Ridiculous TV Show Cast/Setting Changes That Even Suspension of Disbelief Cannot Overcome

…for an example, I choose a show I just posted about on another thread: Laverne and Shirley.

To wit:

L and S are tired of Milwaukee. They want to jump start their lives with a new adventure…so they move to California (Hollywood…IIRC). Seems OK so far…but then all of their friends decide that they are going to abandon their lives, and at the drop of a hat move to California as well.

That’s right, Lenny, Squiggy, Carmine “The Big Ragu” Ragusa along with Laverne’s father and his wife (who owned a reasonably successful business in Milwaukee–the “Pizza Bowl”) all decide on a whim to throw their lives away and with little thought make a major life decision so they can keep their little group together.

Happens all the time, I guess.

Anyway, that’s my two cents. Have at it…if you can top L and S, you have my compliments.

Obvious example was McHale’s Navy. The entire crew (including Fuji, a Japanese POW) was transferred from the Pacific to Italy for the final season. While it’s possible they would have been kept together, it’s stretching belief that their commander went with them. Also, within the show, McHale got away with things because he was an expert on the seas and islands of the south Pacific. That knowledge was useless in the Mediterranean.

Once upon a time, schoolkid Zack Morris moved from Indiana to California. Okay, sure. A couple of his classmates did, too? Hey, we can all suspend disbelief. The principal of their Junior High back in Indiana picked up and left to go become the new principal at their High School in California right at the same time? Yeah, that’s – odd.

The 1967 Sherwood Schwartz comedy It’s About Time , in which the premise was that two astronauts ended up in caveman days, reversed the premise and had the astronauts (along with four of the cavepeople returning to the present. Instead of Astronauts having to deal with primitive conditions, cavepeople, and dinosaurs (hey, it’s TV!), the show dealt with cavepeople trying to adjust to the Modern World for the last seven episodes.

Okay, you could argue that not only moving geographically from one place to another is a huge change, and that jumping through a huge gulf of time is a much bigger one, making this the clear winner. On the other hand, the logistics in this case are simple (everybody gets in the same space capsule, it goes from prehistory to modern Florida). It’s not as if, in Laverne and Shirley, Lenny and Squiggy got into the moving van with L and S’s stuff and got magically transported to California. Although that wouldn’t be too far off for an episode.

I suspect, by the way, that the powers-that-be behind It’s About Time thought it was too much trouble and expense to set up a prehistoric sdet and costumes for every episode, and figured it’d be cheaper just to plunk the cavefolks down in the present day. That, and they were running out of clips of animated dinosaurs from the movie Dinosaurus to re-use.

Wonder Woman relocated to 35 years in the future. As did Steve Trevor, sort of.

The British childrens show Grange Hill was set in a north London high school for many years. Then it somehow moved to Liverpool. Along with most of the teachers and students. Even an ex student, Tucker, managed to move to Liverpool at the same time.

No, that’s stalking.

Kind of like on Boy Meets World, when Mr. Feeny started out as the kids’ sixth-grade teacher, then became their principal when they went on to high school, and finally followed them to college where he implausibly became a professor. Granted, there was no cross-country moving involved, but somebody ought to be keeping an eye on this Feeny character. Why can’t these kids ever get away from him?

Maddie Hayes on “Moonlighting” marrying a man she met on a cross-country train trip. Cybill Shepherd fought that, saying Maddie would never do that.

Kookie of “77 Sunset Strip” changing careers from jive talking parking attendant to private detective with the firm next door. Ed Byrnes felt trapped in the role and didn’t want to get stereotyped. Didn’t do his career much good. Actually in the pilot Kookie was a hitman who was executed but he tested well with the audience so he got the attendant job.

Kim Bauer on “24” going from partying high school dropout to computer analyst at CTU.

On the “Lucy Show”, Lucy Charmichael (Lucille Ball) moves from Connecticut to California. When she goes to the bank, it turns out that Mr Mooney (Gale Gordon) from her bank has transferred to the same location “They offered me two states:state of California or the state of unemployment”.

Even more mind-boggling: You would expect they would be in Florida, or if not there, possibly Texas, once they returned to the present. They weren’t. When Mac and Hec returned to the 1960s with the cave people, they settled into an apartment in L. A.!

Also, fixed link:

https://imgur.com/gallery/Wfvdf

The show Diagnosis: Murder starring Dick Van Dyke was set in Denver, CO during its first season. For some unexplained reason, the setting was relocated to Los Angeles in the second season. Not only was the cast transplanted to L. A., the hospital was the exact same as it was in Denver.

There is a fairly notorious old story about a soap opera that changed it’s setting on a dime. Maybe, “The Guiding Light” or “Search for Tomorrow”? Anyway, the show was originally set in a suburb of Los Angeles, and often referred to actual L.A. locations in the storyline. Then one day, midway through its decades-long run, the characters started referring to the town being located somewhere in the Midwest. The town and all its establishments (homes, hospital, courthouse, etc.) were were exactly the same, but in Ohio, rather than L.A. And as far as the ‘in-universe’ continuity, the town had ALWAYS been in Ohio.

Dr. Beverly Crusher went from chief medical officer of the USS Enterprise, to head of Starfleet Medical, then back to CMO of the same ship, in the span of just over a year. Riiiiiiight.

The change of a husband on *Bewitched *and a daughter on *Roseanne *go without saying.

Actually, for me, a simple change of actor or actress is easy for me to suspend my disbelief. I don’t find it ridiculous at all. Much easier to accept than the husband suddenly died or divorced or something.

She “didn’t work out” at HQ and went back to the field. Happens all the time IRL.

The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis was set in a small California town. Dobie and Maynard were in all the same classes and were somehow the same age even though Maynard had to repeat grades several times. Super-rich Chatsworth Osbourne Jr. went to the same high school because he was being punished by his mother. In the second season they graduated. Dobie, Maynard, and Chatsworth all went into the Army - even though Maynard had already been drafted and gotten discharged because he was allergic to khaki. Somehow all three were assigned to the same army base - in their hometown. They left the Army the next year and Dobie moved on to the local junior college. So did Maynard, who had never passed a single class. So did Chatsworth, who could have gone anywhere in the world. And so did their long-suffering high school English teacher, Mr. Pomfritt.

True, this is the same show that had Dobie go from an only child to having an older brother to being an only child in three years.

The winner still has to be The Doris Day Show, which started out as the story of a widow with two kids moving back to her father’s ranch after her husband died. It ended up with a woman who never once mentioned she had children, working as a writer/editor at a sophisticated magazine. Doris Day herself was the only member of the cast to last the entire run of the show.

Burke’s Law and 77 Sunset Strip both featured main characters who started out as detectives but ended up as spies. For Burke’s Law, changing the main character from a rich, sophisticated city police detective to a rich, sophisticated secret agent actually made MORE sense.

I’m sure Picard and Wesley were thrilllllllled to have her back.

Continuity wasn’t as big a deal back then. I’m sure the writers were just trying to come up with whatever they thought would work.