the White Ranger as his Good Counterpart created by Zordon.
  • Things smoothed out considerably after the producers took a leap of faith after three years and rebranded the show as Power Rangers Zeo and started using new costumes and stock footage from Chouriki Sentai Ohranger. The tradition of annually rebranding Power Rangers and giving the Rangers new costumes is well-established today, but it was considered a pretty big risk in 1996 since it meant abandoning the phenomenally successful formula that was the original Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers.
  • When Power Rangers Zeo began its run, using stock footage from Chouriki Sentai Ohranger for the battle sequences, the producers ran into a new problem. After putting so much effort into keeping the Rangers at six members so that they could keep the Breakout Character Tommy as part of the team (see above), now they had to bring the team back down to five members since Ohranger began with just five Rangers. Combined with harassment that David Yost faced from the production crew when he came out as gay, culminating in him leaving the show, this led to Billy the Blue Ranger—the only remaining member of the original five Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers—voluntarily retiring from active Ranger duty to become the team's Mission Control and tech support, with the explanation that the mystical Zeo crystal only had enough energy to power five Rangers. It was an unavoidable difficulty, but it went a long way towards making Zeo feel like the End of an Era. Tellingly, when Zeo eventually brought back Jason as the Gold Ranger (the second Sixth Ranger in the franchise's history), they actually bothered to write him out before the season finale so that they wouldn't run into the same problem in the next season.
  • In Power Rangers Lost Galaxy, Valerie Vernon was diagnosed with leukemia and had to leave the show. Since the premise gave limited opportunities to have her character Kendrix the Pink Ranger Put on a Bus (it was set on a space colony), they decided to have her go out in a Heroic Sacrifice, leading to one of the few instances in the history of the show where a Ranger or one of their allies is killed in action. In turn, casting her replacement had its own effects on the plot; when plans to bring back the previous season's Pink Ranger fell through, they instead had last season's redeemed Big Bad return as the new Pink Ranger and go through a redemption arc.
  • The reliance on Sentai footage affected Power Rangers Time Force in a more negative way. It was originally planned to involve a lot more time travel, with the rangers jumping to different locations and time periods in different episodes. However they then realised that every single Giant Monster vs. Megazord fight in the series was set within the same city and landscape, which severely limited the locations they could have the Monster of the Week appear in. This then led to the infamous intro with plenty of shots of different eras and dress styles being an outright lie, as most of this came from a single episode that was set in a movie studio, with that week's monster being a reality-warping director that sent each ranger to a different movie scene.
  • In Power Rangers Samurai, Eka Darville had joined a union since his stint as Ranger Red in Power Rangers RPM. The producers circumvented this issue by having Ranger Red appear in morphed form, handwaving an excuse for why he prefers to not unmorph and had Eka Darville provide voice-over work under a pseudonym. This played perfectly into the plot of the Samurai team being distrusful of him.
  • Power Rangers Megaforce was set to be the franchise's 20th anniversary, and Super Sentai had just recently celebrated its own 35th anniversary with Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger. However, the contract Saban had signed with Toei stipulated that they had to adapt every Sentai series in sequence^note Seasons 2 and 3 of Mighty Morphin' used some costumes and elements from Gosei Sentai Dairanger and Ninja Sentai Kakuranger, but the lion's share of their footage was skipped entirely, so they had to go through Tensou Sentai Goseiger before they could touch Gokaiger. On the other hand, their contract with Nickelodeon stipulated that each series had to be divided into two separate seasons of 20 episodes each. Saban used these two restrictions in concert by adapting both Goseiger and Gokaiger in the same series, using the split-season format to justify bringing in new costumes, villains, and a plotline designed to allow for veteran Rangers to cameo.
  • Power Rangers RPM differed from its source material Engine Sentai Goonger in a number of ways, most prominently by having its Big Bad Venjix be a sentient computer virus^note whereas Go-Onger's villains were mechanical aliens who fed on pollution; the season also ended with the implication that Venjix survived the final battle by downloading himself into the Red Ranger's Morpher. Most fans assumed this Sequel Hook would never be resolved (in part due to the franchise changing ownership twice), but when Tokumei Sentai Go-Busters likewise featured a villainous computer virus, the writers seized the opportunity and had "Evox" turn out to be Venjix in a new form, which not only resolved the dangling plot thread but also helped tie the season more tightly to previous shows, even bringing RPM's mentor Doctor K in the final arc and help the Beast Morphers team defeat their common enemy once and for all.
