To be fair, Season 7 still had some really good episodes …
As for TV shows that have changed the very least - I have to nominate Entourage as a strong contender. We are now in season 6 and here are the major changes from the first episode:
- Eric leased a house where he lives alone and he works for an agency now.
- Turtle has a girlfriend. (although, technically that might not be true anymore, as of last ep). He’s still a dogsbody for the boys.
- Drama bought a condo and lives alone. He still has no job (currently).
- Vince - ?? no changes?
What I meant for Andy Griffith or rather Andy Taylor was in the beginning, if Sheriff Taylor wanted to prove a point, he might, “lose someone’s paperwork,” or he’d force tourists to take Aunt Bee’s pickels out of the county. Or he’d cut a deal with Otis.
By the end of the series, Andy was totally straight and narrow. In the start Andy, if he felt it was for a greater good, would “overlook” small infractions of the law, to the point where he sometimes came across as “borderline shady.” Which made sense because Barney was “100% by the book,” so it made for good comedy, for Barney was always looking for crime in basically a crime free area.
With Barney gone there was no one to play this aspect of Sheriff Taylor off.
Doris Day actually did OK in the ratings it was a top 25 (and once top 10 show) and held it’s time slot till the fifth year. Actually the total retool of Doris as a single woman (in the same mode as Mary Tyler Moore," probably saved it from the chopping block when CBS axed it’s rural sitcoms. Doris was living in the country prior to that.
Most people also forget on Green Acres Lisa not Oliver was the smart one for the first ten or so episodes. After that Lisa got more “Gracie Allen-like” each episode, which was pretty expected as Paul Henning (who produced Green Acres)wrote a lot of the episodes for Burns and Allen on TV and Radio
I didn’t say there was no such word as “meme,” just as I find its overuse irksome, just as many people find the “There is no such thing as Star Trek V/Buffy Season 7/Jar-Jar Binks” annoying. But why bother complaining? It’s a joke; it doesn’t hurt you.
I don’t know if this has been mentioned but in the first season of Dukes of Hazzard Bo & Luke were sort of juvenile delinquents looking for trouble rather than the go-gooders of later seasons.
Few people know that it premiered on the DuMont station W2XWV in 1943 and involved two merchant seamen, a lady boiler room attendant, and a rodeo clown (played by Douglas Edwards).
Dammit Doug, that sounds like the start of a good weekend (in my younger days).
The first season also portrayed Boss Hogg and his cronies, Roscoe in particular, as competent. That first season was much closer to Moonrunners, until the Nielsens came in and it was discovered that the show skewed to a younger audience.
He carried a gun in the last episode I saw, actually. It was the one where Barney catches some escaped convict by accident, and everyone thinks he must be really good. But the guy gets out again, and Barney thinks the guy is gonna kill him.
All the cops in the episode (including the ones that came in from the county) carried long rifles when they hunted for the guy.
At the end, though, Barney uses his usual gun to bluff the con into quitting. Andy had set this up, since he wanted Barney to feel good about himself again. Just in case Barney couldn’t handle it, he kept a gun on the guy from a distance.
I know you didn’t say there was no such word – that was my point. That it would be no less absurd if you had said there was no such word than it is when you say there is no Star Trek 5 etc. It was just a silly jibe that’s now gone way out of proportion and taken up way more board space than it was worth.
Why bother complaining? Uh, hello, this is the internet. Porn and complaining are its primary uses!
I don’t know if it was the whole first season or just the pilot, but I was kinda shocked when I watched a rerun of the pilot and there was a little bit of an incesty vibe going on with Daisy. More of a jokey type thing (“if you weren’t my cousin I’d blah blah blah”) than any real incest but still, it was not the way I remember Bo and Luke acting toward her most of the show’s run.
Also, the show looked a lot different, probably because it was when they were actually filming it on location in Georgia, I think.
Scrubs started out as a fairly authentic take on life in a big city hospital, showing how even the work of saving lives takes on a certain banality when you’re living it day after day. It was centered around a somewhat overimaginative but otherwise normal young doctor, his work friends, and their bosses. The characters were believable as a group of talented, hard-working people who clashed due to realistic personality conflicts and workplace disagreements.
The first two seasons of Scrubs also featured clever, insightful stories about the real pressures of life in the healthcare biz: staying awake for 30 hours at a time, a social life that consists almost entirely of fellow hospital staff, navigating the minor rivalries between specialties, and adjusting to the fact that one dealt with mortality on a daily basis. And this didn’t usually mean yelling “Stat!” or slicing open trauma victims while an exciting percussion-based soundtrack played in the background. It came from the far more draining experiences of telling a lifelong smoker he had lung cancer, or realizing that the elderly lady was actually ready to die, or having your patient die on you despite having done everything right, and then having to immediately move on to your next patient.
And at some point, the creators of the show decided to abandon their promising initial premise, and just crank the “wacky” dial to 11. No need to write compelling stories about complex characters when you can just throw in a bunch of non sequiturs and movie references! No need to come up with character-driven jokes and funny little surreal side moments when you can just throw on the disco ball and have the cast act out “Love Train”!
Over the third through seventh seasons, Scrubs slowly but inexorably became a show in which J.D.‘s overactive imagination became “fantasies,” and then the fantasies themselves became the point. And the characters slowly but inexorably became caricatures of themselves. Their negative qualities were exaggerated, while all nuance was gradually lost. Elliot, who started out as a smart (if somewhat socially inept) young woman struggling to succeed in a traditionally male profession, turned into an OCD, baby-obsessed manic depressive whose primary role was to show up in the middle of other characters’ conversations to tell “hilariously” embarrassing and out-of-context stories from her childhood. And J.D., that decent, intelligent young man whose primary motivation in life was to be a good doctor back in season 1, turned into a selfish, moronic head case with a “hilarious” taste for appletinis. Far from being a focal point for the audience’s empathy, he became an object of derision and ridicule, a clown whose only purpose was to pump out the next inane laugh line.
Pretty standard? That show started out totally unlike anything else on television at that time. Wasn’t the first line Al walking into his house muttering “oh home sweet hell”? Or something like that. They were always a sarcastic family that betrayed and openly mocked each other.
Yes over time their personalities changed somewhat and the plotlines became more outrageous but no more then any series that ran 11 seasons.