I'd say Jerome Bixby did that with the Mirror Universe in 1967. The concept was always there; Abrams and his collaborators just took advantage of it. As I mentioned elsewhere, Roddenberry himself reportedly intended TNG to be a soft reboot, only loosely in continuity with TOS and ignoring or rewriting the parts he wasn't happy with. It was when fans-turned-writers became staff members that they brought in more direct continuity ties to TOS. But if Roddenberry had stayed in charge longer, TNG might have emerged more clearly as a reboot and we would've been used to the idea of multiple Trek realities coexisting for the past three decades. And what's wrong with that? Lots of franchises have multiple continuities, and many of them use the multiverse concept to reconcile them. Of course, Paramount Television/CBS Studios' practice since the '90s has been to treat all Trek as a single continuity; the Kelvin films were separate mainly because Paramount Pictures was a separate company at that point and so the movies weren't being made under the same corporate roof anymore. But if they chose to do another reboot or alternate reality at some point, that would hardly be unprecedented or even unusual in today's fictional landscape, and there certainly wouldn't be anything wrong with it.
But the idea is that the movie and TV viewers are going to buy the books expecting them to be consistent with the actual shows and movies. Tie-in books are not meant to be their own independent thing. Heck, it borders on false advertising to sell something as an official STAR TREK or MURDER SHE WROTE novel or whatever and not have it be consistent with what's shown on TV. "Hey, how come Seven of Nine isn't a frontier bounty hounter?" "Why is Chewbacca dead?" Etc.
Whatever she is, that’s not Seven of Nine. I’m curious about these Murder she Wrote novels that don’t follow the canon. I wasn’t aware there was one.
I'm no MURDER SHE WROTE expert, but I assume that Jessica Fletcher solves mysteries in them just like she did on the long-running TV series, and that she and her town and her supporting cast are not significantly different from the TV versions, so that fans of the TV show will find what they expect from MURDER SHE WROTE if and when they read the books. Granted, the innumerable DARK SHADOWS tie-in novels (by "Marilyn Ross") that I devoured back in the seventies tended to play fast and loose with the continuity of the original TV soap opera, but I can't say that ever really stopped me from buying them back in the day. Then again, there was perhaps less expectation that everything fit into some seamless "canon" back then -- even with regards to the actual movies and TV shows. (The original DS feature films pretty much did their own thing, divorced from the ongoing TV continuity, not unlike those old DR. WHO movies with Peter Cushing.). It was a simpler time, before the world became obsessed with "canon." And Seven is definitely some sort of final frontier vigilante on PICARD these days . . . canonically.
As I recall, the MSW novels are not about Jessica Fletcher -- they're "by" Jessica Fletcher, presented as the books she writes in-universe, much like the "Richard Castle" novels. Yup. Series rewrote their own continuity all the time, and adaptations reworked them in their own ways. After all, in the times before home video, people might have only their memory of an episode or movie to go on, if they'd even seen it at all, so a later installment or an adaptation could change the details and people wouldn't notice. The priority of each story was to serve its own needs, not to connect to other stories.
Plus, of course, in the case of DARK SHADOWS, there was no way the novels could keep up with the ongoing plotlines of a daily soap opera, given the long lead times involved in publishing, so the books kinda had to do their own thing, even if it meant having Barnabas tragically roam the Earth, having doomed Gothic romances, at points in history where, according to show, he should have been locked up in his coffin!
All I can say is, I'm not buying a Murder, She Wrote novel unless I hear it ends with the real culprit behind all those murders in Cabot Cove being revealed... deranged serial killer Jessica Fletcher herself! She's been framing people for thirty years to throw Sheriff Tupper off her trail!
As a kid in the 1980's I was trained on the concept of separate continuities by franchises like Transformers and G.I.Joe. The comics and the cartoons were very different and it didn't bother me. Classic Anime would have tv series and feature films that would feature differing takes on the same basic plot ideas. I honestly didn't realize that canon and continuity were so important to fans until I started frequenting bulletin boards on the web in the 1990's. It seemed pretty weird to me that the marvel Star Wars comics would have to be shoehorned into the stories established by the post-Timothy Zahn novels and Dark Horse comics.
Another way of looking at this is if Enterprise's cancellation was followed up by another couple post-Nemesis 24th century shows between 2007 and 2018, it's likely the litverse we got never would have happened. It blossomed precisely because there was no plan to return to it for many years. Same thing happened with Star Wars.
To address the most important issue on this thread. Confusingly even though the MSW novels do say by Jessica Fletcher (and the actual author) on the cover they are actually stories of her sleuthing and not stories about other people she's supposed to have written. So very much in line with the TV series and they use her supporting cast of nephews, nieces, local doctor, beauty parlour clientle and MI6 agents. Also Sherrif Tupper left after series 4 to become a Priest. Sherrif Metzger was in far more episodes so if she was fooling anyone it was him!
That's a good point. Back when Star Wars tie-ins started their "everything is canon, even the contradictory parts we have to awkwardly force in retroactively" policy, it was very much the exception, not the rule. The normal practice would've been just to let things like the Marvel comics, the Brian Daley novels, the Droids and Ewoks cartoons, etc. just stand apart as alternative takes on the concept. It was very rare for different tie-in lines to the same series to acknowledge each other, let alone be coordinated to fit together. And can we please retire the "Jessica Fletcher is the real killer" joke? I used to think that gag was clever when I made it myself back in the '80s or '90s, but now it's become the obligatory kneejerk thing everyone says whenever Murder, She Wrote comes up. I'm not sure why this particular series gets singled out for it, as opposed to all the other long-running amateur-sleuth murder mystery series out there.
DC Comics had an ok go at doing something like this with ELSEWORLDS in the '90s - they just took the stuff that didnt fit with the continuity of their main titles and labeled it as such. - and let's not forget Marvel going strong with the WHAT IF...? branding being tied into a larger multiverse concept. with tie-in fiction based on 'putting the toys back in the toybox when finished with them', these are to allow creator concepts of 'you can use this very similar toybox and you dont have to be careful about putting them all away again' it allowed offshoots to bloom and prune themselves without the need for excess reset buttons and continuity repair like we're seeing.
Those are different, because those are parts of the core publishing lines in the first place, not outside adaptations by a licensee. They're more analogous to the Kelvin Timeline than to the novels. The job of tie-ins is to follow the lead of the core work, not to unilaterally define their own path.
And things like ELSEWORLDS and WHAT IF represent a tiny fraction of what the comics publishers do in a given year, which isn’t replicable in Star Trek books due to the smaller release schedule. If we were still in the days of 24+ books a year, then maybe the novelverse could get an annual look-in. With eight or nine books a year, it’s not gonna happen.
And if there were a strong enough market for alternative continuities in the books, then the last Myriad Universes installment wouldn't have been 11 years ago.
Just speaking for myself, the reason I like the joke is just the incongruity of seeing this wholesome grandmother figure in Angela Lansbury (who I will always think of as Missus Pots first and foremost) turn out to be a cunning serial killer. It's just not as funny if it's, say, Miss Fisher or Lennie Brisco or Poirot.