• Morecambe and Wise. Morecambe and Wise's first television attempt 'Running Wild' was a disaster so when they returned to tv in 1961, they were paired with experienced writers Sid Green and Dick Hills. Green and Hills sketches initially had huge casts which Morecambe and Wise protested about as they felt they were losing attention but Green and Hills refused to change citing their greater experience. This changed when there was an Equity strike meaning it was impossible to cast anyone other than Morecambe and Wise themselves (who were members of a different union, Associated Entertainers, and therefore unaffected) leaving them to concentrate on the pair's interplay which became their trademark
• The sitcom The Real O'Neals, which centered around gay teenager Kevin coming out to his Catholic family, had most of the first season air Out of Order. In addition to the usual continuity errors, this made his mother Eileen's acceptance of his sexuality vary wildly between episodes instead of her slowly becoming more and more accepting of it. Critics noted this made the show oddly realistic, seeing as it mirrored the usual mixed feelings people get in those situations.
• Riverdale: Archie has a broken hand in the Season 1 finale and throughout Season 2. This is because KJ Apa actually broke his hand while filming the S1 finale scene where Archie punched through the icy lake, and In-Universe the hand broke in the same incident.
• Snowpiercer: The influenza epidemic that hits the train off-screen in the six-month time skip between Seasons 2 and 3 was written in to explain the absence of several actors who couldn't resume shooting due to the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting restrictions on travelling. As such, both Last Australians, Mama Grandé, and Dr. Headwood have died of influenza by the Season 3 premiere.
• Star Trek:
  • Star Trek: The Original Series: TOS is absolutely made of this trope.
    • An extremely low budget resulted in the invention of many modern sci-fi tropes; things such as deflector shields (thought up because producers and creators couldn't afford to create new models of a damaged Enterprise every time they did a space battle), transporters (because they couldn't create and film shuttle landings constantly), Rubber-Forehead Aliens (makeup technology was poor in the 1960s, and the show's creators had to scrounge), and even (according to Common Knowledge^note It was certainly the most famous one, which is why it took a fair bit of research to discover it was the sixth of its kind) the first interracial kiss shown on television (actors William Shatner and Nichelle Nichols were ordered to film an alternate version where they don't, but deliberately sabotaged every take to drain the budget). And that's not even mentioning things not affected by budgets, such as cloaking devices and hyposprays.
    • Inverted with the flat forehead Klingons. Because of low budget, Klingons only had a mostly ethnic makeup in the original series. In the movies and later series, which had better budgets and better makeup technology, they obviously had the ridged foreheads. In Enterprise, a Prequel to the Original Series, they actually introduced a storyline to explain the change.
    • Played straight with the model used to depict Romulan Warbirds in the original series. The designer apparently wrecked the model after filming its first appearance, and there wasn't time to fix it or come up with a new one, so they used the Klingon Warship's model instead. This led to the conclusion that Klingons and Romulans had formed an alliance, with warships sent over to the Romulans and cloaking devices sent to the Klingons. Consequences of this action influenced the storyline of the entire franchise forever.
    • The hypospray, a device for injecting medicine without breaking the skin, was put into the Original series since NBC regulations at the time forbade the showing of needles for drugs on-screen.
    • Many, many episodes were conceived simply because they they had access to sets and props from other television shows, allowing them to do stories set on alien worlds that coincidentally resembled periods of human history. Examples include: "Miri", "Patterns of Force", "A Piece of the Action", and "Bread and Circuses".
    • The plot of "The Menagerie" was written so that the showrunners could repurpose footage from the original series pilot "The Cage" (which featured a substantially different Enterprise crew) by making a direct sequel to its plot and retroactively declaring that it took place prior to the events of the first season. But since the showrunners couldn't get actor Jeffrey Hunter to reprise his role as Captain Christopher Pike from "The Cage", the story included the revelation that Pike had been injured in a radiation leak since the events of "The Cage", leaving him horribly disfigured and unable to speak—allowing him to be played by a different actor wearing prosthetics, who didn't need to speak. After that, it became well-established that Pike was the captain of the Enterprise before Kirk.
  • Star Trek: Deep Space Nine:
    • Jadzia Dax was a "joined species," an alien who was actually two entities sharing one body. Both entities (Jadzia, the "host," and Dax, the "symbiont") were intended to remain on the show for the entire run, but actress Terry Farrell decided to leave the show at the end of its penultimate season. So the writers killed off Jadzia, but kept Dax, transplanting the symbiont into a new host, Ezri (Nicole De Boer). The suddenness of Jadzia's death and Ezri's arrival worked greatly into the storyline, with Ezri's main conflict being her having to form new relationships with people who'd already been her (Dax's) friends—and, in Worf's case, husband.
