Status Quo Is God/Live-Action TV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Examples of Status Quo Is God in Live-Action TV include:

  • In House, on three separate occassions House regains the use of his leg without pain and no longer has to walk with a cane, but due to various circumstances he never stays that way. Similarly, House has a vicodin addiction for most of the series, and while he does remain clean of vicodin for more than a season, he eventually does start taking it again.
  • Saved by the Bell was the king of this, with new girlfriends constantly being introduced for Zack and disappearing after their one episode, even though they're usually set up the way that other shows would introduce recurring characters. It was especially Egregious in the cases of the homeless girl who (along with her father) was about to move into Zack's house, as well as Slater's previously unseen sister. While Lisa (being a main cast member) didn't disappear after the episode where she and Zack started dating, the relationship was dropped after the one episode. The only non-main cast girlfriend to stick around was Stacy during the "Malibu Sands" mini-season, but she still suffered from this trope, as even though the run of episodes ended with them saying they'd stick together in a long-distance relationship while she went back to New York, she was never mentioned again after the Malibu Sands recap episode at the beginning of the senior year season. Also, you didn't have to be a Zack love interest to suffer from this: Denise Richards' character, in the last Malibu Sands episode was set up as a new recurring or regular character ("She's going to Bayside with us!") and a love interest for Slater, but never seen again. Earlier, Violet disappeared without explanation after a several episode run that left Screech without his girlfriend and pining for Lisa again.
  • iCarly: Every plot that involves a conflict between Carly and Sam, or a certain incident threatens the loss of one of the Three Amigos ends up being resolved on the same episode. Also, there has been exactly one recurring love interest, and it wasn't for any of the 3 main characters.
  • JAG & NCIS: Both has a strong emphasis on character development, continuity, and story arcs, so this trope really just applies to some aspects of the shows. Any attempt to dissolve the teams is crushed mercilessly or repaired by the season premiere and any new Love Interest is evil.
  • Often Played for Laughs on Arrested Development, whenever the narrator says "next time on Arrested Development." What he says will happen never happens in the next show, but is most often a brief explanation how everything ends up exactly the way it was before in time for the next episode. For example, when Micheal set fire to the Banana stand, he is shown rebuilding it during the "next time." When he was arrested after a misunderstanding involving the forced abduction of a Hispanic housekeeper, he is shown being set free because she could not identify him in a police lineup.
  • Power Rangers both follows and averts this trope. Most of the time, the monster is defeated, and things go back to normal (with any damage being repaired by next episode). But there's times when they get new Zords, a new ranger, or a new Big Bad, who tends to stick around until the end of the season.
  • According to producer Ron Moore, the 2004 Battlestar Galactica makes a conscious effort to avert this trope, the idea being to introduce irrevocable change on a regular basis so the show doesn't stagnate and become the same episode over and over again. Some viewers naturally experience possible side-effects.
  • The original Battlestar Galactica played this trope straight for the most part, with the exception of having Baltar captured halfway through its run and frequently being visited in the Prison Barge whenever the heroes needed him for information. And adding a few new regular and recurring characters such as Sheba. The status quo of the Fleet leaving the colonies in search of Earth (and never really finding it) remained unchanged up until the final episode.
  • While the first season of Chuck played this straight, particularly with Chuck and Sarah's Will They or Won't They?, later seasons started averting it hard.
    • Chuck gets a different enemy organization each season whose situation changes over the course of the season until Chuck ultimately defeats them.
    • Chuck and Sarah's relationship was resolved and steadily advanced, until they got married.
    • Chuck's intersect evolved several times going from just data mining, to data mining enemy information, to combat and skill enhancement, to being removed, possibly forever.
    • Chuck embraces spy life, and trains to be more capable and cunning and relies on the intersect less and less.
    • Casey's relationship with his daughter evolves over time.
    • Grimes became the assistant manager, then a spy, then the manager of the Buy More/cover agent, and then the intersect.
    • Multiple people got brought into the masquerade over the years, starting with Awesome, then Grimes, and then Ellie.
  • Gilligan's Island
    • Obviously this series was built entirely around this trope—i.e. it's all about how they want to get off the island; but that would end the series, so it can't possibly happen.
      • Years after the series ended, there was a special where they did get off the island. There was a sequel to the special, as well, where they returned to the island and converted it into a tourist destination. Needless to say, it just wasn't the same.
      • In the television movie Rescue From Gilligan's Island, Gilligan finds a valuable piece of an exploded satellite, a tsunami washes everyone off the island, they return home, there's secret agent shenanigans, and at the end they all go on another boat trip, get caught in a hurricane... and wind up right back on the island.
  • Gilmore Girls suffered from this to an extreme, it was bad enough that essentially nothing ever happened in a general sense but the arcs relating to various boyfriends especially were forgone conclusions. No matter what it was never going to work out.
  • Glee. Dear God in Heaven, Glee. No matter how emphatically Rachel walks out of the club, Finn makes out with...someone new, or Kurt is compassionate to his bully Karofsky, by the end of the episode it will all be back. Even Kurt changing schools only lasted a few episodes.
