Yes, as I mentioned.
My point is that:
…is an accurate characterization of Howard, pre-Bernadette, but not of Sheldon, pre-Amy.
There was a local show in Seattle called Almost Live. It originally ran on Sunday evenings as a talk show with some comedic elements, akin to David Letterman’s Late Show. The host, Ross Shafer, left and went on to some success in L.A. John Kiester took over as host, and the talk show format continued for another year. At that point, the interview segments were dropped, the show moved to late on Saturday (pushing Saturday Night Live to midnight in the Seattle market) and became just sketch comedy. That new format lasted several years and spawned the careers of Bill Nye and Joel McHale, among others.
Speed Walker rules!
The pilot of The Sopranos depicts Tony as the boss of North Jersey, but in the second episode we learn that the ailing Jackie Aprile is the acting boss which sets up the main story arc for the rest of the first season.
Granted, that one is more of a pilot-its example where significant changes are made in between when the pilot is filmed and when the series is going into production (as opposed to changing stuff that has already been well-established over several episodes or seasons), but it is still a big turn.
There was a sitcom called The Torkelsons, about a single mother and her 5 children in Oklahoma. She was struggling to make ends meet and took in a border. In season two, they changed the name to Almost Home and changed the plot to the mother moving to Seattle and taking her 3 children (it was never explained what happened to the other two) to move in with a widowed man and his two children to be their nanny.
“Didn’t date” isn’t the equivalent of not having an interest in romantic relationships. In real life, people sometimes take a long time to discover the someone else might be interested in them. In real life, people can be so emotionally stupid as to not realize what they want.
So in the reboot of Scrubs that started up this year, Season 9 was retconned out of existence. One of the storylines of Season 9 was that the hospital was torn down and it took place in a new building. But this year’s Scrubs restarted in the hospital as seen in Seasons 1-8 and apparently other parts of Season 9 were discarded as well (not sure exactly what, I skipped that season).
I’ll also nominate Grounded for Life which started life as a single camera sitcom and then switched to a multi-camera style at some point (it also switched from Fox to WB but I think the style switch happened while it was still on Fox). I found the change jarring and stopped watching it.
Which may or may not have any direct relevance to Sheldon Cooper, The Big Bang Theory, or this thread. If you watched the show (and I assume that you have), Sheldon, particularly in the early seasons, had an avowed lack of interest in any sort of social activity which involved anything romantic or sexual; one could safely classify him as asexual at that time, though as his relationship with Amy finally blossomed, he became more of a demisexual.
Again, what I took exception to was your statement about Sheldon:
In no way was Sheldon “drifting through an endless chain of women” in the early seasons of the show.
Other than Amy, really the only other two characters who were shown to have any sort of romantic or sexual interest in him were the aforementioned Dr. Ramona Nowitzki, and a CalTech student or scientist named Martha; both of them appeared only once, in the show’s early seasons, though Nowitzki had a return appearance, eight years later, to serve as a plot catalyst for Sheldon to propose to Amy.
And Ramona’s interest in Sheldon in her first appearance was,not particularly sexual - she seemed to enjoy being involved in high-level scientific work, and saw associating with Sheldon as a way to do that.
I didn’t say that Sheldon was drifting through an endless chain of women. I said that the showrunners knew that they couldn’t have him doing that. They had to have a character arc for him that would begin with him acting the way he did in the early years of the program and slowly becoming the person he was at the end when he and Amy got married. Some of the usual theories about what Sheldon was like at the beginning of the show were that he had ASD, OCPD, alexithimia, and hypochondria. This would be boring if it continued for twelve years In the Nobel Prize speech he gives in the final episode, he talks about how important his friends were because they tolerated him as he slowly became a better person. Amy also began as a person who had somewhat similar problems. She said that she only went on the first date with Sheldon because her mother insisted that she have at least one date per year. It’s made clear that she and Sheldon both lost their virginity in the episode about that.
Naming Sheldon and Howard in the same sentence, with that same reasoning, and the fact that Howard did have an endless chain of women he pursued, made it sound like you were saying that.
If you had named Leonard, or Raj, instead of Sheldon, it wouldn’t have stood out, as all, because all three of them were constantly (and often unsuccessfully) seeking out romantic partners in the early seasons.
The episode with Ramona ends with another young woman (a wiki tells me her name was Kathy O’Brien) wanting to collaborate with Sheldon in an exact parallel of the first scene with Ramona, implying that Sheldon has learned nothing from the first experience and is about to repeat it.
Although, as @Andy_L points out, Ramona’s (and by implication, Kathy’s) interest in Sheldon is professional and not necessarily romantic/sexual.
I remember the short lived tv show Boomtown. It was a police procedural where every episode played out Rashomon-style show the crime from the perspective of different characters (cops, lawyers, criminals, victims, etc.) Then the second season they pretty much dropped that concept making it just a generic cop show. It got cancelled just a few episodes later.
“Herman’s Head” (in my memory, anyway) gradually decreased the focus on the four personalities inside Herman’s head (a forerunner of “Inside Out” by the way) and did more with his quirky coworkers.
Sometime around 2000 or so, Steven Weber starred in a sitcom called “Cursed.” The premise was that his character had been put under a curse by an ex-girlfriend, and now would have nothing but bad luck.
They must have figured it wasn’t working because, after 5 episodes, they renamed it “The Weber Show.” The cursed-with-bad-luck angle was dropped completely, with no explanation or even acknowledgement, and the show became a more standard “guy and his friends” sitcom. It still failed to find an audience, and ended after a total of 17 episodes (the last two of which were not aired).
She Spies. The first season refused to take itself seriously.
The second season they turned it into a standard spy show. No charm.
Charles in Charge was on for only one season, cancelled for a year, and brought back with Charles being in charge of a completely different family. Six characters were lost, six new characters replaced them.