The 1961 game show You’re in the Picture ran for two episodes, the second of which consisted entirely of host Jackie Gleason sitting in a chair on a bare stage and apologizing to the audience for how bad the first episode had been. The network then retooled what would have been the remaining episodes into a talk show and renamed it The Jackie Gleason Show.
Yeah, I really want to avoid spinoffs.
That was the very show I had in mind when I started this thread.
Well done!
After 2 seasons, Star Trek: Discovery jumps from being set before The Original Series to 900 years later pretty much only because the writers and show runners weren’t good enough at their jobs to create and write stories that fit within the established canon of the pre-TOS time period.
Duet. And the Wikipedia article sums it up nicely:
Duet is an American sitcom that aired on Fox from April 19, 1987, to May 7, 1989. Originally, the story centered on the romance of a novelist (Matthew Laurance) and a caterer (Mary Page Keller), but gradually the focus shifted to their yuppie friends (Chris Lemmon, Alison LaPlaca) and the show was rebranded as Open House.[1] The series was created by Ruth Bennett and Susan Seeger, and was produced by Paramount Television.
Mary Page Keller returned but was recently separated from her husband and ended up working for Alison LaPlaca’s character.
Season one of Wonder Woman took place in WWII where she mostly battled Nazis. Finding old cars and costumes were apparently prohibitively expensive, so the following season took place in the present era. This established that Wonder Woman doesn’t age and her new partner is Steve Trevor Jr.
“Manifest” started off as a time-travel story, and spun off into all kinds of weird directions.
The 1994 sitcom These Friends of Mine made two significant changes after its first season: it was renamed Ellen (after star Ellen DeGeneres) because another, even more successful, sitcom with a similar name – Friends – had also premiered in 1994. The writers also ditched two of the main characters after the first season, without any explanation.
But, the bigger shift/revamp came near the end of season four, when Ellen (the character) came out as gay, at the same time that DeGeneres, herself, came out. After that point (and the media attention which surrounded it), the show became more serious, and more about gay issues.
Back in 1988 Fox had a supernatural fantasy titled “Second Chance”, where Heaven sends Kiel Martin back in time to watch over his younger self, played by Matthew Perry. It ran for nine episodes before being retooled into “Boys Will Be Boys”, with Kiel Martin (and the supernatural elements of the show) dropped and never mentioned again. This version ran for another twelve episodes before being cancelled.
In the final season of McHale’s Navy, the crew of PT 73 was transferred to Italy from the South Pacific, along with Captain Binghamton and his aide Elroy Carpenter. I found it interesting that they were the only boat in their squadron to be transferred. (PT 73 its self was shipped to Italy on a “transport,” which made me wonder if there weren’t PT boats already available in the Mediterranean.) The cast remained intact, except for Gavin MacLeod (Seaman “Happy Hanes”), who had left the show because he was given little to do.
In the South Pacific, the crew had to deal with comical Japanese, and Islanders who were out to make a buck. In Italy, they faced easy-to-fool Germans, and Italians who were out to make a buck. They were also placed under the supervision of an unscrupulous US Army colonel named Harrigan, whose conniving rivaled that of McHale.
Arguably one of the strangest (and least-known, since no one’s mentioned it yet) is the 1971-2 James Garner western Nichols, set in the town of Nichols in 1914. Garner, playing a sheriff also named Nichols, was teamed with Stuart Margolin (before The Rickford Files) as his deputy.
They’d only aired a few episodes when they realized that the formula wasn’t working, so they killed off the title character on-screen and he was replaced by – James Garner, playing his twin brother, with the same hairstyles, only with a moustache.
That episode was the last of the season, but they’d expected to come back the next year, only to get cancelled.
Has to be the most sudden and drastic revamp ever. I was watching the show, and was surprised that this wasn’t some sort of weird trick – they really did kill off the title character.
I remember Nichols. Margot Kidder owned the town’s saloon, which was decorated with 50-star flags.
The first season of the late 70s (early 80s ?) science fiction show Buck Rogers in the 25th Century was set on Earth (although they did sometimes travel in space, they always came to Earth) and focused on defending the planet. The second season they were based on a giant spaceship traveling through the galaxy a la Star Trek. Mostly the same cast, but they added a sort of man-bird hybrid named Hawk. The second season was so bad that the show got canceled about six episodes in.
The “Mathnet” serials on Square One TV (which were eventually aired as a freestanding series) changed the setting from Los Angeles to New York in Season 3, then replaced protagonist Kate Monday with Pat Tuesday in Season 4.
And ended up as a retail store comedy rather than a school comedy.
9 seasons, and I believe the shop opened in the fourth or fifth season.
Lost in Space is a good one. It started out as a fairly straight youth-oriented sci-fi adventure: the Robinson family stranded in space, with Guy Williams (TV’s former Zorro) as the heroic dad/lead.
But pretty quickly the show discovered that Dr. Smith was the fun part. He began as an actual villain, but Jonathan Harris turned him into a cowardly ham, always scheming, whining, insulting the Robot, and stealing every scene within tractor-beam range.
So the show drifted from “serious family space adventure” into “Dr. Smith, Will, and the Robot get into ridiculous trouble while the adults stand around looking concerned.” Not an official revamp, maybe, but definitely a show that changed course mid-flight.
Fun ratings footnote: in its original run, Lost in Space actually ranked better than Star Trek, which later won the immortality sweepstakes in syndication. So Dr. Smith may have been ridiculous, but the bubble-headed booby got eyeballs.
The Kate Mulgrew show that started out as Mrs. (Kate) Columbo, the too-young wife of the famously rumpled detective. After a mere 6 episodes, she got a mysterious divorce or reality shift and became Kate Callahan. The show became Kate the Detective, then quickly Kate Loves a Mystery with a stop at Kate Columbo along the way. Four titles and a complete revamp in all of 13 episodes.
I’m sure I watched it new and I can’t remember a thing about it. I didn’t even make the conection when ST Voyager came on.
Also, I am of the school that Columbo never had a wife, that “she” was just another trick he used on suspects.
In one of the last episodes, we do see Columbo in private talking to his wife on the phone, with no one around to be fooling. That’s commitment to the bit.
Galactica: 1980 is either a sequel series or a revamped continuation of “Battlestar Galactica,” with a lot of new cast and an Earth (vice deep space) setting, and a sharp decrease in quality and maturity level.
I’ll grant you the later episode talk to the shy Mrs C probably collapsed the Schroedinger’s wife waveform.
I think I read that when the show was starting, even the creators (Levinson and Link) weren’t sure she existed.
Galactica 1980 was a weird thing. It supposedly took place 20 ish years after BSG, but that means, since it was set in the titular year, they picked up the Apollo 11 broadcast 10 years before it happened.