Well, obviously the reset was deliberate (i.e. it wasn't casual). And it's not like the alternative was impossible and/or unthinkable. Serialized tv did exist at the time. In addition to the aforenamed Dallas and Crime Story, you had Hill Street Blues and obviously the various soaps and sitcoms. But for various reasons the Networks preferred the episodic formula for hour long tv shows.
ETA: And while we are focusing on American tv series, the serialized format was quite common in other countries' shows
Could they have? Sure. But I think you're viewing this through a modern day lense at a time when serialized shows are far more common. Fact is, most American TV shows at the time were episodic, and while yes there were some serialized shows, it was still very much in experimentation. And when I mean the resets weren't deliberate, I mean it in the sense that they went about making the best shows they could within the confines of the format of the day. It's actually likely nobody producing their shows had any second thoughts about the way they were doing them.
Though they reference the flute on occasion I always thought it was odd that Picard lived an entire lifetime in The Inner Light but it never comes up or seems to affect him.
This is one of my biggest gripes with TNG - since this seems to never have really affected him again (aside from the "Lessons" moments when he gets asked about the Ressikan flute) it's also massively overlooked by the viewers of the show, which causes somewhat bizarre misconceptions. The man raised two kids, and yet people always claim "Picard hates kids/knows nothing about kids", etc etc. He. Raised. Two. Kids. I mean just because the experience wasn't real for anyone but him doesn't invalidate it, and I for one think "Inner Light" should have affected him profoundly, perhaps even more than the Borg or Gul Madred (the latter of which is yet another trauma of his that's never mentioned again... sigh). I've always found it extremely illogical that he resorts to making up a family in Generations when the real Nexus thing should have been him reuiniting with Eline and Batai and Meribor. They were his family, right there, but nah, the writers had come up with some super bizarre Elizabethan-style XMas scene scenario. Ah, well. Episodic TNG could only go SO far, I know. Still kinda aggravating how they just "forgot" about most of Jean-Luc's traumatic experiences.
Well, it's still better than most of tv shows of that era... About the scene in the Nexus, I always interpreted as a manifestation of his guilt (he always negleted his family, even before Inner Light episode).
Yeah they at least tried to have a continous thing going on with his Borg PTSD, I gotta give them that. It's more than a lot of other shows did at the time. And yeah, his guilt playing a huge part in the whole Nexus manifestation is also how I choose to interpret the scene... at least in those moments in which I don't want to throw something because of it.
You know, it never really bothered me... I was more troubled by the fact that people can die for a fire in the 24th century...
Considering how much Robert was against technology (which probably included technology that creates forcefields to smother a fire)... I wouldn't say this is TOO much of a plot hole tbh.
I'm not sure that having the protagonist living an earth-shattering experience that normally could cause PTSD in average people and then in the following episode everything is ok is the best choice... If I had to write for these shows, I would probably have avoided this kind of plots because I would have found them insulting for the audience... Law And Order is a perfect example (in my opinion) of a episodic format. Main characters are more or less ciphers who have the task to advance the plot.
Well, interestingly, his definition of "technology" (like so many people in real life) is completely arbitrary, because I'm pretty sure he didn't light the fire with two sticks or bathe in the river. And because of this hypocrisy, innocent people died (again, far too many parallels with real life).
Well, that's certainly unfortunate. But again, those were different times and there was far less research into PTSD back then, and I don't think producers were thinking on that level. PTSD research is something relatively modern and many Vets are still fighting for their rights to this day. If you look back on a lot of shows from that period, there's actually a fair bit of stuff on a wide range of subjects that feel tactless, and knowing what we now know, different approaches would be certainly taken.
That's what ended up putting me off Smallville - so many characters, many of them high schoolers, died in such a short time with no discernible effect that the whole show became ghoulish. Particularly when Lana (accidentally, but still) killed a dude in 3x2, and it was never mentioned again. And the lack of non-senior staff character development for Enterprise and Voyager was particularly egregious. Seven years stuck umpteen light-years from the AQ, and the only marriage/pregnancy during that time occurs between two of the leads? Really? And no follow-up with the surviving Equinox crew members?
It was really more a case of them being as late as 1952 in the early going and not imagining they'd go to 11 seasons. In S4E1 it was September 19th, 1952 when Potter arrived. Then in later seasons, like you said, they kinda reset it a little, back to 1951. Continuity isn't really important in a show like MASH, so it's easy to ignore those little things.
The worst case of "reset button" were the "very special episodes". where, in a usually light-hearted tv show, you have something incredible traumatic happening to their main characters, to teach some vague lesson (the aforenamated CHIPs episodes was a VSE on the DUI deaths) which will be forgotten by the next episode. One of the worst offender is the episode “A, My Name is Alex” of the tv show "Family Ties". Here Alex Keaton is deeply traumatized by the death of his dearest friend (who was never mentioned before and after of this episode!), suffers of survivor's guilt, goes to therapist, and he's perfectly fine at the end of the episode. If someone had really gone through something similar to what happened to him, s/he would have had to feel offended because a similar problem was trivialized, or ashamed because s/he could not heal in an hour like the good old Alex Keaton.
I actually watched that one recently I thought that since it was so close to the end they were finally going to have the secret get out. A similar example that also annoyed me was in Lois & Clark. There's an episode where they go back in time to the day Kal-El's pod crashes and Lois finally realizes that Clark is Superman. By the end, though, she has her memory erased and takes many episodes to figure it out again.
It’s hard to pick one specific one. Any time a sitcom character learns a valuable lesson then forgets it a week later annoys me equally.
Oh, yeah, this was a pretty stock trope back in the day. Even as a kid, I figured out that if the Hero got serious about this week's Female Guest-Star, to the extent of them talking wedding bells and kids, she was a goner for sure. Nothing could be allowed to change the status quo that much. See "The Paradise Syndrome" on STAR TREK. Miramanee was doomed the minute Kirk married her and she got pregnant. And, of course, she was never mentioned again. Heck, even The Bionic Woman died tragically when she was first introduced on THE SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN. It was only later, after the ratings for that ep went through the roof, that ABC undid her death in order to give her her own show.
And that's the ticket, isn't it? That's why I feel they aren't resets, because technically they never were going for those kinds of developmental details in the first place. And a lot of these seem to happen in shows where there are only two or more regulars that are the only constants with the rest of the cast being completely new with each episode. They aren't resets in the same sense as what happens on a show like Voyager in any case. Ahh yes, that's a classic example.
Can't say I'm a huge fan of this whole Tommy Westphall crap. Although that's not even really a reset, come to think of it. The final scene of St. Elsewhere doesn't necessarily mean that the series didn't happen. Some characters would have to be different, but the series as a whole isn't automatically rendered invalid. Perhaps Tommy was a patient at St. Eligius at some point, and the staff were kind to him, so he based his dream on real people. And of course Tommy can't dream about scenes that he wasn't actually in, can he?