Well, that may been the result of scrambling after the sudden death of Nancy Marchand. Once Tony’s mother was dead, talking to the shrink seemed far less relevant.
Not really apropos to the OP, but in Delta Burke’s spin-off series as Suzanne, the shortlived Women of the House (made years after Delta was fired from Designing Women and after the show subsequently tanked), Suzanne had picked up two relatives. One was explicable: an Asian daughter she had adopted while married to the elderly Congressman who died in office (the plot of the show was that she was filling his seat), but the other not so much: her retarded brother Jim (played by Jonathan Banks), who had never once been mentioned on Designing Women (in which she and Julia had a half-brother, born between them and played by Atlanta humorist Lewis Grizzard, by their father’s brief marriage to another woman).
What about the constantly changing children of Murray and Marie (at one point including a juvenile Helen Hunt) and Ted and Georgette (let is never speak of the Cambodian baby again…) on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show”. Kids came in an out with sweeping dramatic licence.
mm
Voyager wasn’t bad until they ran into (yawn) the Borg and Seven of Nine joined.
Actually, she did make it to the opening credits; I saw it. Only that was the season that they used the background mural that the show didn’t want to pay for, so after the first few episodes, they went back to the prior season’s credits, and just tagged a tiny “Erika Alexander as Pam” line of text onto the end of those.
On **Three’s Company ** after Suzanne Sommers left, the brought in a chick that was susposed to be a relative on Chrissy named Cindy Snow, but I can’t remember how she was related. I think the show lasted at least three years after that.
There were many bad things about the last couple of seasons of Mad About You, but Mel Brooks wasn’t one of them.