This suggests that the re-titling and the character coming out as a lesbian were even a little bit related.
The show went by the title These Friends of Mine for season 1, from March 1994 through June 1994. When it returned in September 1994, it was Ellen.
Ellen’s character came out in an episode that aired in April 1997.
Yep, and the show isn’t nearly as good anymore. We used to be able to sympathize with Chuck, who’s essentially pretty useless except for being lucky and charming. Suddenly he got the new Intersect and he’s actually competent and kicks ass. And that’s not nearly as interesting. Suddenly the only underdog is Morgan, and even he’s starting to show hints of not being totally useless.
I’ll still watch for Yvonne Strahotty and, more and more, for Sarah Lancaster.
For Buffy, I think the movie isn’t supposed to be canonical. Rather, Joss’s original script for the movie is canonical.
I would say there’s a difference between reworking a show and a logical progression.
For instance, All In The Family couldn’t stay the same. They couldn’t have Mike in school forever. Once Mike graduated the show turned into a typical sitcom (OK a bit edgier for its time), with Mike and Gloria becoming the wacky neighbors. Notice how Irene and the Jefferesons were no longer there by then)
The premise of the show was Archie was the typical white middle aged man and the world was changing around him and he didn’t like it. It was the CHANGE of the status quo that really bugged Archie not those around him.
For all those calling Archie a bigot, he was opinionated, but he freely mixed with everyone something a real bigot wouldn’t even attempt to do.
As for Roseanne, the last year was done that way because it wasn’t suppose to be. The last year was suppose to end with Dan having a heart attack and dying. Then the network conviced Roseanne to comeback for one more year and she decided at that point to go wild and do what she pleased.
In a similar type thing Unhappily Ever After was supposed to be a starring vehicle for Stephanie Hodge. But the other cast memebers kept stealing the show. At one point she was written out (killed off) and brought back. The last season she was out again, but that was done specifically as Nikki Cox who played Tiffany was signed to star in her own WB show and the network wanted to use the last year of Unhappily Ever After as a way to build her up so her new show would sell
Rgarding A Different World, Lisa Bonet got pregnant and the writers were at a loss to explain how Denise could be pregnant. So they wrote her out and she was supposed to come back after the baby was born. To do this, new writers and a new producer were brought in and what started out to be a minor edit turned into a major rewrite. Denise was suppose to come back to the show, but by then it had left her behind.
I would say Family Ties was driven by Michael J Fox, but he didn’t quite take it over. At the end there were still many, many episodes centering around Mallory, the parents, Jennifer and even the little kid. I will give you Fox was the effective star and the reason people tuned in, but he didn’t overshadow everyone like Fonzie on Happy Days
Shows like Happy Days are common where a character breaks out. Another example is Two Close For Comfort, which was about an overprotective father and his two daughters. Then JM J Bullock (as he was billed then) came on for a one time bit part and had instant chemistry with Ted Knight. Knight and Bullock were so good together.
Another example of this is Reba. It changed but basically that was because no one really knew what Reba McEntire was capable of. Could she act? Could she do comedy? Park “Empty Nest” Overall was cast to provide comedy if Reba to back her up, but clearly in the first five or six episodes no one saw Melissa Peterman would break out. In the first episodes Peterman’s protrayal of Barbara Jean was all over the place, being Christian, the other calling her BJ (sort of a weak joke). But once Peterman and McEntire were put together, well those two just clicked. It had been a long time since any two females played comedy off each other as those two did.
What should have been a minor annoying character, Barbara Jean, turned into central element of the show.
So I think you have to differentiate between natural progression, early on reworks and things like unexpect chemistry.
Thriller, hosted by Boris Karloff in the early '60’s, began life as a crime suspense anthology and only slowly over the first season became the Twlight-Zonish supernatural horror series that people remember.
I’ve been watching the first season on DVD. A lot of the forgotten early crime episodes are actually nice little mini-noir dramas worth seeing if you like that genre.
Having first seen Buck Rogers & Battlestar Galactica in reruns as a kid I was really and thought they were set in the same universe. Didn’t help that they were made by the same people and alot of footage from BSG was recylced for Buck Rogers (especially in season 2).
Oh, and how about Weeds? It started out a show about a suburban housewife had to take up selling marijuana to maintain her upper-middle class lifestyle. Then the cookie-cutter suburb moved down and they all ended up burning to San Diego. Her wacky neighbors came along & moved in with her in a kitschy beach cottage, she got involved in trafficking hard drugs (& people), married a Mexican drug lord, and had a baby. Then her teenage son kills a rival drug lord and they flee to Seattle.
She kinda returned to her roots re selling hash, but then ended on a family roadtrip from Hell in an old RV filled with Jesus crap & gay porno; selling drugs and pretending to be missionaries. Now she’s back in her hometown and working on a zany scheme so they can all move to Denmark and live happily ever after.
Doctor Who started off as mad (and a bit creepy) scientist traps two of his grandaughters teachers in his malfuctioning, or so he says, time machine to stop them revealing his secret. His curiosity keeps on getting everyone into trouble and its up to the heros of the show, Ian and Barbera, to bail everyone out.
The whole Timelord thing took six years to be revealed.
It didn’t come entirely out of the blue. I’ve just been watching season 1 on Netflix, and there’s an episode where a judge is killed, apparently by a morbidly obese man (who has a history with Monk and his late wife) who is too fat to get out of bed. At the end, when Monk nails him, the guy tries to lunge out of bed to strangle him, but is still too fat to get up. Monk leans in to the guys hands, staying just a couple inches out of reach, basically taunting the guy. It’s not John McClaine badass, but it does demonstrate that Monk will fuck with you if you’ve ever threatened his wife.
