I guess the title says it all. Seems like most shows that go through a major show-altering change end up being diminished for it. Examples include:
(SPOILERS AHEAD for Roseanne, Buffy, Angel, Alias!)
Roseanne - Winning the lottery. I dunno what it is, they just lost what made the show interesting.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer - Graduating high school and moving on to college/work. Note that I still really liked the show after the 3rd season, but nothing could live up to the glory of seasons 2 and 3 (though season 6 IMO comes close). Not sure if it was the graduating into a different setting that caused the (slight) decline or if it was the writers starting to run out of ideas. Season 6 (with life as the Big Bad) stands as an exception because it did have a very different focus from the rest of the series and still pulled it off rather well.
Angel - After taking over Wolfram & Hart, the plots and main season arc just kinda floundered. Some nice standalones but the focus was lost.
Boy Meets World - Never that great of a show to start with, it just became absolutely insipid after middle school.
Alias - After Syd and co. take out SD6, it loses the whole double agent tension and just becomes more Rambaldi-oriented and more absurd as a result.
Are there any shows where the initial conditions were significantly changed, resulting in a show that feels different but just as good? Buffy (for reasons stated above) would be the closest thing I can come up with.
How about almost every Star Trek show that made it past the third year?
TNG had some of their best episodes in season 3 and beyond. Seasons one and two pretty much sucked with a few rare exceptions. There weren’t many major changes on screen (all I can think of offhand is Tasha Yar dying) but there were a lot of changes behind the scene resulting in a show that looked the same but was much improved in quality.
DS9 didn’t hit its stride until year 3, with the introduction of the Defiant and the expanding conflict with the Dominion. I’d consider DS9 to have undergone the most radical changes overall.
I will let others debate if Voyager ever got any better at any particular time…
Enterprise also seemed to find its footing in year 3 and 4. The Xindi plotline showed that they could do a compelling story arc and the year 4 episodes had some of the best Star Trek moments I’ve ever watched. The show went from being lighthearted and bubbly to being dark and intense (for example, the poor scientist being tortured viciously in “Cold Station 12”). The characters may not have changed a lot (but that’s another debate altogether) but the situation did and was infinitely more compelling.
Definitely* Deep Space Nine. *Sometime around season 3, it changed from heavy emphasis on “situation of the week” episodes with occasional longer arcs to the other way around, eventually culminating in the massive two-season Dominion War arc. While the first two seasons had their share of excellent episodes (mostly the political ones about Bajor and Cardassia), the show really found its footing once it switched to longer story arcs. To this date, it’s the only Trek series other than TOS in which I’d say greater than 50% of its episodes could not have been done on any other series, and the lasting repercussions of the various story arcs was a major cause.
Not to diminish all of the 21st Century SF shows you’re dwelling on, but how about the Tonight Show. I think it meets the criteria set forth in your thread title. While the format has remained more or less the same, the show has seen a range of hosts from Jack Paar, Johnny Carson and now Jay Leno over the last 50 years.
NYPD Blue was at its best with Jimmy Smits and Denis Franz after the departure of David Carusso at the end of the first season. Some of the other cast changes later on didn’t go so well though.
Granted that winning the lottery (semi- but that’s just me) screwed Roseanne up.
However, it did go through the major change of having one of the principal actresses (Lecy Goranson) leave the show in the middle of a season, and remained successful with a second actress (Sarah Chalke) taking over the role. Not unique, really, but then Goranson came BACK to reprise her role for several seasons near the end of the show.
Red Dwarf underwent a major overhaul at the beginning of series 3. It was so big that they ran a Star Wars-style intro to the first episode including dozens of crowbar plot moves that explained new actors, etc (Holly, for example, the computer, had apparently “performed a head transplant” on himself).
I liked the intro, I thought it was nicely tongue-in-cheek. The show was still funny and worked well, although the switch did portend other more gradual changes which would eventually mark its decline. The real shift was from character-driven, “trapped” sitcom, with scripts that were just pure gold in series one and two, and the overwhelming knowledge that there was just NOTHING outside the ship, no aliens, nowt… to much more the sort of show one might have expected if it had been re-made for America. Aliens were slowly introduced, one imagines largely to sustain a show that was now intended to run for a lot longer. At first they weren’t proper aliens, just manmade whatevers that happened to show up on a weekly basis, but slowly everything changed, until eventually the original idea of two blokes who hate each other trapped in a spaceship with an evolved cat… seemed like a distant memory.
Opinions differ on exactly when the show lost it, but it certainly held together for a long, long time after the big “head transplant”. So I guess you’d have to say it survived a major change.
slight nitpick. There were never any alients on Red Dwarf. Everything they ran across is somehow decended from Earth. The polymorphs, the gelfs, the psirins, Legion, The Inquisitor, they all had their origins on Earth or through Earthmen.
Not that your point is any less valid, just a little nitpick.
Law & Order has obviously gone through major cast changes, and has remained very strong. After the departure of Chris Noth there wasn’t a sinle original cast member left, and the show never missed a stride.
But cast changes aside, I can’t think of any shows that really survived a major premise change. Sit-coms like Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley and All In The Family all went downhill after shifting their focus. The short lived LA Dragnet tried to save itself by changing from a two-cop focus to a team focus, and quickly died.
Ah! Here’s one that might be good for a debate. How about when the simpsons moved away from the bart-centred episodes of the first season, and into the Homer-centred episodes of later years? Some of the best stuff, I thought.
I disagree about Angel. I felt Season Five was the strongest of them all.
I think my favorite show that falls into this category is MST3K. It went through a complete cast change, creative revamps (credits sequence, set designs), loss of its creator, a leap to a new network after a small hiatus, a network dictate that the show have a storyline…
and it just kept getting better and more polished. Danger : Diabolik was as solid an episode as anything from the early years - moreso than some of them.
My theory on that was that when the show started it was populated with book/movie characters. They weren’t complex enough characters to make it through several seasons on television.
Frank Burns was a selfish, egotistical incompetent creep. That was it. Winchester was selfish and egotistical, but he had a good heart and wasn’t the least bit incompetent. This made him a more complex character that could have better stories written about him.
Notice how Burns/Trapper/Blake were all married, but cheating on their wives, yet BJ and Potter were devoted husbands (albeit slipping a bit as an occasional plot point) and Winchester wasn’t married? This made for more sympathetic characters that people could form greater attachments to.
Blackadder went through a major overhaul after the first series. It would have been cancelled altogether as the first series involved huge sets and lots of them, a great deal of outdoor filming, and a vast cast. Also the scripts weren’t all that good.
Series two used standardised sets (ie. in a BBC studio), and a far smaller cast. And Rowan Atkinson was taken off writing the scripts, which helped quite a lot.
It was the biggest shift between any Blackadder series, and it was only after that that it really hit its stride.
I have no idea what I’m talking about, by the way, and have pieced this together from memories which are less than reliable.
You could debate “Charles in Charge” being a good show at all, but it did go through a drastic change and lasted far longer after the fact.
The family Charles was in charge of changed after the first season. Later the show was in first-run syndication with the new family for 3 or 4 seasons.