The Lucy Show started off with Lucy (a widow) living in New York with her best friend Vivian (a divorcee). Lucy had a daughter and son, while Vivian had a son. By the fourth season, Vivian left the show. Lucy moved to California, and the kids disappeared...
Mrs Columbo started life as a mystery show using the Columbo formula - you know the killer and the detective keeps plugging away til the end - into a straight whodunnit show. Not to mention the distancing of the main character from the Columbo character
In regard to "The Monkees": I prefer the first season episodes myself. Season two has its moments, but some of it's just not very good.
I liked the dynamic between Carl and Steve, so it was pretty entertaining when they were together... I didn't care for it as much when they had Urkel having the Stephan (sp?) alter ego.
Season 2 is the main camp offender. Season 3 is hit and miss but the good is actually quite good and its nice to see the Jupiter 2 actually flying around space a bit, albeit still lost.
Am I remembering correctly that, in the last season, Urkel and Carl become astronauts? Not as extreme a change, but Perfect Strangers started out as a sitcom nominally for adults (well, adults who didn’t mind simple physical comedy, at least). By the end, the show was clearly being written for children. At least, that’s how I remember it.
All I can recall from the final season is that Urkel indeed goes into space and that his actor was getting quite too old for the role. Wouldn't surprise me if Carl wound up in space as well. It was the Urkel-Carl show at that point.
Charles in Charge? Started with "Charles" (seriously? who called themselves 'Charles' in the 80s?) in charge of this group... ...got cancelled, or postponed or something, then came back with Charles now in charge of this group: (to which I'll only add: "You let Scott Baio be in charge of your teenage daughters??")
The Oprah Winfrey show? Started with Oprah interviewing -- as Bill Burr put it -- "midgets who wanted to bang their boyfriend’s mailman", and changed several years later to A-list guests and literary recommendations.
I really like both, but the second version was better. You can't have Alison Janney on board and only give her a bit part! The "gang of addicts" is well done and pretty original for mainstream sitcom. A bit sanitised but not too many steps from reality (I work with a lot of recovering addicts in my job).
Interesting, I do not remember the cast from the first photo.... Not that I would want to remember the cast in the second, but it is interesting they decided to revamp it.
The Odd Couple went from a cheap one camera copy of the movie to the greatest filmed in front of an audience show of all time.
Friends. Went from a relatively interesting take on being young and on your own and turned into a pastiche of cliched characters who sleep together sometimes, and then Chandler tries to grow a mustache to look more like Tom Selleck and then there's a wedding or something. What an awful, awful show that started out with promise.
Although everyone on the planet will disagree with me, Breaking Bad started as a look into the life of a desperate dying man who had sabotaged nearly everything good in his entire life (it reminded me of Kurosawa's Ikiru) and now has to live a double life, but eventually it turned into a show about drug dealers with lots and lots of violence that viewers loved.
The Doris Day Show underwent numerous revisions throughout its five year run, the most radical occurring in Seasons 4-5: The Doris Day Show - Wikipedia Interesting that some television historians believe that the reorientation of the show from a rural to a more cosmopolitan setting may have been less an artistic choice, and more of an attempt to keep the show from getting the axe during CBS's infamous "Rural Purge" of the late 60's - early 70's.
I didn't care for the last season of Breaking Bad myself, as I felt it strayed too far away from its initial premise, and began to embrace violence for violence sake (my understanding is that the show's creators had originally intended for the fourth season to be the last, which may explain the unexpected change of tone and direction).
Walter White in the first season was the most fascinating character I had ever seen on television, and in that season the show did a fantastic job of showing us his painful life. Walter was a young genius full of promise and hope but his ego and explosive anger repeatedly drove him away from everything that he could have achieved, yet he still walked around with a pathetic cheerful facade of success. Wow! I was 100% invested in this show. I think during the writer's strike, the producers read what people were saying about the show on the Internet and that directed the show somewhat. Before the second season started I couldn't find anyone who was interested in talking about the character or story of Walter White, but man guys were talking non-stop about how Walter killed those guys with poison gas! And that guy Walter strangled with a bike lock -- that was awesome! Oh, and they melted his body with acid! Cool! And that drug dealer who almost got blown up with Walter's explosive crystals! It seemed like the main topic of every episode was who was killed or threatened by Walter that week. I guess they liked the idea of an average Joe turning into a killing machine, so naturally the second season really stepped up the violence. Walter became less of a tragic figure and more like a conventional psychopath that I didn't care about.
That is not a children's show! I mean, it's really not, but I guess the brilliance of Pee Wee's Playhouse is that kids can watch it and be none the wiser for all of the adult-themed material and innuendo. The films (except the last one) was more geared toward kids, but the TV show, I don't know how they got away with most of that stuff, which was all subversively hardcore adult entertainment.
Yeah this show really lost its way. I enjoyed the first two seasons a lot. But soon lost interest as the show progressed. I eventually gave up when the machines started fighting it out. For me, the story line got very hard to follow in each of the episodes. I have no idea what happened after the first three seasons. The other thing that irritated the pi$$ out of me is that Jim Caviezel whispered his lines throughout the series. It seemed to get worse as the series progressed. If I turned up the volume to hear him then I got blasted out on everything else. The director should have fixed this early on.
Stargate The film was a huge disappointment Avoided the TV series until I saw it be accident and was in