    • During the planning for a revisitation of a classic TOS episode, the producers met in a pizza parlor to discuss which episode it would be. At this point, one of them noticed that Charlie Brill, who had played the villain in "The Trouble With Tribbles", was in the parlor with them, which settled the matter. Brill does reappear in "Trials and Tribble-ations", as the same character as before, and triggers the revisitation by using Time Travel to Make Wrong What Once Went Right.
      Ira Steven Behr: "It shows that God is a Deep Space 9 fan."
    • Nana Visitor got pregnant. The writers didn't like the idea of Kira having a baby with her lover Vedek Bareil, so Kira became an emergency surrogate mother for another character, Keiko O'Brien. Amusingly, this one overlaps with Reality Subtext: she had the baby with her then-husband Alexander Siddig, who plays station physician Dr. Julian Bashir; in-universe, Bashir is the one who performs the fetal transplant, and Kira openly grouses at him for putting her body through hell.
    • DS9 pretty much ran on this trope, to the point that "make it a virtue" was a behind-the-scenes Catchphrase.
      Ira Steven Behr: Make it a virtue! Every time we got stuck and something wasn't working, we'd say, "let's make it a virtue!" We should have had T-shirts made up.
  • Star Trek: Voyager didn't do so well its first three seasons, coming off as a re-hash of previous Star Trek incarnations. In a last-ditch effort to save the show from cancellation, the writers created Seven of Nine, whose tight suit would hopefully keep ratings afloat. But a combination of juicy writing material and a superb acting performance from Jeri Ryan resulted in her becoming a Breakout Character. She also brought along plotlines that gave the show a voice of its own to distinguish itself from the other Star Trek spinoffs (a focus on family and humanity) and brought in some much-needed villains that the audience could take seriously, the Borg. Her catsuit wound up being little more than an added bonus for male viewers, and a source of humor for less serious episodes.
    • During Season 5, the set of the bridge was damaged after a fire, so while it was repaired, they quickly assembled a script that allowed most of the action to take place away from the bridge, "Bride Of Chaotica!", a holodeck story that was a Genre Throwback to sci-fi films of the 1930s such as Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers.
• Supernatural:
  • The third season's plotline of Dean being condemned to Hell was originally planned to be resolved by Sam learning how to use his demonic powers to rescue him. However, the 2007-08 WGA strike occurred during the third season's production, forcing the season to be cut short with no time to properly build up Sam's powers beforehand. The showrunners thus had to come up with an alternative way to get Dean out of Hell. Their solution? Have Dean be rescued by an angel named Castiel and start introducing angel mythology during the fourth season to plausibly explain why an angel would be interested in Dean's fate. That's right; the series' Breakout Character, the resulting legendary Ho Yay between Dean and Castiel, and the entirety of the angel lore that eventually took over the plot exists solely because of a writers' strike.
  • Dean's Big Eater tendencies came about because Jensen Ackles improvised a moment where he swiped food during a funeral. The writers decided that this would mesh well with his backstory of constantly having to live and the move and thus valuing free food wherever he could find it, turning it from a single funny moment to an outright character trait - to the point that when Dean doesn't eat something, it's a sign that something is seriously wrong.
• Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles:
  • The subplot in the first few episodes in which Cromartie, the main Terminator pursuing the Connors, gets blown up and has to rebuild himself with a different face (as seen in the page image for The Nth Doctor), was introduced because Garret Dillahunt, who the showrunners wanted for the role, had a scheduling conflict for the pilot. Cromartie's original "face" was played for one episode by Owain Yeoman.
  • The first season finale originally was going to have a massive fight scene between the FBI SWAT team and Cromartie. When the budget turned out to be too low for it, the writing team got creative. This resulted in a chilling, minimalistic sequence where Cromartie slaughters the FBI agents off-screen and tosses their bodies into the hotel swimming pool, seen from a point of view at the bottom of the pool. All while Johnny Cash's "When The Man Comes Around" plays.
• That '70s Show's famous "circle" sequence—where the kids would have a conversation while siting around in a circle in Eric's basement, with the camera rotating to each of them in turn—was conceived as a way to get around network censorship. The kids were depicted as casually smoking marijuana on occasion, but the showrunners weren't actually allowed to show them smoking onscreen—so they used the rotating camera technique to subtly convey them passing around a joint in a circle, rotating to each of them just after they'd taken a hit.