    • A notable example is the way that the glee club is persistently considered to be unpopular despite repeated incidents of them being the focus of rapturous responses from the student body at some of their performances. Santana even thought she could win enough votes to become prom queen by getting Kurt to come back to McKinley after he went to Dalton. This despite the fact that both before and after his return much was made of how much homophobic hostility towards him there was from the student body, and of course the question of why, if the students hate the glee club, they should care about improving their chances at Nationals.
  • Lampshaded in the pilot episode of Supergirl, where Kara quickly rejects the Stripperiffic costume James suggests before using the more iconic look.
  • Psych. Shawn and Jules and their relationship. They've never really displayed any overt affection towards each other, but Shawn has turned down some relationships with characters that would obviously change the dynamic of the show because of some unspoken thing that they'll get together eventually.
    • This season Shawn has a girlfriend and Jules is starting to be open with her feelings for Shawn as well so this may change soon.
    • The finale minutes of the last episode before the mid season 5 break had Shawn and Jules finally kissing, just as Jules was beginning to seriously date Declan (Shawn 2.0)
  • Burn Notice. Whatever happens and whatever Mike does, he's going to stay in Miami. The change is in how Mike deals with it, and by the middle of season three, he's reconciled himself to giving up figuring out who burned him.
    • Lampshaded when Mike returns at the beginning of Season Four, only to find Sam and Fi are already embroiled in a case-of-the-week as if he had not disappeared into a secret prison for several weeks. He protests this, and Fiona reveals they'd taken a client out of respect to him and his memory.
  • British sci-fi comedy Red Dwarf tends to subscribe to this most of the time. It doesn't matter if one of the crew is turned from robot to human, or if reality itself is collapsing, status quo will almost always return. Exceptions are made for the start of the 6th, 7th and 8th seasons, where a new Status Quo will be applied for the rest of that season, no matter how little sense it makes. This even includes bringing back a former character, who had left to go hop around the multiverse at random. However, because it's a scifi-sitcom, this series has a decent excuse.
    • They do kind of make a lame attempt to explain the changes (they're in Starbug now because Lister forgot what planet he parked Red Dwarf behind?), but the start of Season 7 is particular egregious considering the way 6 ended.
  • Seven Days has essentially no character development. Frank and Olga never get their relationship past the flirting phase. Donovan never gets to backstep (or do much of anything else). Ramsey still hates Frank's guts all throughout the series even though Frank stuck out his neck to protect him on multiple occasions.
    • It's partly, though not entirely, justified by the show's Time Travel premise: that virtually all the onscreen character development gets literally reset-buttoned at the end of every single episode must make the situation infuriating for Frank, since he's the only one who can remember any of it.
  • As irritating as this trope can be in light-hearted series, it's even moreso in serious drama. Spooks has managed to hit both Anyone Can Die and Status Quo Is God, the latter for destroying half of south-east England, murdering the Royal Family, killing the parliament and leaving one of their main cast on death's door, before revealing the whole thing was a training exercise.
    • To be fair, it was explained to be such at the start of the episode.
  • An accusation sometimes leveled at Star Trek: Voyager. Perhaps the more Egregious example comes from the episode "Deadlock." The ep kicks off with the surprise deaths of Harry Kim and Ensign Wildman's newborn baby daughter Naomi. This major story development is quickly averted via the convenient creation of an exact duplicate of Voyager and its crew. Said duplicate sticks around just long enough to fill out the episode's runtime, after which it is destroyed, and all the duplicates die...except for the doubles of Harry and Naomi Wildman, who make it over to the real Voyager; the Harry clone is explicitly given the job of replacing the real Harry. Everyone on the ship treats him as if he were the original and no one ever mentions it again.
    • It helps that the duplicate was created that same day, and that there really was no way to tell which Harry (or for that matter which ship) was the "real" one.
    • Another episode dealt with the "Year of Hell," which was foreseen by Kes, yet no one remembers to steer away from the race that started it. The year gets progressively worse, killing most of Voyager's crew, most of the survivors leaving on shuttles, and Voyager itself quickly losing power. Janeway initiates a Reset Button by ramming the enemy ship with Voyager. Since the Doomsday Weapon was based on altering time, it's destruction reset the entire year, and Janeway making the decision to go around.
    • Prior to Deep Space Nine (and arguably The Next Generation), this was the standard procedure for Star Trek. Likewise for the Star Trek novels, to not interfere with any of the shows or movies.
    • "Tuvix" is a prime example. Reviewer Tim Lynch said that the reason Janeway decided to destroy Tuvix and restore Neelix and Tuvok despite the ship being better off without them and most of the crew loving him is that Ethan Phillips and Tim Russ had contracts.
  • Although the plots of Seinfeld implicitly offer up an unlimited number of hilarious, deliciously complex, irony-steeped Aesops, the characters never, ever learn anything from them and in every episode they are as shallow and petty as they were in the previous one. In fact, in nine years of adventures, the only change they ever went through was that by the Finale they ran out of new things to talk about and started repeating what they had been talking about in the Pilot.
