Everyone Meets Everyone

A type of Premiere where the cast of characters are collected together one by one. Some of them may already know each other (occasionally all of them) but this is the story of how they get together to be an identifiable unit of people. Hopefully, the episode won't end with someone saying "And I'm sure we'll have many great adventures together!"

Common in reality shows, when new people arrive in a season premiere.

Everyone Meets Everyone episodes can also come later in the series, often told through Flash Back scenes. The West Wing did this in "In the Shadow of Two Gunmen", and Firefly did in "Out of Gas". It is also a common Fanfic premise.

Debut Queue is Everyone Meets Everyone drawn out over several episodes.

Compare Welcome Episode, One We Prepared Earlier. You All Meet in An Inn is an equivalent trope common (to the point of being a Dead Horse Trope) in Tabletop RPGs. For a sequel, or where the characters already have a shared Backstory, see Putting the Band Back Together.

Examples of Everyone Meets Everyone include:

Anime & Manga

• Saber Rider and the Star Sheriffs (at least in the dub version). Saber Rider and April already know each other, professionally. Fireball and Colt know each other by reputation.
• Lupin III had the 20th anniversary TV special (Episode 0: First Contact) which not only explains how Lupin, Jigen, Fujiko, and Goemon meet, but also explains Zenigata's never-ending pursuit of Lupin AND how he gets carte blanche to do so. Also, where Goemon found Zantetsuken and how Lupin got his hands on a Mercedes SSK.

Comic Books

• An unusual case in Runaways, which opens with the main characters hanging out during what we are told is their parents' annual meeting. So while it's not the first time that they meet, not only can one assume their original meeting was somewhat similar, it is also when they first become a "team", making it their Avengers Assemble moment.
• Used frequently in Superhero comics where a new superhero team in complete.
  • In fact, one of the easiest ways to decompress the origin story is to introduce the characters one per issue over a multi issue premiere arc.
• All of Marvel Comics heroes met for the first time in Contest of Champions #1. Most of them had already met, but this was the first time that every single superhero was in the same place at the same time (courtesy of the Cosmic Entity The Grandmaster, who needed to choose heroes for the contest). Note that only handful of the heroes actually participated in the actual contest, including some brand-new ones.
• In The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Mina (the head of the League) is introduced to Nemo, then the two of them are sent to dredge Quatermain out of an opium den. They then go on to apprehend Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde in Paris, then catch Hawley Griffin molesting schoolgirls in a boarding school.

Film

• Movie examples: the eponymous heroes of Seven Samurai, its western remake The Magnificent Seven, and the remade Oceans 11 are introduced in this manner.
• Happens early in the film adaptation of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. M summons Allan Quatermain from Kenya to lead the new generation of the League; Allan meets him in an underground library and is promptly introduced to three of his teammates -- Captain Nemo, Mina Harker, and Rodney Skinner. They then have to leave to collect the remaining two, and manage to pick up a Tagalong Kid in the process.
• The Muppet Movie shows how the Muppet troupe got together.

Literature

• The New Testament begins this way with Jesus collecting his disciples one by one, making this one at least Older Than Feudalism.
• In the first Animorphs book, the heroes meet at the local mall and decide to walk part of the way home together by taking a shortcut through an abandoned construction site. This is before any of them get involved with aliens or Voluntary Shapeshifting, and though they all already knew each other to some extent they were not a collective group until this moment. Previous to this meeting their various relationships were one-to-one between the various members; Jake/Marco and Rachel/Cassie were best friends, Jake/Rachel were cousins, Jake/Tobias were minor friends after Jake saved Tobias from bullies at school, and Jake/Cassie had mutual crushes on each other. After this night they became a solitary group of friends committed to the fight against the Yeerks, but they had to maintain the cover that nothing had changed to avoid being discovered, so whenever they were in public they had to make it look like they were not "a group."
• In the first Harry Potter book, Harry meets Ron, most of the Weasleys, Hermione, Neville, Crabbe, Goyle, Dumbledore, McGonagall etc. for the first time all on the same day. (His only previous contact with wizards was with Malfoy, Hagrid and Ollivander.) In the book Harry, Ron, Hermione, Neville and McGonagall are all meeting each other for the first time.
• Otherland does this for what seems to be most of the main characters by the end of the first book. However, it's subverted--not only do they get separated, a whole slew of new main characters appear.
• The main cast are all gathered together as old friends at the beginning of Dragons Of Autumn Twilight, first book in the Dragonlance series.
• The novel The Alienist gathers the team members for dinner at Delmonico's.
• The entire first half of The Fellowship of the Ring. Frodo sets out with Sam, then adds Merry and Pippin, Aragorn joins up in Bree, and then the rest of the Fellowship gets assembled in Rivendell.

Live Action Television

• In the pilot of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Buffy comes to Sunnydale. Giles reveals he is her watcher. Later, Xander overhears them talking about vampires. Buffy saves Willow from a vampire attack. From this point on, Buffy, Giles, Xander and Willow are a team.
• The Real World is a particularly notable Reality Show example.
• Sliders
• The X-Files
• Although two of the characters and part of the premise had been established in the film Stargate, the premiere of Stargate SG-1 was largely an Everyone Meets Everyone episode. Much the same can be said of the premiere of Stargate Atlantis.
• Aversion: Heroes didn't do this till the very last episode of the first season, and even then some characters ended up being left out, simply because the series has Loads and Loads of Characters, with more on the way. An example: Hiro, a main character, did not meet the Haitian (a recurring character from season one) until season three IN THE PRESENT. They meet in the future and Hiro assumes present Haitian is just as bad as future Haitian. This was Lampshaded in season 2, when Hiro Nakamura encounters Matt Parkman and Nathan Petrelli. Hiro immediately shouts his (second) Catch Phrase: "Flying man!". Parkman's reaction is: "And who's this?" This was Lampshaded when a couple of comic geeks start arguing about whether or not Hiro and Claire had ever met.

