Making It Up As I Go Along II

So after writing this post, I started thinking about media where the story is long and protracted and of necessity they make it up as they go along. Or at least improvise it.
TV, for instance. In Babylon Five, J. Michael Straczynski started out with a five year plan for where the show was going … and had to radically rewrite when his lead actor left at the end of the first season. Or The X-Files, where one plotline concerning Scully’s disappearance was written to keep Gillian Anderson off-stage during her pregnancy.
Or take comic books. Reading the first appearance of the Inhumans in Fantastic Four, it starts out by portraying them as a kind of oppressed class like the mutants of Genosha, hunted by the all-powerful Seeker. Then it turns out that they’re the ruling caste, and the Seeker is just a flunky for the tyrant Maximus (one of the least impressive villains of Marvel’s Silver Age).
In Ghost Rider, they introduced an Apache shaman named Snake Dance, who it’s clearly implied isn’t what he appears to be … but they never got around to explaining it as the plotline shifted in other directions.
Even in book series, it happens. I can’t imagine Marion Zimmer Bradley had such an elaborate outline for Darkover that she conceived all the characters and histories when she wrote Heritage of Hastur. In fact, I know she didn’t, because she rewrote it into Sharra’s Exile to fit the expanded history better.
I’m not sure what this proves, other than that if people like your stuff, you can probably get away with inconsistencies (heck, resolving the contradictions is half the fun of being a Holmes fan). But as I keep forging ahead on the Applied Science series, I’ll hope that if I screw up the timeline, people will be as forgiving.