HotLips Houlihan from MASH. She went from being a hostile, type A, officious bitch to being a softer character who had standards but also had a heart.
Ditto Hawkeye Pierce–he went from drunken gadfly commentator to tortured soul who has Right on his side.
I like both characters all the way through, but they did change. As did Klinger whose attempts at a section 8 sort of disappeared once Radar went home.
Andy Griffith’s character didn’t change but the joy sure went out of his performance in the later seasons of his first show.
Ruth Fisher from 6 Feet Under. I still don’t and can’t believe that Ruth would gamble away her inheritance. Other than that, I think that show did a great job in showing how people do change over the years–look how unbuttoned David became! And Keith mellowed as well. As much as I liked Nate Fisher, he was kind of a jerk, as was Brenda.
Does Marty Crane on “Frasier” count? In the early episodes, he’s a bit gruff and somber, conservative, maybe a bit humorless. They’re really playing up the traditionally masculine father with a son who’s liberal/artsier/more effete. In later episodes, he’s still different from Frasier, but he comes across as the voice of reason and common sense and as a lot softer. And when it comes to a dispute, you pretty much never think, “Wow, Frasier’s right and Martin’s wrong.”
I think it’s that later in the series, Hearst is the enemy against which everyone in Deadwood unites, so as nasty and mean as Swearengen is, Hearst is more so.
That’s one of the reason’s the shows were so good.
Angel became funnier and less broody. Fred became less psycho. Cordy less of a bitch. Wesley started using a shotgun and Charles Gun turned into a white man.
Buffy became less normal. Spike turned good and Willow became less of a nerd.
Swearengen changed because he grew to care about Deadwood. He went from a stone cold pimp to a pillar of the community, and he actually gave a damn about his people: Trixie, Doherty, Jewel, Doc, even Bullock, Widow Garrett, and Sophia (who he tried to have killed in S1). That’s what transformed him, that feeling like he was Big Daddy to this sprawling, dysfunctional family. It was very moving to watch, in a weird way. I also thought, in the first season, that Bullock was intended to be the protagonist, but Swearengen stole the show out from under him.
As for Nate Fisher, I haven’t watched the show in years, but I do remember loving him at first, and then the whole Lisa storyline, plus how his relationship with Brenda got so stupid, thinking that he deteriorated over the course of the series. Maybe we just got to know him better.
Wait… Am I the only one that remembers Al killing with a knife one of his poor girls during the last episodes? And him taking pity of the little girl and sparing her life just in the pilot? His personality remained contradictory and complex from start to finish.
Taking care of what little girl in the pilot? He knocked Trixie around in the pilot because she shot a customer. Later, he grew to love her and consider her a confidante. If you mean Sophia, he send Dority to murder her in the first season, but Dan couldn’t do it, so Al gave up on that. At the end of the series, he had Jenny killed to save Trixie from Hearst. A blonde girl had to die, and he chose to save Trixie and sacrifice Jenny instead.
Was he a great guy? No. He was a killer and a pretty cold fish throughout. However, he was a pillar of the Deadwood community… that does not imply sterling morals or warm fuzzies. He loved the town and there were people he came to care for, people he most definitely did not care about in the beginning (Trixie, Bullock, Jewel, Sophia, Wu, etc). At the beginning of the show, he only cared about himself and his money. Definitely a transformation, from a solitary sociopath to one with a quasi-family he cared about. It didn’t make him a good guy, but it did humanize him.
Even if you don’t count Martin, how about Daphne? In the early episodes she was kind-hearted, ditzy and an erratic psychic. A few episodes later she was slinging srcastic putdowns every time either Frasier or Martin got out of hand. After she and Niles got together she seemed to be the only one in the cast with any common sense – pretty much a complete reversal of the original character.
Another one is Karen Walker on Will and Grace. During the first few shows she was just a snobby socialite with a normal voice. Then all of the sudden a significant part of character was that she was a wild partier and she spoke in a high squeaky voice.
It was a big bunch of money ($25k or so?) but it wasn’t her entire inheritance – remember, she had enough to invest $100K or so into the business when the boys needed it.
Agree on Nate – but not on Brenda, who I loathed from day one.
I think that’s it – he was superficially charming, but actually fairly seriously fucked up, and it led him to do things that were either hurtful to others, or not in his own best interest, or both.
