Actually, season one starts in the middle of the school year, having had to move because of the fire she started in the gym back in LA. Apparently, Joss’ original script of the movie had her burning down the gym but someone else didn’t want that so they didn’t do that. He brought back that part of it in the show when he had more control.
Not sure that the series abandoned its premise since she fights vampires. What it did abandon was the fact that she fights more than vampires, including demons, evil sorcerers, and amoral robots.
While I like reading this thread, part of me wonders if most series won’t seem to have abandoned their original idea many seasons later. For example, SG-1 was about fighting the go’oald but they faced robots and ascended beings as well. Is that breaking it or are they supposed to defend the earth from threats? And, isn’t it better as long as it serves to tell a good story?
Great example, even people who remember Mannix usually don’t remember how it started.
An obscure example was a show called Duet, I think on Fox in the 80’s. Originally about a young couple, it turned into a show about a secondary character and gave Ellen Degeneris a jump into television.
The show Spaced forgot that it was originally supposed to be a series about two friends who don’t know each other very well faking a long term relationship to rent a couples-only apartment, and became about an eclectic group of 20 somethings, and their alcoholic landlady.
Oddly, the original premise was brought back for the final episode.
well, it was a long time ago. And, according to the Wikipedia entry, they didn’t put the first season shows into syndication, so people who didn;'t see the first season the first time through wouldn’t know. It wasn’t until they released the first season on DVD that folks got to see them again after all those years.
Why? Maybe they didn’t want to pay residuals or something. If they didn’t want to confuse people, they should never have released the last season I Love Lucy’s out of sequence. Confused the hell out of me as a kid when the Ricardos were sometimes living on a Connecticut farm.
Monk, 4/10. The early seasons portrayed Monk as a helpless, bumbling schlub. Later seasons showed that Monk had a serious badass streak in him, which he seemed (unlike so much else in his life) to have some control over.
The interesting thing to me is that Monk’s badass streak came almost out of the blue at the end of the last episode of Season 3, when Monk tracks down Warrick Tennyson, who was involved in his wife’s murder, at a hospital in Manhattan. Tennyson is on a morphine drip, and asks for forgiveness. Monk says no…and reaches over and turns off the drip. After Tennyson writhes in agony for a while, Monk turns the drip back on, saying, “this his is Trudy, the woman you killed, turning it back on.”
I remember at the time everyone who watched Monk was in shock. “Holy shit, did you see what Adrian did? Damn!”
possibly the most extreme case of this was the 1971-2 series Nichols, starring James Garner as a Maverick-like sheriff. Because the series got low ratings they killed off Garner’s character.
Then Garner came back as his own identical twin brother to avenge the first Nichols’ death. They could kill off the character, but keep the series name, and star.
But the series was cancelled before that episode ran, although it did run – as the last episode.
I look at it as an evolution of the character. Not that Dexter is suddenly feeling emotions and becoming “normal.” It that he is slowly realizing that Harry wasn’t 100% right about him.
They’ve done a spectacular job showing that as much as Dexter was a product of his childhood trauma, he was also molded into a killer by his adopted father. Hary told Dexter he was this way so Dex believed it. By building a “cover” of normality Dex is starting to feel and experience he was told he could never feel.
ETA: didn’t see the thread was at 3 pages and this was addressed several time.
Edith didn’t die on All in the Family, she died (off screen) on Archie Bunker’s Place in the 2nd season.
Actually, by the end they weren’t business partners, just roommates, as they’d closed down the store to build bedrooms for Beverly Anne’s adopted son Andy and the Australian highschool foreign exchange student Pippa that lived with them for reasons that I’m sure only would make sense in a sitcom.
By public superhero, I mean someone who has regular dealings with the public and does not try to hide his very existence. If the Blur stops after he saves a busload of nuns to give an interview with Eyewitness News, or accepts the keys to the city, or even advertises in the Yellow Pages without admitting that he has superpowers, he’s a public superhero. The fact that he’s referred to in the press by that name does not make him public.
Comic-book Superman is a public hero. Angel was sort-of a public hero (he just wasn’t open about being a vampire in most cases). But Clark on Smallville isn’t public (as I understand it; I watch the show very rarely).
I like MT, but she always felt sort of shoehorned in. She was the token white girl meant to reassure Middle America that it was okay to watch the show.
Oh, and a quick mention of Family Matters, which started off as a show about two distant cousins (one of them a Greek exile) sharing a flat in Chicago and turned into a show about a middle-class African American family in the suburbs.
Is that a joke? Of course Family Matters (black family in suburbs) and Perfect Strangers (Meposian expatriate) had different characters and different settings. They were different series. It would be like saying Maude and the Jeffersons abandoned the premise of All in the Family because they were about different characters in different settings (whereas Archie Bunker’s Place could arguably be considered a continuation rather than a spinoff of All in the Family, as it featured the same lead character, living in the same house, and most of the transitional events – Stivics moving out and Archie buying a bar, orphan moving in – happened under the old title).
