Writing Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for the craft of professional writing, including fiction, non-fiction, technical, scholarly, and commercial writing. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
Does it make sense to reset your characters' development in a episodic show like South Park or Family Guy?
I often see that the characters ignore some of the things that happened in previous episodes. Is it a good idea, or is it something that can alienate your viewers? Why is this often done? What are the pros and cons?
It is my opinion that every episode in a long running and episodic series should be considered to happen in an alternate universe of its own, separate from the alternate universes of other episodes. except when one episode is clearly a sequel to an earlier episode.
We can imagine that the creators of an episodic and non serialized series search thousands and millions of alternate universes for ones in which the protagonists have interesting experiences which can make good stories - and which the protagonists survive.
And thus a writer can find ways to make it explicit that different episodes of his series happen in alternate universes.
So a series about a secret agent named Bond Jameson could have a episode that begins when his boss decides to send him to Egypt and not to Libya. The next episode could open with the same scene only his boss decides to send him to Libya and not Egypt.
The old cop comedy Car Fifty Four Where Are You? (1961-1963) had a theme song describing the tasks it might be assigned.
There's a holdup in the Bronx,
Brooklyn's broken out in fights;
There's a traffic jam in Harlem
That's backed up to Jackson Heights;
There's a Scout troop short a child,
Khrushchev's due at Idlewild;
Car 54, Where Are You?
So in a police comedy or drama or action show several episodes might happen on the same date , each opening with the dispatcher deciding whether to send car 45 to the scene of a holdup, or a traffic jam, or a visiting foreign leader, or a street fight. And in each such episode the dispatcher makes a different decision and the cops have different experiences at the different places they are sent.
And in a science fiction series the starship Enterprising might sometimes have different episodes set at the same time, where they are sent on different missions to different stars systems. And maybe sometimes the Enterprising might travel to an alternate universe where they meet the starship Invincible, which is a big surprise to both crews. In the universe the Invincible is from the Enterprising was destroyed by the Negative Space Wedgie at Zorgton V, and the Invincible later destroyed the Negative Space Wedgie, while in the universe the Enterprising is from, the Invincible was destroyed by the Negative Space Wedgie at Zorgton V, and the Enterprising later destroyed the Negative Space Wedgie.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NegativeSpaceWedgie
And of course a writer Could write episodes where the protagonists ae defeated and even killed by the problem of the week. Each such episode should followed by another episode that starts the same but at a critical moment something happens differently followed by increasingly different events leading up to the protagonists surviving.
You, as the creator, have to decide about the following two things: (1) whether your work is "episodic", or whether it relies on continuity; (2) whether your work is more serious or more comedic in nature.
(1) Some serial works are very much intended to be composed of individual episodes, and it should not matter greatly in which order they are consumed (read/watched/etc.) Surely, if you read/watch the episodes out of order, you may miss an occasional reference, but this should not detract greatly from the enjoyment of the episode. In this case it should not matter all that much if you reset the characters' development after a single episode (TvTropes calls this Negative Continuity). On the other hand, some serial works are very much continuity-reliant: if something happens in an episode, we expect the changes to stick in the following episodes. Here, resetting character development would be a bit more problematic. As a creator, you have to decide which of these two models you wish to follow.
(2) In more serious works, character development is serious business, and it is expected that it should "stick" — if a character learns a life lesson, he should not simply forget about it in the next episode or next instalment. On the other hand, in a comedic work such as Family Guy or South Park this is much more tolerated — the "life lessons" that characters learn are not expected to be taken all too seriously, so a form of negative continuity (where characters forget all they learned in the previous episode) is much more common.
