This is often done for the funny, but it’s been done for “morally ambiguous” and the like. So what are some times that it’s gone too far and ruined a show/character for you?
Monk is a good example. I’m watching Columbo for the first time, and some of his traits are growing more exaggerated/frequently displayed at this point in the show. These are main characters, so perhaps that makes it worse than it would otherwise be. They get too much screentime to skip their bits.
back in the day there were people who said the makers of columbo could have an interesting lawsuit against monk,
but yeah there were times I wanted to scream at monk " get over it and yourself"
The biggest example is when the “schtick” is the point of the show … I mean in the last episode when he finally watched the tape his wife made him if he had just watched that tape when it all happened it would of erased 90 percent of the show (also it conveniently gave him a sort of daughter he didn’t have to raise or deal with growing up)
I’d quit watching long before that, so I have no idea what you’re talking about. But it kinda makes me happy I quit watching.
Still watching Columbo, for the moment. Plus, it doesn’t take the same investment or result in the same caring (to me) when binge watching.
Monk started out as a Mystery show, with a genius detective with a quirk. As it went on, it became a comedy, about a quirky guy who also solved mysteries.
I did not care for the change.
another show was psych…i missed the first season so I never learned why he had to pretend to be psychic in the first place
Another couple is JJ in good times and Urkel in family matters
This phenomenon didn’t seem to hurt The Big Bang Theory’s ratings.
I never watched the show until it went into reruns (and then only sampled the first few years’ worth), but it was abundantly clear the characters were getting consumed by their quirks. Perhaps the most glaring (but hardly the only) example was Howard’s love-hate relationship with his mom.
I always enjoy when Flanderization comes at complete odds with a characters first season appearances.
Perfect example is Bob Saget as Danny Tanner in Full House. First season, he’s your typical sitcom dad now being forced to care for his three daughters after their mother suddenly passes away. He’s overbearing but in a realistic sense, and he tries his best to clean the house but fails due to all the kids.
Then at some point he became a guy who didn’t like fun at all and became such a neat freak there was a gag of him cleaning his cleaning supplies.
I think Archer did this with just about every character. The last couple seasons really sucked. The Well of Funny ran dry, so they just beat the horse that died of thirst on the rim.
Pam especially. In season 1 she’s one of the few competent people at ISIS - by the time I stopped watching she was a two-note character whose persona revolved entirely around gluttony and her sex drive.
Rebecca on Cheers and Winston on New Girl both went from relatively normal people with a few funny quirks to slobbering emotional basket cases.
Same with Always Sunny, but I understand that was by design. I heard they just pushed shit farther and farther to see what they could get away with. Unfortunately, it became unwatchable.
I was actually unaware of the term ‘Flanderization’ until now! I thought immediately, is that related to the Simpsons character Ned Flanders? And indeed, it is.
My candidate is Arthur Fonzarelli. He began as a realistic character on Happy Days, which itself began as pretty much a realistic nostalgia series take on American Graffiti. But as Happy Days grew in popularity, it lost all sense of grounded reality. As did the breakout character of the Fonz, who basically became a supernaturally cool character who could do anything he wanted to, like a single knock on a jukebox to get it to play the exact song he wished to play.
The explanation was that his father had trained him from childhood to be the greatest detective in the world, but when he tried to get a job, he discovered that the only way to become a police detective is to spend years as a patrolman/constable, which he had no interest in at all.
Key and Peele’s best sketch talked about this.
Flanderization usually happens only in sitcoms,except for Monk, as mentioned.
As the seasons went on, he became more and more nothing but irrational quirks. In the first season, he could use a cell phone, a remote control, he even smiled. By the end, he could do none of them, and people said he never could. It got really annoying, even though there were still good episodes at the end
It’s one of those terms that an early user of TV Tropes completely made up on their own based on their own knowledge and prejudices. Names like that are usually changed these days to be more user friendly, but this one became so entrenched over the years that no one wants to touch it out of tradition.
Stuart Bloom on Big Bang Theory. Arguably all the characters went through a reduction to stereotypes, but Stuart had some amount of agency in the early episodes, yet by the end he was just a sad sack loser, even with being in a relationship by the final season. It didn’t bother me all that much, it’s often how sitcoms go, but I think both the character and actor deserved a bit more respect than he got.
I’m surprised they used Ned Flanders as the namesake of the trope. I don’t think his character really changed that much throughout the show. The Homer Simpson character, on the other hand, went from a relatively realistic depiction of an irritated, bumbling sitcom dad in the beginning, to a pure personification of raging Id. The term should be “Homerization”. 
Nitpick: Shouldn’t the term be “Flandersization”?
Radar on MASH. At the beginning he may have been a bit of a naive Iowa farm boy, but he was still one of the guys. He’d have a swig of the Colonel’s booze, play poker and even smoke a cigar. As the show went on he turned into a mystical man child who couldn’t have anything stronger than grape soda.