Riff and Bun-Bun are not gone for good. Bun-Bun comes and goes. Usually, when he goes for too long a time it is because he is involved in his own story line that will be reveled in between the other story lines. The last time he was away for a while was:
when he challenged and defeated all the holidays before his shadow screwed up and got him thrown out of time (again). That of course led to him actually beating the crap out of himself (multiple times) in timeless space.
As for Riff: he is currently trapped in an alternate dystopian universe ruled by version of Dr. Shlock with Zoe as Torg, Sam, and Riff’s ex have become super villain minions to try and save them.
I tend to agree that the Torg Potter stories are distracting, although they are close in tone to the original strips. But the DoP was actually important to the main story. It seemed like an aside on the weekends, but eventually they figured out how to get into the Dimension of Lame and Torg was brought back by the lame Gwen to fight the demons. That led to a lot of character development for Torg, becoming mostly competent, falling in love, tragedy, partial redemption. It was a very moving story line and it matured Torg without him losing his Torgness.
I have to agree that Sluggy changed a lot from the early strips, but I think it has really become a lot better. Of course, it is no almost impossible to be a casual reader as the story lines can take months or even years, but the humor is still there and I enjoy the stories.
I always found that scene bizarre, because it’s not like turning off a morphine drip for that long would put the guy in any immediate physical pain. At worst he would have just made the guy a little nervous that it might get left off for hours.
Well, I can’t say for sure, but I’m pretty sure it was a joke because earlier, Mean Mr. Mustard said:
and Raguleader followed up with:
Sounded to me like he was riffing on the phrasing there. So I, of course, had to continue the joke by clarifying the nationality of the character involved… you understand!
I don’t remember the “humor” of the earlier strips relying so heavily on having characters with lame puns for names.
*I remember this arc, but I don’t remember it having anything to do with the stupid “Crocodile Hunter” parody that was popping up every weekend. I never felt I’d missed anything by skipping those strips.
On the subject of webcomics, “Megatokyo” started off as a mix of gag strips (often about video games/gamers) and plot strips (the adventures of two hapless gaijin in a fantastical version of Tokyo). Then there was some behind-the-scenes drama that anyone who cares must already have heard about, and the gags faded away. Eventually, so too did any actual advancement of the plot. Updates became infrequent, and the strips that were posted moved things forward at a sub-glacial pace. Then everything was put on hold for a side-arc that had absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the series (different setting and characters), and I said “Screw it.”
I did revisit “Megatokyo” 2-3 years later, and as far as I could tell it was later that same day. No joke. I had fully expected to be confused about what was going on, but I read back a few strips and it didn’t look like I’d missed anything at all – apparently nothing had been resolved or even significantly changed in the years I’d been away. The “Characters” and “Story” pages were also still devoid of content and marked as under construction.
Uh, no. They had to deal with Lisa Bonet’s unexpected pregnancy, and felt that it would be too difficult to do the “behind counters and big purses” thing that they did with Phylicia Rashad on The Cosby Show in the college environment and didn’t want to turn Denise into an unwed mother and change the focus of the show into “college student has a baby” so they brought Denise back as a character on The Cosby Show and diversified the focus of the show.
The last season of The West Wing was barely about The West Wing at all, but about the campaign. It’s a little nitpicky, perhaps.
Well, my joke was that Family Matters is (at least according to Wikipedia, the one true source of all factual and correct knowledge on the internet) that Family Matters is a spin-off of Perfect Strangers. Seems that there is all of one common character between the shows, and they both take place in Chicago.
Another series might be Murder One, the legal drama hyped with having the then-risky premise of following a single murder case throughout the season, primarily through the eyes of the cantankerous defense attorney played by Daniel Benzali. Benzali was gone after that initial season. Season 2 was divided into three (or possibly four?) smaller cases, with a few more attorneys added to the firm along with new star Anthony LaPaglia.
And what about Red Dwarf? Premise: Dave Lister, the last human alive on a mining ship (and possibly the universe) after the death of his 1,000+ crewmates from a radiation leak. 3 million years later, when Lister awakens from stasis, his only companions on board are a creature that evolved from his cat, the hologram of his dead bunkmate Rimmer, and Holly, the ship’s computer. Kryten the mechanoid was added two series later, but that was it. Dave was lovesick over Kochanski, the girl he could never have (even when she wasn’t 3 million years in his past, and also dead).
By the 7th series, Kochanski was somehow alive again. By the 8th series, all 1K crewmates were back and Red Dwarf was teeming with life!
(OTOH, this might be an example of a show regaining its premise, since after a decade, the 9th series premiered and found Dave, Rimmer, Holly, Kryten and The Cat alone again.)