ISTR that at first they were playing up the theme of “how wacky is it that the kid’s more conservative/preppy than his parents” and that they dialed that whole generational conflict trope back fairly rapidly. Am I mis-remembering?
The mother on Family Matters worked at the Chicago newspaper w/Balki & Cousin Larry, so it’s a spin-off, like Jeffersons and Maude.
There was a comic book named Daredevil (no connection to the Marvel character - he wasn’t even blind) that started off as the standard superhero in a rubber suit. At one point, the title character acquired semi-legal status as guardian of a group of tough street kids. Over time, they edged him out completely and the series continued for years without him.
Regards,
Shodan
Well that was another problem with Buck Rogers. It was conceived as a kiddie SF show. But it aired in prime time. So it had Wilma Deering in spandex for adults. And apparently, quite a few adolescents. So it had an episode called “Planet of the Slavegirls,” with no identifiable slavegirls – cause y’know, kiddie show. It was a really badly written, badly conceived show. It might have been a pretty good kiddies SF show, if it had had halfway decent writing. Didnt have it.
I don’t know if I’d say he’s badass in the traditional sense, but he can be very calculating and cold blooded when he’s motivated to do so, not entirely unlike Simon Tam on Firefly (one of the few times we see Simon get into a fight, rather than slug it out with the guy or try throwing him around like Mal or Jayne would, Simon gets the guy down on the floor and calmly chokes him out.
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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,
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Don’t forget the episode in Season 2 where Captain Stottlemeyer’s wife is shot and might be dying. Stottlemeyer is a wreck and getting worse; the parallel to Monk’s situation gets obvious and explicit. Anyhow, our hero eventually makes the crucial deduction – but a minute too late: the key evidence is even now motoring away down the street, having been picked up by sanitation workers and dumped into the back of the garbage truck.
Adrian Monk unhesitatingly overtakes the truck on foot, throwing himself inside to sift through massive piles of trash for the win, because, hey, this murderer isn’t going to get away with it.
Never mind that the episode also includes Monk making absolutely clear why the Captain needs to give his sidearm to another officer before confronting the suspect: “Why? Are you afraid I’ll use it?” “I would.” IMHO, that’s secondary to establishing that Adrian Freakin’ Monk is driven enough to wade through filth if that’s what it takes to nail someone who reminds him of Trudy’s killer.
Slight nitpicks: from the beginning it was clear that the Doctor and Susan were not native to the Twentieth century, and possibly not to Earth at all. At one point the Doctor gives a speech in which he says that where they came from, the riddle of how to travel between any two points of time and space had been solved ages ago, and was now considered trivial. The Doctor could be quite crotchety, and was evidently paranoid about someone or something finding him (aways into the first Doctor’s adventures, it was explicitly given that he and Susan were refugees). He did lighten up quite a bit once he learned to trust Ian and Barbara. The first Doctor was too old to be the hero of the series, so Ian & Barbara (and later a series of nearly-forgotten male and female replacements) had to handle the heavy lifting of the episodes.
By the second Doctor’s tenure (if regeneration wasn’t enough of a clue), in one story a Dalek mind control machine failed to work on the Doctor because it had been designed specifically to work on humans- revealing that the Doctor in fact wasn’t human.
Of course this pales in comparison to the fact that originally the show was conceived of as a children’s educational show, with about half of the first stories dedicated to adventures in Earth history.
Losing the history arcs from Doctor Who was a mistake IMO. But considering the UNIT years, the Time Lord mythbuilding, &c., Doctor Who has mutated repeatedly.
Yeah, originally he was “the single guy” because he wasn’t married. But some exec thought, “oh, no, he’s the guy in a relationship,” & his girlfriend Charlie McCarthy was written out. I think they may have lost some other characters in the second season, but it just fell apart in general as I recall.
Webcomic example: John Allison’s Bobbins span off Scary Go Round as a series in a sort of experimental no-outlines drawing style about Rachel & Tessa dealing with monsters. Then Bobbins ended, & some of its characters ended up taking over Scary Go Round, which was now the main strip, with Tessa & Rachel very much written out. Then John did Scare-O-Deleria as extra hand-drawn strips, then decided to do the regular series that way, & oh, it was now as much about new high school student characters as the old characters. Then he “ended” it with Esther & Eustace going off to college, & started a new strip with even younger characters. The site is still scarygoround.com --it now says, “Scary Go Round presents Bad Machinery.”
Scooby-Doo seemed to go from “the monsters are fake” to “the monsters are real” & stay there through multiple reinventions.
Branded (1965), the story of an 1880s cavalryman reviled for cowardice even though it was his commanding officer who actually bailed on the Battle of Bitter Creek, started out as an interesting story of a man (Chuck Conners) trying to regain his honor and reputation, one small western town at a time. By the second season, he was a secret agent for the government and a less-campy version of the Wild Wild West. There was no third season.
I remember the transition, but I think it was about half-way through the second season when it happened, when President Grant drew him in to a secret mission.
I’m pretty sure a lot of long-running comic strips have changed their premises over time, including Barney Google and Snuffy Smith. I read that strip for years as a kid, and maybe only one time did I see Barney Google come through Hootin’ Holler for a visit.
Has anyone mentioned the 1950s “Adventures of Superman” which in beginning was more of a film noir/crime drama show, albeit with a virtually indestructible man with super strength? When it went to color in the third season (a lot earlier than many tv shows), it became more cartoonish, less violent and more eccentric characters, designed to appeal to young children.