Laverne & Shirley. The whole cast somehow moved from Milwaukee to LA together. By the end, Shirley had even disappeared and it was just Laverne.
Beverly Hillbillies
B/W episodes, Hillbillies adapting to 20th century technology.
first color episodes, Hillbillies taking on 1960’s “softball” social issues. (women’s lib, hippies)
last episodes, Hillbillies inheriting castle in England, buying Central Park in NYC.
I love the B/W episodes, the color episodes, myeh.
Family Feud: When Richard Dawkins groped all the females a little too much.
Bewitched: Big Forehead Darrin (Dick Sergeant) vs Beetlebrow Darrin (Dick York)
Barney Miller was supposed to be mostly about Barneys home life with his wife. She was the co-star. The great comedic ensemble took over instead, and her part got smaller and smaller. She was pretty much gone by seaon 3, with a guest app in S 5. I also want to point out that despite the comedy, the show was more like a real Police office than most other “dramas” portayed.
*Lost in Space *started out as an adventure show, and it ended as Doc Smith, and the Boy & his Robot. Smith was only supposed to be around for a couple of epis., and he gets less and less Evil as time goes on.
I watched that when I was a kid, and I thought he was an Evil Bastard throughout.
The series ended indeed on an entirely different note than it began. The last storyline took place in a parallel universe set in 1841 with totally different characters and no vampire. That plot was a mélange of Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery, Wuthering Heights, with a ghost or two tossed in for supernatural chills.
Actually it was Squiggy, Laverne, Carmine and her Father stayed on.
It would’ve been better to have Big Rosie, come in from Milwaukee to live with Laverne after Shirely left.
I would call “Archie Bunker’s Place,” a continuation series such as “Mayberry RFD” or “Three’s Company,” which continued on as “Three’s A Crowd”
Others include:
The Lucy Show, from being set in NY to CA and by the time it hit California, the continuity from one show to the other was so often ignored, each episode of the California show was almost unique unto itself.
Many characters changed. For instance, on Andy Griffith, in the beginning Andy Taylor while always basically honest, was not above doing a bit of a “sneak turn,” if it suited his purpose. By the time it went color, Sheriff Taylor was 100% by the book never do anything wrong ever.
Show such as Happy Days changed when one character broke out. In this case Fonzie. Another example is Too Close For Comfort, which started out as a show about a man, his wife and two kids. Then JM J Bullock came in as a one shot and the show then basically revolved around the Monroe characher and Ted Knights character. This show produced a “continuation show,” called “The Ted Kinght Show.”
Family Ties was a rare example of a show that could’ve easily been turned into the “Michael J Fox” show, and to a degree it was, but the Alex character was stopped from totally taking over the show as happend with “the Fonz” on Happy Days.
Rhoda was a long lasting show that was simply all over the map. Oddly enough I found that Rhoda by the time it settled down was much better in its last two years.
Of course there was the Doris Day Show famous for having four completely different formats in five years
That’s the show that first came to mind. The show used to be centered around Richie, his family, and his friends. It ended being the Fonzie Show. Even Fonzie changed; he was a low-key background character at first.
MAS*H changed in a way that’s hard to describe. Sure, it was a great comedy, but it just became too preachy, among other things. Turning into the Hawkeye Show, cast changes …
Was this before or after he wrote those books about evolution? <_<
Or that The Wire never existed.
I don’t know what you’re talking about. Buffy ended at the end of Season FIVE.
I think it was because Miss Day was under contract and they had to pay her for five seasons, so they kept trying to see if they could make enough money repolishing the turd to pay for her.
And it ended with Cloris Leachman and George Clooney and some kid in a bakery or something, didn’t it?
I really hate this meme, that such and such never happened, because someone didn’t care for it. It might have been funny back when Og the Caveman first used it.
Wanna see something weird? Watch the first batch of Simpsons “Tracy Ullmann” shorts, compare them to the first “The Simpsons” season, then compare that to a 5th season show, then compare that to a current episode! That’s quite a shift, if I may say so…
Og never used it. In fact, no one ever used it. I don’t know what you’re even talking about.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply she was the only cast member left at the end:smack:, just that she was the only TITLE character left at the end.
Yeah, like when they made a big deal about him never using a gun, to the point that some big film producers flew him out to Hollywood to film his life story or something like that. Yeah, I’m pretty sure he did use guns in some of the earlier eps. I don’t know if he ever fired them, but he had them.
The bakery was post-school cafeteria era, but still not even close to the end. They also had some novelty store in there (following a house burning down very special episode) and by the end had given up on that.
Cloris was Mrs. Garrett’s sister, Beverly Anne, and she came in near the end when the other actress left. Andy (Mackenzie Astin) was some kid that lived across the street from the store, but at some point he became an orphan (I think this was a retcon, as I seem to recall him being a latch key kid at first), and wound up being adopted by Beverly Anne and moving into the house (part of the reason they closed the store was to build him a room in that space).
Clooney was in there somewhere in the middle, I think in the era when they were building the novelty store. He was LONNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNG gone by the time the show ended.
The last year or so, they also added a young girl who was a foreign exchange student from Australia. Pippa.
Interesting tidbit - Near the end there was a “backdoor pilot” for a spinoff/continuation that would’ve had Blair as headmistress (or something to that effect) back at Eastland, and involved letting boys attend the school. Two of the kids in this episode were Juliette Lewis and Seth Green.
Did I miss a mention of Married With Children somewhere in this thread? That seems to me an obvious example. The first season was a pretty standard family sitcom, before it became the outlandishly sarcastic, over-exaggerated play between superficially-defined characters.
Similarly, I hate the overuse of the term meme. Generally I deal with it by pretending not to see it. Amazing how easy that is.
And very early Andy had Andy himself taking an active role in the comedy but he soon eased into a reactive role as the ensemble filled out.
Well, you could, every time someone uses the word, try and tell them there is no such word.
(I don’t really like that word either, for the record)
Yeah, probably helped that they got a lot of press when they started doing outrageous things, so they just started going over the top with everything. And it worked.