#oh man this is actually so interesting to think about tho
Kids these days expect characters in TV shows to have, like, consistently drawn personalities and comprehensible emotional arcs and such. In my day, we had to infer our favourite character’s basic personality traits from 175 under-budgeted episodes written by fifty-eight different people who mostly hated each other’s guts and actively worked to undermine each other’s characterisation choices – and those were the ones who’d actually bothered to read the series bible before turning in their scripts, which not all of them had. And you know what? We hated every minute of it!
(This is why it’s comical when somebody tries to “gotcha” a post about an older TV show by bringing up an example of the character they’re talking about behaving at odds with what the post is describing. In pre-2000 serial television it was completely normal to watch a character for six consecutive episodes and see them written as six completely different people – sometimes with mutually incompatible backstories, to boot, because naturally the writers couldn’t reasonably be expected to keep track of every tiny little detail, like whether their parents are alive or dead.)