• WandaVision:
  • In the final episode, the townspeople confront Wanda after Agatha "wakes them up," forcing Wanda to see just how much mental pain she was inflicting on them by making them act out roles in her sitcom fantasies. Originally, they were going to swarm her like zombies and attack her, but this was dropped due to COVID-19 filming delays. Jac Schaeffer found this change to be more psychologically compelling as it gave the residents more of a voice.
  • Darcy's incredibly brief role in the last episode is also a product of the COVID-19 delays. Kat Dennings couldn't attend the new filming dates, the one scene she had already filmed^note a setpiece where Monica, Darcy, Billy, Tommy, and "Fietro"/Ralph Bohner try to steal the Darkhold from Agatha's house and have to fight off her pet rabbit, Senor Scratchy wasn't being used, and they needed Darcy to have some kind of role in the story's resolution rather than be left hanging since her last scene in Episode 7 was Vision abandoning her while she was stuck in an eternal traffic jam. So her brief appearance is limited to her ramming her vehicle into Hayward's car to stop him from escaping, then saying her one line (which Dennings filmed in front of a bluescreen), then skips out on the debriefing afterwards.
• Some of the production staff of The West Wing have claimed that the show's ending was rewritten due to the sudden death of John Spencer (Leo McGarry), although series creator Aaron Sorkin has disputed this. Supposedly, the final season's presidential election storyline was originally going to end with Arnold Vinick winning—but when Spencer's death forced the writers to kill off Leo (who was Matthew Santos' running mate), they decided to have Santos win instead, since it would have been much too depressing for Santos to lose both Leo and the election.
• Originally, the puzzle board for Wheel of Fortune was intended to be entirely automatic, much like the board on the original Concentration. However, the set designers didn't have time to finish building it before they started taping the pilot, so the board was altered to have each letter be turned manually by a Lovely Assistant (originally Susan Stafford from 1975-82, then the far more iconic Vanna White from 1982 onward). The mechanical board was replaced with a computerized set of CRT monitors in 1997, but White stayed.
  • The monitors (which had moved well on to flatscreens) also allowed for a special Disney-themed week in 2019 where Vanna White had to take on hosting duties, due to Pat Sajak having to go to the hospital for emergency surgery. Minnie Mouse (the mascot theme-park-character version) took Vanna's place at the puzzle board, and "Disney magic" (the producers behind the scenes with the electronic components) allowed her to reveal the letters without touching the board.
• The Wire:
  • One brief scene in Season 2 featured a number of neighborhood kids playing cops and robbers, with one kid declaring "It's my turn to be Omar!" Fast forward a few years, and that same kid, now given the name Kenard, appears again in Season 4 and in Season 5 assassinates Omar after seeing him hobbling on crutches and being disappointed at how the legend appears in person. Dennis Lehane revealed in an interview that this was actually a total coincidence and the producers had no idea the same actor had been cast for both roles until it was pointed out to them after the episode aired. In this case, it resulted from a lower budget than previous seasons that caused them to have to call up actors who'd worked for them previously instead of casting brand new ones but looked like an intentional case of Foreshadowing.
  • Minor supporting actors Robert Colesberry (Detective Ray Cole) and Richard DeAngelis (Colonel Raymond Foerster) both unexpectedly died during production, leading the writers to write in the deaths of their characters. ^note  Colesberry died of complications from heart surgery, and DeAngelis succumbed to cancer while undergoing treatment They got in-universe funerals both times, with the police officers throwing a traditional Irish wake, and Landsman delivering a eulogy to the tune of "Body of an American". This ended up influencing the series finale: when Jimmy McNulty is thrown off the force in the final episode, his co-workers jokingly throw him a wake to celebrate the death of his career, complete with Landsman delivering a "eulogy" while "Body of an American" plays.
  • McNulty (temporarily) leaves the Major Crimes Unit to become a beat cop at the end of Season 3 when he finds himself struggling to find a new purpose following the death of Stringer Bell, resulting in him being Out of Focus for most of Season 4. In Real Life, Dominic West requested that the showrunners reduce his role in Season 4 so that he could spend more time with his family.
• The elaborate, layered Myth Arc on The X-Files, which would go on to influence the Myth Arc structure of dozens of other shows, only exists because Chris Carter had to find some plot-relevant way to write Gillian Anderson out of the show for maternity leave. Word of God says the Myth Arc was not planned and the Big Bad of the series, the Cigarette Smoking Man, was, until then, just an "extra leaning on a shelf."

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