5 Weirdo Supernatural Plots In Famous Sitcoms
Around late in the fifth season of any sitcom, you can practically see the fatigue hit the writers' room. Someone just snaps and starts throwing out ideas like "What if a leprechaun steals the baby?" And no one is paying enough attention to stop them. Sometimes they add a nice little "It was all a dream" moment at the end, but mostly they leave things open-ended and never mention it again. What you then end up with is a perfectly normal family sitcom, except for that one episode which implied leprechauns are real in this universe, and also they hate babies. Episodes like ...
Boy Meets World: Eric Is Revealed To Be More Powerful Than Satan
Boy Meets World has two different episodes in which one character murders the entire cast, and three that involve time travel to the 1950s. All of those were written off as dream sequences. It also did two crossover episodes with Sabrina The Teenage Witch (the cute '90s Sabrina, not the modern one where Sabrina is Satan's Jesus). When you think about it, that means Boy Meets World is a show about what the normal people of Sabrina's magical universe do all day.
The first Sabrina crossover only featured a brief cameo at the end of the episode. The meat of the show is about Eric worrying that his roommate Jack's girlfriend is a witch. Of course, she totally is a witch, and an evil one, and she's only dating Jack for his balcony, which is apparently the exact location where a prophecy has dictated that Satan's tail will appear, sending a beam of light through "the crystal of death" and insuring immortality for her and other witches if they sacrifice Jack.
Eric thwarts the witches by accidentally hitting himself with the beam, which looks a lot like the ones from your local observatory's Pink Floyd laser show. The witches say the beam should have killed him, but he just shrugs it off. He then orders all of the witches to leave and they just ... do. Even though they could all go to jail for attempted laser murder, they just go home and watch The Craft again instead, because Eric said so.
I can't stress how normal this episode is, other than the Satan stuff. The B-plot is about another character being afraid to fly. Why didn't Eric die from being hit with the laser beam? In the Boy Meets World sequel show, Girl Meets World, we learn that he grows up to be a senator and not a demon fighter, which is, in my opinion, a huge missed opportunity for a spinoff. Boy Beats Underworld? Shut up, you know you'd watch it.
Related: 5 Crossover Episodes That Led To Chaos And Insanity
The Nanny: Ghosts Are Secretly Manipulating Every Aspect Of Our Lives
Toward the end of The Nanny's run, Mr. Sheffield and the Nanny are about get married. He's worried about what his late wife Sara would think about him remarrying, but luckily she appears as a ghost to reassure him that it's fine with her. In fact, she tells Mr. Sheffield that she sent the Nanny to him! This isn't in a dream sequence or anything. Niles the butler comes in, and it's established that he can't see or hear Sara. Since Mr. Sheffield wasn't gulping down fistfuls of mushrooms prior to this scene, we have to assume that this is a real thing that happened.
Mister Sheffield now not only knows for sure that there is an afterlife, but also that ghosts can cross over and manipulate our reality. What does he do with this powerful knowledge? He never mentions it to anyone. With his Nanny-boning now 100% dead-wife-approved, he simply moves on with his wedding.
The Nanny basically took 12 minutes during what was essentially a clip show episode to say, "Hey, real quick everyone: Ghosts are real and control your destiny. OK, now back to your regularly scheduled jokes about the Nanny's dumb voice." It turns out that the essential question of The Nanny's theme song, "Who would have guessed that the girl we described was just exactly what the doctor prescribed?" actually has an answer. It's "Mr. Sheffield's dead wife."
Related: 25 Disastrous Episodes In Non-Disastrous Shows
The Middle always did Halloween episodes, but they were usually just regular stories that took place on Halloween, until Season 7's "Tick Tock Death." It featured short stories for each member of the Heck family. Brick, the youngest son, is dressed as Twilight Zone narrator Rod Serling, and he bookends the show with very Twilight Zone-esque monologues, but each time his mother interrupts him to show that he's just talking to himself. Most of the short stories are grounded in reality (the eldest brother is chased by a grim reaper who turns out to be Brick's girlfriend, the mother and daughter decide to egg a mean neighbor's house, etc.) but Brick's is left more open-ended.
