Friendly reminder before the 1980s and Miami Vice and 21 Jump Street TV series generally did not have episode-to-episode...
Friendly reminder before the 1980s and Miami Vice and 21 Jump Street TV series generally did not have episode-to-episode continuity
Dallas? The Fugitive?
Well Dallas was the “prime time soap” (we were having a renaissance back with The OC by way of the FOX and WB youth dramas), soaps had nothing but continuity, but they couldn’t run “* see issue 143!” boxes in the corner like comics so they had like, secondary reading booklets in the supermarket checkout aisle every week
The starting point for the type of episode to episode continuity you guys are talking about really is Hill Street Blues (1981, with St Elsewhere soon following) where there were thread plots episode to episode while still having the idea that the individual episode functioned as an unit, in a way (as noted) that superhero comic books had been doing successfully since the 1960s. Soap operas obviously have had continuing plots going back to the premier of (These Are) All My Children in 1949, but there was a little effort to sculpt the individual episodes or have a plan more than a day in advance. All this traces back to the fact that the development of early television was based on trying to incorporate elements from already existing narrative forms, soap operas being simple filmed versions of radio soaps. The idea of the “teleplay,“ where one writer sat down and crafted a play that was an hour long minus commercials, became the main way dramas were conceived and the sitcom was mostly based on ongoing simple low concept premise radio half hours like the Rosenbergs where you could miss episodes with impunity since nothing ever changes. The cliffhanger serial was mostly adaptationally eschewed in favor of standalone shorts/B movie hybrids like the Lone Ranger. A lot of this was historical/geographic accident of people in NYC (where the radio and plays were the existing talent base) scrambling to figure out what would work in a rapidly evolving media landscape.
So, excepting soap operas, the only real 50s continuity that you saw was introduction/departure continuity, such as getting a dog or baby that would then be in the show afterwards or certain character exits being giving a farewell. Leave it to Beaver the first show I can think of to have an ending that felt like it was meant to be the ending of the show (actually, this happened in the early 60s, but it was a 50s show) - they show clips of prior episodes, give the solution to a long-standing mystery (the origin of Beaver’s nickname) and it ends on a shot similar to the first episode that seems to suggest these slightly older boys are capable of playing together just as much as when the show started (the Seinfeld ending seems modeled on this, to some extent).
The 60s added premise continuity shows with the idea of a show that had a beginning and ending point given the limited set up, but which was somewhat modular within the show except for the first and last episode (most notably the Fugitive and Route 66 - both of the shows had endings that ended the premise, but didn’t really affect the episodes leading up to it). There were also outlier shows like Batman (openly emulating the movie serial format) and the Prisoner (experimental, but attempting to build within the framework of a show like the Fugitive but with a sense of progression from early till later episodes even before the finale).
The 70s added a lot of relationship continuity, with love interests that would create a kind of implication of character growth by having their reaction to the main character indicate that they were in a world in which change was necessary, but somehow leaving the main character unchanged. When I was a kid, I first noticed this in Rockford Files reruns where Beth would break up and get back together with Jim, and the relationship progressed in phases, until she finally left him for being emotionally unavailable. There’s some degree of this in a lot of the era’s shows including the Mary Tyler Moore Show and they started to play off of this by having show finales that were low concept premise terminators attempting to pay off the essential emotional tensions of the show (sparked by something like a marriage or a station closing down). Meanwhile, nighttime soap operas had resurfaced, and ABC (and NBC and CBS trying to cash in) started doing some comic book like continuity building in genre shows where, even though they were was predominantly premise bracket skeins, they also had a sense of accruing mythology with history (your Battlestar Galacticas, your Six Million Dollar Mans, etc). Backdoor pilots became a thing at this point for related reasons.
So it is a little iffy to say there was no continuity before the 80s, but as I’ve said before the big breakpoints feel like Hill Street blues and Twin Peaks (at the other end of the decade) for moving forward the handling of this stuff. I think there’s a prior post of mine where I talk more about subsequent development of sequentiality through the Buffy, Sopranos, and Lost eras, so I’ll stop.