Apologies if this has already been asked and answered - I did not want to read all three pages of thread - but how does L&O rate a 3? TOS (as opposed to spinoffs) almost never deviated from formula for its entire run. You could practically set your watch by the time at which the cops would reject their first serious suspect and start to look elsewhere. Maybe losses for the DAs became a little rarer in the later days than they were at first, but that is hardly abandonment of the premise.
Indeed. The only real deviations I remember were that 3 episode arc where they went to LA and that one were the McCoy, young female ADA, Briscoe, and junior partner witnessed an exectution and spend the rest of the episode talking about it.
Is that the one where Briscoe falls off the wagon? If so, I remember that as an excellent episode, one of relatively few “mothership” episodes I’ve seen.
IIRC, The Dick Van Dyke Show was supposed to have Laura as only a supporting player, not the lead female character.
Valerie went from a show starring Valerie Harper to a show w/o Valerie Harper at all.
When Law & Order began, we never saw anything of the characters’ private lives; it went on that way for many years, pretty much until the episode in which Claire Kincaid was killed. Her affair with Jack McCoy had to be completely inferred; there was nothing on scene to definitely point to it. (Though I recall one former assistant of Jack’s who thought it was the case, but that character had no credibility.) They loosened up on this beginning with that episode (though thank Athena they never did the musical beds common to the genre.) Showing things like Lieutenant Van Buren’s chemotherapy or Curtis’s wife’s funeral, as happened in the last season 
would have been inconceivable in the first one.
They also abandoned the younger detective/older detective dynamic. It was always clear that Greevey was senior to Logan, that Briscoe was senior to Curtis & Green, even that Green was senior to the brunette detective whose name I’m too lazy to look up; but the last two detective pairings were not so clear.
Of course they never abandoned the improbably-hot-assistant-femaleADA-whose-Bond-girl-beauty-is-rarely-commented-on-though-freaking-obvious rule established by Kincaid. I mention that only so I have an excuse to post this.
Anita Blake, Vampire Executioner and perennial “Good girl” has in the course of the book series turned into Anita Blake, bad ass necromancer, and Girl Who Will Have Sex With ANYTHING. Constantly. And be both upset about it, and morally superior about it.
Of course, it’s not HER FAULT. She’s posessed by the spirit of a Werewolf sex fiend woman who forces her to fuck any were she comes across.
She hasn’t done any detective work in ages, and now spends most of her time admiring who she’s gonna fuck/kill next, as near as I can tell. Bah.
How have we gone four pages and not mentioned Family Matters?
Dude, we barely made it four posts.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=12646047&postcount=10
What about that show with that annoying black nerdy kid?
Whatchu talkin’ about Willis?
Oh come on! Yes there was slightly more soapish stuff in later years, but it always remained a miniscule proportion of the whole. It never became anything like the focus. In terms of deviation from premise this is worth about 0.5 at most.
And since you ruled out change of characters, as in ER, this is worth a 0.1 at most. Yes, the older-younger cop dynamic was there, but it was never a significant part of the show.
Well, the original assistant ADA was a young black man (although, so far as I can judge as a straight male, still ludicrously good looking). If anything, this is the biggest change you have mentioned, since (for us straight males, anyway) his replacement by ultra-hot women became a real, if minor, additional incentive for watching. (I guess the slot for implausibly handsome black men was eventually re-filled when Detective Green took over from implausibly handsome hispanic, Curtis. - Is Anthony Anderson also considered very handsome? Probably; but that manicured 5o’clock-shadow beard squinks me out somehow.)
I do not think that is her work attire. 
Woosh!
And St. Elsewhere turned out to be just a daydream of an autistic kid looking at a snowglobe.
This harkens back to the original pre-WW2 comics. Originally, Superman didn’t spend his time saving the Earth from aliens and ultra-cosmic menaces; he brought bank robbers and murderers to justice. He was a sort of force of justice incarnate, invulnerable enough and irresistable enough that the bad guys couldn’t escape from him or kill him. If he made his debut today, he’d be a guy who takes down drug cartels by being invulnerable to machine guns (and a RPG maybe knocks him on his ass but doesn’t really hurt him), and strong enough to rip down steel doors the villains might be hiding behind. Wolverine might be an equivalent, if you substitute healing factor for invulnerability and adamntium claws for strength.
People seem to have noticed.
"71 points or more: Irredeemable-Sue. You’re going to have to start over, my friend. I know you want to keep writing, but no. Just no.
Your Mary Sue Score: 168"
And many many more.
Not to mention rumors that he was Jewish.
The Wire would be at least a 2 or 3; maybe quite a bit higher depending on your viewpoint. Seasons 1 & 2 were purely about criminals and the police who were investigating them. Then Season 3 spends a moderate amount of time on politics and the mayoral race, while Seasons 4 & 5 spend a lot of time on the public schools and newspapers, respectively.
Now, this sort of depends on what we mean by “about.” Plot-wise, Seasons 3, 4, and 5 are a pretty big departure. Thematically (‘death of an American city’ and all that), they mostly fit right in.
Yeah… no.
Too many people have done that seriously. I stand by my snark.
Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.