>With stories that are self-contained a show, if it runs long enough, is easier to sell to independent stations or outside markets. That way they don't need to keep the episodes in order.

>But if a show is popular enough it can be shown out of order and still snag viewers, and with something like ST, which has established characters, viewers can pick up on the story quickly enough even if they are shown in random order.

>MASH is like this. Castle is as well.

Makes sense.

I thought most or all comedy/drama series were essentially self-contained through the late 1980s at least. Many shows still are written that way. Where it happens the change was/is due to acknowledging the audience had a capability to remember longer than a gold fish does and that permitted greater plot development, and made shows more interesting.

No idea how many shows were or are regularly shown out of order.

I haven’t followed the 007 series so can’t comment on that but I do recall that Ian Fleming came up with a formula in his story lines that permitted repeating itself essentially every time and that was a the corner piece of the franchise. Each show was about the same as the one before. That element is also a very frequently repeated part of TV series. It’s one of the things that Robert Beltran (Chakotay in Voyager) complained about being the key flaw of the Voyager series.