Never mind.
Maybe he married his wife well after his career started, so for many years he had an imaginary wife, but ended up with a real one?
OOOH! Good example. I guess Hawk was kind of cool, but that was just about the only thing remotely good about season 2.
How about shows that should have been only one season? “Prison Break” and “24” come to mind (how many action packed days can one guy have?)
Babylon 5 was supposed to be 5 seasons, but when the 5th season was in doubt, the ending was crammed into season 4. So a lot of season 5 was … less good.
Brian
He did that more than once. The first time might have been at the health spa in “An Exercise in Fatality” (Season 4, Episode 1):
Columbo: [on the phone] Hello? What’re you doing up? You know what time it is? It’s… um…
[calls out] DOES ANYBODY HAVE THE TIME?
Voice from other room: It’s 6:30.
Columbo: [into the phone] It’s 6:30. I’m not yelling.
I had forgotten that one - I was thinking of “Rest in Peace, Mrs. Columbo” (in which he fakes the funeral for Mrs. C.)
The first season of Due South was outstanding. The second season, which began with Ben recovering from being shot, not so much. But the show really crashed in the truncated third and fourth seasons, where he got a new partner everyone (including sister Francesca) had to pretend was Ray, who was on a “highly classified” undercover operation.
Truth was, the actor who played Ray was cut loose because he wanted (and deserved) a pay raise. He returned for a brief cameo toward the end of the series.
The early 90s US version of Men Behaving Badly had Rob Schneider, Justine Bateman(!), and some other guy in it. I thought the first season was funny, probably because it was very raunchy.
Bateman and the other guy left after the first season, supposedly because they didn’t like working with Schneider. As the only one of the original cast left the show got considerable retooling with different supporting cast and situations, but I don’t remember exactly how the plot was changed, and the Wikipedia article doesn’t go into any detail.
It was canceled before all of the season 2 episodes were broadcast.
True, but “The Facts of Life” ended up going full-circle: Blair Warner (the girl from a wealthy family) ended up buying Eastland School, and while the other girls go their separate ways, Blair continues at Eastland, where we started, as the headmistress.
I don’t know if I’d call the changes in “The Facts of Life” as sudden revamps, as much as I’d call them “changes over time.” Entirely believable every step of the way, but not sudden: as the girls grow older, we have to figure out what to do with them. And the show does.
If I remember correctly, in the Trouble Waters episode of Columbo, he and his wife are on a cruise and other people mention seeing her.
The change from season 1 to season 2 was pretty dramatic
Gene Roddenberry actually pitched Star Trek to CBS first before NBC. After spending several hours going through his spiel with network execs, they passed on it saying “We’ve already got a show set in space.”
This one is more subtle and maybe doesn’t fit, but what the heck!
In the cop show Hunter with Fred Dryer, it was established in season 1 that Hunter was the “white sheep” of a mob family. By the end of the run not only was that not true, but his father had been murdered by mobsters. I guess they…forgot?
It really didn’t affect the show, so maybe not?
Wow, that sounds horrible, and another version of a bad US version of a great UK comedy (like Red Dwarf and a few others). But it’s weird too.
Because Men Behaving Badly in the UK was originally starring Harry Enfield with Martin Clunes supporting, and wasn’t half as funny, it possibly was the last actual Sitcom that ITV channel produced, in 1992 (it exists still just it gave up comedy). Then it moved to the BBC, dropped Enfield, made Clunes the star, and actually had Men Behaving Badly in it.
We’ve forgotten one of the most infamous revamps of all time.
Patrick Duffy decided to leave the cast of Dallas at the end of season 8. The producers had plenty of advance notice, and sent him off in grand style; a car crash, followed by a tear-jerking death scene in the hospital, letting the audience know that wasn’t merely dead, he was really most sincerely dead.
Without Bobby Ewing, season 9 suffered a big drop in the ratings. The producers sent a personal appeal from Larry Hagman (J.R. Ewing) and an armored car full of money to Duffy’s house to get him to come back to the show. Season 10 opened with the widow Pam Ewing discovering Bobby taking a shower. He told her that his death - and everything else that happened to every other character in season 9 - was all just a dream.
OTOH, it gave the ending of Newhart a real boost.
Remington Steele was heavily reworked after the first season. The characters of Bernice Fox and Murphy Michaels, Laura Holt’s colleagues in sleuthing, were cut unceremoniously from the cast, removing the prospect of any romantic triangles developing and ensuring the focus would be on the two leads (Stephanie Zimbalist and Pierce Brosnan) growing closer together. Perennially-available Doris Roberts was brought in as the agency’s secretary, providing a matronly chaperone feel in the office. (At the start of the second season, Laura even kvetched about how weird to felt not having Bernice and Murphy around any more.)
Solving cases on the basis of old movie plots every week became one of the show’s hooks, and Brosnan was ready to move on after four years. He was bitterly disappointed when contractual obligations prevented him from becoming the next James Bond, and you could tell his heart wasn’t really in doing one more season of RS.
From what I remember (which is dubious), Hunter’s father was murdered long before the start of the show. The son of Hunter’s father’s partner had him killed because Hunter’s father didn’t want to take any more mob money for their business, he wanted out. After that, I think they hardly ever mentioned his father again, or at least it wasn’t a recurring theme, so I wouldn’t say it was a big change to the show. Maybe they softened his image, but he was still mobbed up when he was murdered.
Probably because it had already been on for two years and thus built something of a fan base. However, the quality of the show was declining rapidly, and it wouldn’t last much longer.
In the first season of 12 O’Clock High, Robert Lansing was General Frank Savage, the role played by Gregory Peck in the 1949 motion picture of the same name. In the second season, Lansing was replaced with Colonel Joe Gallagher, played by Paul Burke, reportedly because he was very difficult to work with. (I personally preferred Lansing, even though it was technically inaccurate to have a Brigadier General in charge of a Bomb Group.)
I’ve always thought that Gallagher (an Irish American) was an homage to Joe Kennedy, Jr, who died in 1944 testing a bomber converted into what was essentially a cruise missile. Gallagher had appeared early in the first season as the commander of a B-17 christened “The Leper Colony” and crewed by misfits, though I doubt he was at that time considered a potential replacement for Savage. The show carried on pretty much as before until it ended in 1967, but I felt it lost the edge that Lansing brought to it.
Buck Rodgers.
Season One–straight up BR. Buck gets into suspended Animation, goes to the Future, wacky adventures.
Season Two–a bastardized Battlestar Galactica.
A bit of a meta-example: The initial plot of 30 Rock was about the all girl sketch show “The Girlie Show” being retooled into “TGS with Tracy Jordan” by the network. This conflict drove most of the first season before pretty much being dropped.