Marcy & Steve Rhodes on Married with Children went from being a yuppie couple to Steve losing his job and leaving Marcy, and she went from sweet career woman devoted to her man to a shrew married to “boy toy” Jefferson D’Arcy.
The character changes on MASH were all indicative of the way the entire show changed. Monstrously for the worse I might add. They essentially turned everyone into a ‘good guy’ which took away all sources of conflict from within the cast of characters. So it turned into a ‘cause-of-the-week’ show where it was always the whole cast fighting against some new, and more and more ridiculous, external enemy. Once Holouhan’s hair turned silver the show was a completely pretentious, self-aware, sanctimonious love-fest. Should have been canned about six seasons earlier!
Anyway, Butters on the original six South Parks actually hung with the tough kids, they ones who kept saying, “Huh-huh, that’s gay!” Technically he wasn’t much of a character yet, I don’t think he ever spoke.
Edith on All in the Family was indeed different as described. In fact, she didn’t even talk in her high pitched, ditzy voice at all! Stapleton used her regular voice. The show also had bits of incidental dramatic music in it, a harpsichord I think. Really weird.
On The Simpsons, Comic Book Guy originally sounded totally different. It may have been only for his debut episode, Three Boys and a Comic Book, but he was patterned after Ralph Bakshi (I heard). Hard to describe what he sounded like, but it wasn’t the ultra-sarcastic, vowel-stressing “Worst Episode Ever” guy!
Heh, Giles changed considerably, but not in a way we didn’t see hints to earlier. He went from being a stiff, doofy bookish librarian to an axe wielding ass-kicking magic-flinging badass. The swinging point for his character change was when he kneed Ethan Rayne in the face in Season 2, showing that he was quite capable of beating the crap out of someone without a problem.
Xander basically went from being a lovable loser to being a moderately successful jerk. The main consistent thing is his snarkiness, which was endearing when he was the goofy loser, but by later seasons he has become the guy with a good job and a hot girlfriend who gives the nerdy kid crap. He’s still a good guy, but certain parts of him failed to grow up, personality wise.
And yeah, Willow had hella personality change a few times. Went from lovable nerd girl to lesbian witch to (briefly) apocalyptic supervillain back to badass lesbian witch.
On the Firefly pilot, Simon went from being a sort of scaley, slick, slightly pushy aristo probable villain in the first part to basically being the fish-out-of-water constantly off-centered socially akward sap we all know and love. And of course, in Jaynestown, he briefly and inexplicably became a cunning master of disguise;)
Several episodes of the first season of Dukes of Hazzard were filmed on location in Georgia and during those episodes the show was a bit more comedy-drama than it soon became. In the early episodes Roscoe was actually a pretty sharp guy who was bitter over having lost his job/pension as sheriff of another county (one person refers to him as “once the best sheriff in the state”) due to a bogus charge and so he had to go hat in hand to his brother-in-law, Boss Hogg.
Hogg, otoh, was a much darker character in the early episodes: he was into all sorts of vice from bootleg recordings to shake-downs and blackmail- if you learned Boss was bankrolling heroin shipments from Savannah you wouldn’t be that surprised. He was also a major womanizer (you actually see him making out with a young girl in Atlanta in one episode until he’s told to run for it as the cops are coming). He’s a sharecropper’s son who became rich from vice and toughness and is an out and out thug who eats raw meat (literally- he’s seen in a couple of early episodes dining on raw or almost raw liver) and uses brother-in-law Roscoe to legitimize his dirty deals.
Of course they become more comical by the end of the first season. By the second season or so they’re a Hee-Haw Laurel and Hardy and then they become Foghorn Leghorn and Barney Fife and by the last season they’re just total buffoons who couldn’t shake a penny out of a piggy bank and aren’t really into anything ‘real’ bad.
Didn’t Milhouse go from being “Bart’s friend” to “Bart’s somewhat odd friend” to “Bart’s very confused, if not actually an eventual closeted homosexual friend”?
I’ll second Stewie Griffin going from Matricidal Megalmaniac to Bon Vivant/Socialite.
Also, Kryten went from being a single-episode character in Series II of Red Dwarf to being one of the most important characters in the show (moreso than The Cat, even) by about Series IV.