When The Rockford Files started Rockford, being an ex-convict who’d been wrongly imprisoned, only took on cases similar cases that had been wrongly closed by the police. That premise was quickly abandoned and soon Jimmy was taking any case he could get that would pay him his “$200 /day plus expenses.”
That change actually made sense, because it gave him a wider variety of cases to solve.
I saw it differently:
The face the criminal was making wasn’t a “OMG I’m in terrible pain right now!” face, it was a “OMG I’m going to be in terrible pain in a little while, and I’m stuck in a room with this psycho who’s dead wife I helped kill!”
Okay, normally I woulldn’t bump a month-old thread, but I have to in this case:
Family Matters is still an example, even if you ignore that it was a spinoff. The original premise was about a sitcom family dealing with typical sitcom family situations. But a one-off character in the first episode, Stephen Q. Urkel, became popular enough that they made him a recurring character in the plots they’d already written. Only in later seasons did the show become the Urkel show.
Still, they did keep some of the family aspect to the end–it just became the B plot. So I’d give it a 5 or so.
While Erin Gray looked great in Spandex, she wasn’t on the same order of magnitude as Jeri Ryan as Seven of Nine on Star Trek Voyager.
Sci-Fi hotties don’t get better than Athena 
I remember this one. Duet was a domestic sitcom about a couple Ben (Matthew Laurance) and Laura (Mary Page Keller). Their friends were a cynical married couple Richard (Chris Lemmon) and Linda (Alison La Placa). The show was supposed to be about Ben and Laura but the characters of Richard and Linda got better lines and were more popular.
So they rewrote the show. They had Ben and Laura break up with Ben disappearing. Linda became the main character with Laura becoming a supporting character to her. Then they switched the setting to the real estate office where Linda and Laura worked and retitled the shoe Open House.
Bloom County debuted in December 1980. Opus the penguin didn’t make his first appearance until June 1981, and then didn’t become a regular character until January 1982. By 1983 he was the focal point of the strip.
If you count development as a part of the run, you may consider Another Ball Game, pitched as a romantic comedy vehicle for real-life NFL star Alex Karras and his wife, Susan Clark. Somebody at ABC saw Emmanuel Lewis…and the rest is history.
Similarly, Outland was to be a distinct strip from Bloom County, with new characters and Ronald Ann as the primary. It gradually cameoed in old Bloom County characters which took the spotlight from the new Outland characters and eventually became a redux of the older series.
And of course Opus survived briefly as a “where are they now?” series featuring Opus and Steve Dallas as [del]actors[/del] characters trying to reboot their [del]show[/del] strip after everyone else had moved on.
Star Trek - TOS Regularly abandons the Prime Directive - interfere in primitive “pre warp” culture" ? You bet!
Was just thinking, in the greater scope, the Star Trek franchise went from being about exploration and discovering new cultures, to a story of transgalactic warfare and political intrigue (due, probably at least a bit, to Babylon 5 being a darker and grittier counterpart to Deep Space Nine when both shows were on the air)
Funny that no one mentioned Happy Days, which started out being about Richie Cunningham and his friends and family, but which, in short order, turned into more or less The Fonzie Show.
Also, Rod Serling’s Night Gallery, which started out as an anthology show, but morphed into *The Gary Collins Show *with a series called “The Sixth Sense” interloping into the show.
Aqua Teen Hunger Force. The first episode was about crime-fighting food (they tried to make the show without a premise but the executives wouldn’t accept a show that didn’t have a point). They completely abandoned that premise from then on.
Yeah, they broke SD-6, mainlined Syndney and company to the real CIA (but a secret office), then discovered that what made the show work was the twisted nature of what Sydney had been doing.
The Practice had long since gotten twisted. It started as a struggling small law firm dealing with interesting legal issues, but somewhere along the way went batshit crazy (come on, the serial killer boyfriend dressed as a nun?).
I was going to mention that one. First half season was reasonably interesting, but then it went soap opera.
I think it was more loosely inspired by the movie than that. One of the episodes first season recreated the scenes where Buffy discovered her destiny.
I don’t think it abandoned that premise. The last half the last season, the big bad was The First - a power that could take the form of any dead person. They just were more focused on the story arc than individual episode plots - less demon of the week, more bring the main story to a head.
The biggest change with Buffy is what every show revolving around kids/teens faces - they age. Buffy started as a high school show, but it couldn’t stay a high school show because Buffy, Willow, Xander, and Cordelia and company were growing up*. So it had to shift to college.
The bigger change was the end of season 5 and the channel move. That made season 6 insufferable largely because Buffy stopped being sympathetic at all, what with the whole low affect and rampant sex with Spike. I get what Whedon was doing, what with her returning from heaven so nothing could measure up, but it wasn’t fun to endure.
Well, yeah, you can’t have white students at a Black college. :rolleyes:
A more recent example is The Big Bang Theory, originally supposed to be about Leonard and Penny (both played by proven TV actos), which is turning into The Sheldon Cooper Show
That actually has a ring of truth to it. One of the weird things about a cycle of domestic abuse is that the abused person sometimes consciously chooses to trigger a violent episode by the abuser. Sometimes it’s because the abused person can see it coming and wants to get it over with; sometimes it’s to deflect the abuser from abusing a child. In that odd dynamic, the abused person might see it as a “win”.
Recently, the Fox sitcom “Till Death” started out as being about two couples, one newlywed, idealistic and in love, and one married for a long time who had gotten used to each other, with most of the humor being the way the two couples interacted. Then they dropped the newlywed couple altogether.
Chuck is just about there. The original premise involved an ordinary guy who gets a supercomputer’s worth of information dumped into his head, getting dragged into the spy business. Naturally, he has to keep this secret from his friends and family.
Now, everyone knows he’s a spy, and he’s not a regular guy anymore, he’s a full member of the team who can take care of himself as good as or better than the best. Every week is another “hey, this person from your past is a spy as well!” It’s getting quite ridiculous.
These Friends of Mine starred Ellen DeGeneres as a straight woman. It was later renamed Ellen and the premise was changed a bit.