He trick-or-treats in the nice part of town, and at a particularly fancy house, he sees a painting that looks just like him. The owner tells him that she bought it because it looks like her husband as a young boy, but acknowledges that it also looks like Brick. Her name is Cindy -- the same as Bricks girlfriend. She says that her husband is the world's leading font expert. (Brick's obsession with fonts is a running joke on the show.) This leads Brick to believe that he is a time traveler who has chosen to retire in a nice part of his hometown during a happy time in his childhood. At the end of the episode, the name on the house's mailbox is revealed to be "Heck."
The Middle's series finale later shows us that Brick grows up to be a successful science fiction writer whose stories involve traveling through time in a magical microfiche machine. Before that in Season 8, he purchases a microfiche machine from a library auction. Basically, The Middle is a Doctor Who prequel, and you can't convince me otherwise.
Related: 6 Classic Shows (That Went Insane For One Episode)
Sister, Sister: Cupid Is Real, And Also Maybe Their Neighbor?
Insanity visited the Sister, Sister writers' room late in Season 4 when they randomly decided to toss out that Cupid is real. The episode starts with both of the titular sisters getting a Valentine from their neighbor Roger, to their great disappointment. Tia complains that Cupid is doing her dirty, and Tamera tells her that Cupid isn't real. Of course, Cupid then shows up in the form of a very badly green-screened version of Roger with a tiny bow and arrow.
Cupid hits Tia with the arrow and she completely loses all self-respect in her relentless pursuit of Roger, which is a real turnoff for Roger until Cupid reappears to hit him too with an arrow. Roger and Tia proceed to be so grossly horny for each other that it makes Tamara feel sad and left out on Valentine's Day. In the last two minutes of the episode, Tia and Roger glow to show that the arrow's effects have worn off and they're no longer in love. Then they all sing a Whitney Houston song together.
Now I'm curious. If Cupid exists in the Sister, Sister universe and really affected Tia and Roger's lives, does that mean other Greek gods exist too? That could produce a wealth of episodes that I'm absolutely dying to see. It's the twins' birthday! But when Zeus rains down on them in a shower of golden coins, are they getting more than they wished for? When Ray accidentally crosses Demeter, will his community garden project be the one to suffer the consequences? Tia thinks Tyreke is cheating on her, so Hera smites his ass. This is the definition of must-see TV.
Related: 6 Great TV Shows That Went Completely Insane For One Episode
Happy Days: Fonzie Has Alien Superpowers
The Robin Williams sitcom Mork & Mindy was a spinoff of an episode of Happy Days in which Richie is almost abducted by Mork, an alien. It was originally going to be an "all a dream" episode buried deep in the 27-episode fifth season, one of the two longest seasons of the show. The writers must have felt like they were trapped in an unrelenting desert wasteland of jokes about how much the ladies want to smash Fonzie, when one of them feverishly muttered "What if this episode, Richie gets abducted by aliens?"
But Mork was so popular with viewers that he got a spinoff, and you can't have an entire show that takes place in Richie Cunningham's dream. That only works for one season, and only if the show is Dallas, and also it still doesn't work. So the ending of Mork's original appearance on Happy Days was reshot so that when it aired again in reruns, it could be revealed that Mork just wanted Richie to think it was all a dream. This means that aliens exist in the Happy Days universe, which is strange. But even stranger, in that same episode, Fonzie keeps pace with Mork in a battle of magical powers.
Fonzie has always been able to do cool stuff like turn on a jukebox by hitting it, but when he and Mork battle for Richie like two knights jousting for a fair maiden's heart, he only gives in because he's afraid of bringing Al's to the ground. Does the retconning of Mork into a real being mean that Fonzie legitimately has superpowers? He goes toe-to-toe with an alien and almost wins. Why do Mork's powers affect everyone but Fonzie? Is Fonzie an alien? Happy Days is a way cooler show if you picture Fonzie as a big sexy ALF.
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