Sam: Kirby Plaza doesn't count. They never actually even talked.

• In Star Trek: Voyager's pilot, about half of the ship's officers and skilled staffers were killed, forcing the captain to accept various Maquis rebels, area aliens, and even computer programs as replacements.
• Scrubs begins on the interns' first day at the hospital, as does Grey's Anatomy
• Firefly's pilot Serenity added a number of characters to the existing crew (Book, Simon and River) with their first meeting as part of the plot. However, because the pilot was not shown as the first episode, the characters had to be (re)introduced to the audience without retconning the first episode out of continuity (although the film later retconned a number of aspects of the unaired pilot anyway).
  • There were also echoes of Everyone Meets Everyone in a second episode, Out Of Gas, which showed how the original crew met through flashbacks, and Mal's purchase of Serenity.
• Although starting off with a Welcome Episode for Gwen Cooper, Torchwood used flashbacks to show how the rest of the team were recruited.
• Lost begins with the plane crash in which the majority of the principal characters meet, and by the end of the pilot they all seem to become good friends. More characters are added and taken away during the course of the show, however it seems to be that latecomers, especially the tailies don't seem to last as long as anyone else. This idea is also used as a plot device with Arzt, Nikki and Paulo.
• In That 70s Show episode "Class Picture", the main characters, in search of a quote for their yearbook, start remembering how they first met.
• How I Met Your Mother has "How I Met Everyone Else", where they tell Ted's new girlfriend the story about how Ted & Marshall, Lily & Marshall, Ted & Lily, Ted & Barney, and Ted & Robin (but not Barney & Robin! No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Just no.) met.
• Averted big time in Solitary. The contestants never see or communicate with each other, save special occasions, and then only through a third party.
• Maid Marian and Her Merry Men. The first episode is even called "How The Gang Got Together".
• Community's Pilot Episode is one of these involving the formation of a Spanish study group.

Tabletop Games

• Some tabletop RPGs encourage the GMs to make the players stage this, if their characters are to play in extended chronicles. Or maybe it's just to avert the You All Meet in An Inn scenario and its "you were drunk enough to risk your life with a bunch of shady strangers" implication. An example of this is The World of Darkness and Exalted
  • Ironically enough, the 4th Edition of Dungeons and Dragons is one of those RPGs, despite being the poster boy of You All Meet in An Inn.

Webcomics

• Electric Wonderland began with a story in which Trawn meets and hires NJ, Shroomy, and Aerynn for her new independently-published newspaper, The Nettropolis Free Press.
• A major component of the first storyline of The Fuzzy Five.

Web Original

• Welcome to Poe, one of the first Whateley Universe stories, where six kids start their freshman year at Whateley Academy and find out they have something unusual in common. It's what makes such a diverse group into a team.

Western Animation

• Total Drama Island's first episode has all the campers meeting each other for the first time (with the exception of Katie and Sadie who were already BFFFLs before the show). It takes up about the first 11 minutes of the first episode for this to get done, seeing how it's 22 contestants.
• Futurama. Fry gets unfrozen, meets Leela (his career placement officer), runs away from her and meets Bender in a suicide booth. And together they meet the Professor, who is Fry's great-great-great (and so on) nephew, who hires the three of them (including Leela, who turned her back on her own career rather than force Fry into his designated role) as his new delivery crew. The second episode introduces the trio to the rest of the cast already employed at the Professor's delivery company: Hermes Conrad, the company's bureaucrat, Zoidberg, the doctor, and Amy, the college intern.
• Justice League; Superman, Batman, and The Flash know each other already but the rest of the team meets for the first time in the pilot.
  • They also knew about Green Lantern and the Corps, but didn't know John Stewart personally.
• Drawn Together, largely because of its premise as a reality show parody.
• The Teen Titans animated series did the latter variety, where the show started off with the whole team already assembled and the Everyone Meets Everyone episode was done as a flashback later on in the series.
• Like the Teen Titans example above, Code Lyoko started with everyone knowing each other and showed the Whole-Episode Flashback episode in a later season.
• Meet the Robinsons is almost all about this. The children's book it is based on IS all about this.
• Rugrats does the Teen Titans and Code Lyoko example as well, revealing how they met in the original final episode as a flashback.
• In WITCH Irma, Taranee, Cornelia and Hay Lin were already friends prior to the start of the series. Will moves in and is taken into their circle (mostly because Hay Lin's grandmother is ready to set them up to be a team). Then Caleb shows up (and gets captured soon after) and when Will gets captured, the other girls meet Blunk in the process of saving both Will and Caleb.
• The first episode of My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic, in which Twilight Sparkle meets the rest of the mane cast for the first time, and their quest to defeat Nightmare Moon helps them bond as a group of friends. (In subsequent episodes, it's also implied that some of the other ponies knew each other but are only now becoming proper friends.)
• Prior to The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes, Iron Man had built Ultron robots with Ant-Man, and partied with Ant-Man's companion, The Wasp, a few times. Since Iron Man owns a suit of Hulkbuster armor, some could assume that he also already met The Incredible Hulk. The first episode that aired on Disney XD, "Breakout", marks the first time They Fight Crime together. It also marks the first time any of them meet and team up with The Mighty Thor.
• Aaahh Real Monsters made this the series finale, with a How We Got Here setup showing Ickis, Oblina and Krumm's arrival at the Academy.