TV Viewers Are Pointing Out Shows That Totally Ignored Storylines After Setting Them Up, And I Love The Friends And Yellowstone Points

We’d love to believe TV shows are perfect creations with choices made purely for creative reasons, and not scheduling, finances, ratings, studio exec whims, etc. However, that isn’t the case in an industry where the bottom line is the top dog, and so television history’s annals are riddled with fractured storylines, forgotten characters (like Chuck Cunningham) and completely ignored histories. Some of the biggest shows of their respective eras, like Friends and Yellowstone, are just as guilty as those with less pristine productions.

It’s a wide-ranging topic that TV audiences love to get into nitty-gritty discussions about, with yours truly in that group for sure, and one Redditor sparked a ton of conversations with a recent post asking for others’ thoughts on shows with unresolved plots. A ton of different shows were namechecked, going far beyond the usual suspects like Lost, that holiest grail of “Did that mean anything to the plot?” inquiries. (Even though some can argue that Lost’s story gaps don’t matter.) So let’s dig into some of the gripes that fans laid out.

To kick things off, quite a few commenters were quick to point to Taylor Sheridan's rather hectic writing habits as a frequent offender of introduced-and-forgotten ideas on and around the Montana ranch in Yellowstone. I'll no doubt carry the third one listed below to my grave.

Yellowstone's Forgotten Plots

• In the first few episodes of Yellowstone, Kayce is having trouble adjusting to civilian life and calls his old commander and says he wants back in. The CO says "Pack a bag, im sending a chopper". Kayce says "i never unpacked" No helicopter ever arrives, no mention is ever made again of Kayce rejoining the service. Hell, at the end Sheridan's super cowboy character is at the Yellowstone helping with the liquidation auction. Then Teeter asks him for a job, and he says "why do you want to leave this place?", she says "too many memories". Both of them apparently forgot they just finished liquidating the ranch. - @UnderwaterKarma
• Still waiting for the bomb on the airplane to blow up on Yellowstone. - @PhutukKusi
• The one that immediately springs to mind is the kid - the grandson - finding the dinosaur. - @BlackbirdsGarden
• Also, when John stops to help the lady change her tyre and they both get shot we never find out what happened to her son. Makes me think that boy was originally going to be Carter since he appears at the start of the next series - @OnafridayR

I mean honestly, those dinosaur bones could have (presumably) been used in SOME way to argue for the ranch to be seen as a historical site of value. And it's not like fake bones would have another TV show to shoot that would conflict with a resolution. The same goes for Kayce's military background, which didn't come up nearly as much as it seemed like it might earlier in the run.

Now let's shift our focus to some shows that introduced main characters' family members and then dropped the siblings from the face of the earth.

Missing Siblings

• In the first episode of Sherlock it is deduced that John Watson has an alcoholic brother named Sam all from the appearance of his phone. This sibling is then said to be a sister. They are never referenced again even at Johns wedding. Nor is this quirk of Sherlock getting something 95% right because Sherlock is the one to notice and admit he deduced poorly. - @HatOfFlavour
• Seinfeld mentions he has a sister in the Chinese Restaurant episode ... She's never mentioned again. - @RunDNA
• In Brooklyn Nine-Nine, it’s pointed out that Amy is the way she is because she has 7 brothers, and not only do we only meet one (Lin-Manuel Miranda by the way) but none of them even to come to her wedding! - @alehansolo21
• On New Girl, Jess having a sister out of nowhere, and then sister disappearing again right after she was introduced. - @nomnomsquirrel

So often, TV siblings are just vehicles to bring in guest stars, which has a lot to do with why we never see them again. That wasn't so much an issue for Friends' Joey, whose gaggle of sisters showed up several times in the show's run. Unfortunately, that wasn't the case for Phoebe's long-lost-then-found dad.

Phoebe's Dad In Friends

• Also, there's no mention of Phoebe's biological father after she meets him for the first time. The storyline of her search for her dad was so great, and was the main story for a number of episodes. Then she finally meets him, and it looks like the two might be able to slowly heal old wounds and form a relationship. Then he never came up again and it's like the whole storyline never happened. For me, that's the most frustrating one in Friends by far. - @Scarred-Face

This is definitely the kind of story issue that bothers me the most, when more than a single episode of plotting goes into tracking down a specific character, where conversations are had about the importance of it all, and then it just never comes up again.

Speaking of lengthy build-ups to fatherly reveals that go the way of the do-do:

Jon Snow's Lineage On Game Of Thrones

• Everyone talked up Jon being a Targaryen for fucking YEARS too before it officially happened on the show. It was going to have such massive consequences and either put a massive wedge between him and Dany for their claims to the Iron Throne… OR it would draw them closer together to give them an undoubted authority to claim the throne together. Then as soon as its confirmed… no one really mentions it as being important that he’s the son of Rhaegar Targaryen. In a setting where names mean eveything and are the most important factor in determining who should be sitting on the throne. - @dynesor

This was one of those book plot points that the HBO series could not stop fans from talking about and theorizing over during the earlier seasons. But then when it came time to finally make Jon Snow's ancestry live-action canon, the showrunners didn't go as far as they could have in drawing out possible ramifications.

While I would have little problem with singling out tons of other TV plots that never panned out, let's go through a quick selection of snipes targeting Pretty Little Liars, Blindspot, and more.

• Aria murders someone in the season 5 premiere and this incident is barely mentioned again. The whole show was so messy but the good outweighs the bad for me so I still have a lot of love for it- even if the night Allison disappeared is extremely convoluted - @athmeystic
• Blindspot. Jane Doe shows up covered with clue-based tattoos related to various future crimes and terror attacks. We eventually find out who tattooed her and why, but not where they got the foreknowledge for them to be cued by things like sports scores and other unpredictable events - @Fancy-Television-760
• Landry killing a guy on Friday Night Lights. Just swept it under the rug - @spokanetransplanted
• Just as a new one that nobody mentioned: Thawne/Wells was seen to be stealing genetic tissue or blood or some shit from captured supervillains in a pre-credits sequence in the first season of the Flash but this never came up again. - @ContinuumGuy

If only we all had the powers of The Flash (or even Reverse-Flash) to go back in time to convince all of these showrunners to wrap up their stories in better ways. Justice for Judy Winslow!