Sometimes, a show can be changed by demands from the executives running the network the show airs on, usually in an attempt to make the show more appealing to audiences. TV Tropes calls this, “Executive Meddling”.
When has this happened in a show you liked?
Bob. It was a very funny show with Bob Newhart, an artist who quits his job at a greeting card company to go back to drawing a comic book character he created and which is being revived and Dark Knighted. They got the workplace right, and his battles with Harlan Stone, the writer, were very funny. It later evolved to show the very funny life of the characters outside of work. It got decent ratings. Despite the fact that CBS moved its time slot all over the place.
For the second season, CBS executives decided to drop the entire workplace staff, added Betty White and Jere Burns, and send Bob back to the greeting card company. It was awful, and was cancelled after 5 episodes.
Interesting tropes page, I had no idea the miniseries V was a heavily retooled version of It Can’t Happen Here.
OK, the tropes page doesn’t mention, under the CBS heading, that *Big Bang Theory *was initially supposed to be what it eventually became – guy geeks paired off with equally quirky girl geeks. The idea to add Penny as a street smart non0intellectual was supped to be purely Les Moonves’s idea – and nearly made the show creators/writers quit at the start. Remember the quirky female physicist when she visited for one episode? Remember Leonard’s girlfriend the doctor? Remember his one blind date with that brash blonde friend of Bernadette? That’s what the show creators had in mind.
BTVS
Firefly
X-Files
Branded, a Chuck Conners western from the mid-60s, ran for two seasons. The first season was kind of interesting. It was the story of a soldier who was kicked out of the army for cowardice after being the sole survivor of a poorly-waged battle. He wanders the west trying to restore his good name. By season two, he’s a government agent fighting bad guys, kind of like The Wild Wild West without the gadgets, sidekick and sexy saloon girls.
This is pretty much the thread right here but it bears mentioning that Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse got way better once the studio stopped messing with it.
Saturday Night Live fired Norm Macdonald in order to placate NBC executive Don Ohlmeyer.
I agree about Dollhouse, but did the network mess with the content of Firefly, or just with its airings?
Lorre vs. Sheen in Two and a Half Men, of course, and the writers of **Mom **shifted the focus from Anna Faris’ character and her children to the group of friends.
Mork and Mindy got a ridiculous amount of meddling that effectively destroyed the show - after the first season, the network decided to add new younger characters, add new settings (a local deli) and shift the focus to the romance between Mork and Mindy (away from Mork’s fish-out-of-water antics) - and changed the time slot. Ratings declined sharply and further modifications were made, which didn’t help.
Burke’s Law was a fun little mystery series featuring Amos Burke as a head of a detectives who was also a millionaire and who showed up at the scene in a chauffeured Rolls Royce. Each episode had a bunch of moderate-to-big name guest stars as the suspects. After two successful seasons, someone decided to revamp it to cash in on the spy trend and renamed it Amos Burke, Secret Agent. It quickly tanked. Even Gene Barry, its star, hated it.
Yeah. I still miss the original version of “Bob” - the young woman who played his daughter was particularly funny working with Newhart.
I thought that the network insisted that he create a new pilot and add the blue hands sub-plot.
Cynthia Stevenson, who has been in a ton of stuff, but I wouldn’t say she was particularly famous for any of them. Maybe as Norm’s secretary on Cheers. Or Joe Mantegna’s fiancée in Forget Paris.
Here’s one that not a lot of people know of. I’m a big fan of Babylon 5, and the work of J Michael Straczynsky. I recently read his autobiography and he mentioned that the network execs, one in particular who seemed to totally have it out for him, meddled in his new show called Crusade so much that it completely ruined the show. He said that this particular exec would constantly give them worse and worse notes - things that clearly and deliberately would ruin the show or were not possible given the budget they had to work with. One example he cited was that he got a note demanding that the captain character willingly hand over his first officer to be raped. (JMS refused that, of course.)
John Bracken was voiced by Warren Stevens, but never shown in the first season of the 1969 drama Bracken’s World. But the producer deciding to add him to the cast and have him played by Leslie Nielsen? Surely you can’t be serious.
“Blackadder” was a very different beast in series 1 compared to subsequent series. A lot of that was to do with a demand from the top of the BBC that in order to get recommissioned it had to be cheaper and better. It was, and it was. The enforced changes worked in its favour I think.
She was also excellent in The Player, where she was the only person in the film with a sense of proportion. Also very good in Dead Like Me as George’s mother. But she never had a role that led to popular fame.
CBS fired A.J. Cook (J.J.) and all-but-fired Paget Brewster (Emily Prentiss) from Criminal Minds to free up payroll for a spin-off no one wanted or watched. I’m happy to say they fixed those mistakes later.
Particularly egregious was that they replaced J.J. with a dead ringer for A.J. Cook (“who’ll notice?”). When I see those episodes, I refer to her as “Fake J.J.” or “budget J.J.” depending upon my mood.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I seem to recall that Terra Nova reportedly suffered from executive meddling, but now I can’t find anything supporting that online. At the time, I remember reading something along the lines that Fox executives wanted something in the show to appeal to every key demographic, but instead ended up with a mess that turned everyone off. For example, they had the cute kid with the pet baby dino to appeal to young kids, but those kids weren’t watching the show because it was too violent, and the male 18-49 demographic there for the violence thought those plot lines were stupid.