Space:1999 's first season was somewhat high-concept, with the drifting Moon appearing to fulfill the path/destiny of the humans as determined by some ancient race.
The second season was more of an action-oriented, monster-of-the-week thing, with some new characters (adding Maya, removing Victor Bergman) and new sets. The revamp was an attempt to make the show more marketable in the U.S. There was no third season.
The second season was produced by Fred Freiberger, who was also responsible for the dreadful third season of Star Trek. His fingerprints were all over it.
It wasn’t sudden, but The Big Bang Theory went from being about three horndog nerds (plus Sheldon) to being about three women and their nerd husbands (and Raj).
Angie Tribeca changes for the final season. They change the name to Angie Tribeca: Special Division Force. It’s 20 years later. It has some changes in the main cast. I’m thinking it changes location. I skip the season and can’t remember the specific changes.
The 90s sitcom Roc aired a live episode in Season 1. That got such a good reception, they switched to broadcasting every episode live in Season 2.
As the show began, Sheldon and Leonard were 27 years old and Howard and (probably) Raj were 26 years old (according to specific mentions on the show). They were each socially awkward and acted like someone a decade younger. It appears to me that the overall character arcs for them were decided when the series began. They grew up. Leonard, Howard, and Sheldon got married and Howard and his wife had two children. Leonard and his wife were expecting a baby as the show ended. Raj got over his selective mutism and began to act like he might someday get married. Given that the character was probably 38 as the show ended, it’s hardly surprising that that might take long.
The Byron storyline was dull. I will defend season 5 as having about 1/2 the episodes good.
I can’t say the character arcs weren’t decided when the series began (although it probably was for Leonard and Penny), but when Amy and Bernadette were introduced it wasn’t planned they’d become series regulars.
Sledgehammer blew up the city and all the cast at the end of season 1, so had to make season 2 a flashback
Grand, a soap opera spoof with Bonnie Hunt and Michael McKean, looked like it was headed for cancellation after the first season, so they ended the ‘last’ episode with a town-destroying tornado.
Well, oops, the show got picked up for a second season, but a number of the leads had already signed on to other work, so they pivoted into a much more conventional sitcom format. And then when that didn’t work, they tried the soap opera parody thing again, but too late to save the show from an actual cancellation.
It was a shame, as I thought relative to the times that it was a really good, funny show.
I think of their characters as being similar to how a man in his thirties who has never had any success with getting any woman (that he was briefly involved with) to remain with him finally finds a woman willing to marry him. The showrunners knew that they couldn’t keep the characters of Sheldon and Howard drifting through an endless chain of women over twelve seasons and have a good show. They hired Melissa Rauch and Mayim Bialik for a year each hoping that they would be able to plausibly play the part of a future wife. Had those two not been right for the part, they would have not renewed their contracts and found someone else.
I think the shift of the 4th and 5th seasons of B5 was to take all the A plotlines and put them in S4 and leave all the B plotlines for future times. This lead to a superb Season 4, and the Season with plots which might have stood up with one of the incredible A plotlines from S4. I can’t imagine any other series being able to do a whole season of B plotlines (imagine that of DS9), so they had some great B plotlines too. Plus, compared to Season 4, what the hell could stand up. I think B5 did well, though I never did get to watch the Crusade series, I think I got most of the films.
Similarly, The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret blew up the entire world at the end of Season 2, so Season 3 retconned the first two seasons as Todd’s dream.
I should have mentioned that one, too
When Amy Farrah Fowler was introduced at the end of season 3 she was intended to appear in only that single episode. The chemistry was so good and the audience reception so clear that they wrote her into the 4th season and then decided to keep her long term.
Wasn’t Dark Shadows just a conventional soap opera at first?
It appears to me that there was always a plan to have it be an ordinary soap opera that introduced fantastic horror elements:
I remember the theme song to that one, which means I must have watched it once.
Sheldon didn’t date, and had essentially zero interest in women or romantic relationships, before Amy. He was consistently depicted as asexual, or something very close to that, and the few times that other female characters tried to pursue him, he was bewildered and uninterested.
And even his relationship with Amy was exceedingly long-burn before he saw her as his actual “girlfriend,” versus “a girl with whom he was friends.”
But there were women interested in him. Ramona Nowitzki, played by Riki Lindhome, early in the show wanted to co-author a paper with him. Later in the show, she wanted a sexual relationship with him. This caused Sheldon to fly to New Jersey (where Amy was doing research) to see Amy and finally ask her to marry him. The entire series was the arc of his character. It seemed as if he would never meet any woman that he might be interested in until the final episode of the third season when he met Amy. He had a very slow character arc in the series. From that first meeting of him and Amy it was clear that he would be married to her by the end of the series. He was the smartest person in the series intellectually. He was also very slow in his emotional life (and maybe you could say that he was emotionally stupid). That was the entire point of his character. He could only force himself into a sexual relationship and then a marriage over a long period. It took him eight years to get from meeting her to marrying her. According to Young Sheldon, they had two children after they married. That sort of thing isn’t that rare these days.