  • Lampshaded by That '70s Show. Kelso complains at length that he's gone for the entire summer and nothing's changed. The minute he leaves, Jackie and Hyde are all over each other.
  • If Status Quo Is God, Babylon 5 regularly commits deicide. Drastic, lasting changes often occur from episode to episode. Even in one relatively standalone episode from Season 2, an entire race is killed off. This is the series that gave us the trope name for Nothing Is the Same Anymore. Several of the actors commented that it was a great show to work on because they never knew what would be happening next and it was a given that their characters would change significantly over the course of the show's events.
  • When's the last time an episode of Monk changed something in the continuity? Even the "Trudy bomb" is losing its impact because the last several episodes that involved her case in some way didn't change anything or reveal anything. Monk has been mired in its' own status quo for quite a long time, and even the season finales haven't really changed anything.
  • Merlin. It wasn't so apparent in series one, because nothing terribly earth-shattering happened, but then the last episode made it look like things were finally going to get shaken up a little, only to reverse it all at the start of series two - Merlin is forced to go back on his vow not to speak to the dragon again; Morgana finds out for certain about her magic, freaks out, and runs away, but at the end of the episode she's back and things are more or less exactly as they were; Gwen and Arthur start to fall in love, only to agree that it wouldn't work out; Merlin gets a girlfriend and vows to run away with her, but by the end of the episode she's dead, and the chances are he'll be over it by next week, And then worst of all, Arthur finds out the truth about his birth and tries to kill his father, only to be persuaded it was all a lie and go back to his 'all magic is evil' attitude. However, it looks like this may possibly change soon - at some point this series, the dragon is going to be released.
    • Thankfully, well and truly shattered by The Fires of Idirsholas - the Dragon has been released, and will shortly wreak havoc on Camelot. Morgana has left with Morgause after Merlin tries to poison her. Hopefully they won't just hit the reset button again...
    • Season four has seen the writers avert this trope entirely, killing off Lancelot and Uther within the first couple of episodes.
  • The Mighty Boosh has Howard Moon. An unwritten rule seems to be that anything that could possibly maybe lead to him being happy will be killed off or revealed to be some horrible prank.
  • Roseanne arguably played this relatively straight for eight seasons, then in the last season decided to avert it entirely, with the Conners winning the lottery, not losing it by the end of the episode. They remained rich until the end of the season when it was revealed that Roseanne had been making up the entire thing to try and cope with Dan's death. Many believe all of this to be the point where the show Jumped the Shark, showing that Tropes Are Not Bad.
  • Eureka averted it in a bold move; despite some sacrifices (Poor Jo Lupo) when the 4th season saw them travel through time and permanently alter their present, introducing Grant from the year 1947 and making reassigning Lupo and Fargo to superior roles.
  • Big Bang Theory. While it does have some story and character arcs, there are a surprising amount of Filler episodes in which something will upset the balance of the main characters lives only to be completely ignored forever after. A couple of examples are the girl who moved in upstairs and became something of a rival to Girl Next Door Penny (but she disappears in the next episode and is never heard from again) and the trip the four guys take to the arctic (they are instantly back at the beginning of the next episode with very little lasting change).
    • Even Lampshaded by Sheldon. After Amy kisses him while drunk,, he suggests they treat their relationship like a malfunctioning computer and restore it to the last point they both agree that it worked (which, given that this is Sheldon we're talking about, is quite a mature thing to suggest).
    • In the fourth season finale, it is shown that Penny slept with Raj. Cut to the next season, after one episode, everything is back to normal again.
  • Lampshaded on an episode of Cheers, when an old man came into the bar and commented on how he hadn't been there in 20 years, and noted how many things had changed—including, he said, "the wallpaper behind Norm."
  • In the How I Met Your Mother episode "Blitzgiving," we are introduced to Ted and Marshall's college buddy "The Blitz," who possesses a curse that makes awesome things happen... right after he leaves a room. Over the course of the episode, the curse is passed to Ted, then Barney, but it returns to The Blitz during the end credits.
  • While many aspects do change in Smallville, there are at least two things that remain the same. The first is it will not take long before a Brought Down to Normal Clark regains his powers. The second is that the people who are destined to know he has powers will be the only ones to keep that information. When Clark wanted Jor-El to restore Chloe's memories without her knowing his secret, Chloe remembered two episodes later. The characters who aren't supposed to know will have Easy Amnesia.
    • In a short-term Status Quo Is God, Clark spent an awful lot of time keeping Lex and Tess alive because they were on the opening titles, while letting Villains of the Week who were a lot less dangerous than them die.
  • The goal of the leads in Person of Interest is to resolve bad situations. At the same time, they know going into it they will ultimately fail and die having only made minor changes in the world.
  • Community seems to be averting the heck out of this trope. In the run up to the end of season 3, they've killed off a minor character, given Chang military control over the school, replaced the dean with a look-a-like to do Chang's bidding, and expelled the main characters!
  • Lampshaded on The Fresh Prince of Bel Air; one season ended with Will moving back to Philadelphia. The next season started with NBC studio execs showing up to kidnap him and drag him back to Bel Air, and the whole thing was never mentioned again.
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