Night Court - the first two seasons were closer to Barney Miller and then it became an outrageous slapstick farce. Alice - from a fairly realistic working-class sitcom to Lucy in a Diner.
Empty Nest started out as an episode of the Golden Girls with a premise as: George and Renee Corliss (played by Paul Dooley and Rita Moreno), were introduced as the Girls' neighbors, a middle-aged couple suffering from empty nest syndrome. Their teenage daughter Jenny (Jane Harnick), who had left for college, and Renee's brother Chuck (Geoffrey Lewis), also appeared. The Corlisses also had an annoying neighbor played by David Leisure (although in this version his character was named Oliver). The show when it finally aired, starred instead Richard Mulligan as pediatrician Harry Weston working in a local hospital, with 2 grown daughters, played by Dinah Manoff and Christy MacNicol, who eventually move back in with him. The show changed once again, in its last season with Harry leaving the hospital and working in an inner city neighborhood clinic run by a doctor played by Marsha Warfield. The only actor that remained from the original pilot was David Leisure, who would play a different character named Charlie.
Roseanne - from the second year, when Roseanne took control of the show, up to maybe where she started the diner it was brilliant. Funny, caustic, devastatingly honest about lower class life in the Midwest, the show had arcs, like Dan’s losing the bike shop and Becky running away with Mark, that were better than most dramas while still managing to retain the humor. As the seasons passed, the show grew weaker and then totally self destructed.
funny no matter how bad the shows of the 60's went, they are still better than many of the current crap out there today...and sadly, they are controlled by nutjobs.
I slightly prefer 30 ROCK, but if you argued SEINFELD was one-third of 30 ROCK's genetic makeup, I wouldn't argue.
Without a Trace started out as a show about missing persons but morphed into a show about racial profiling and the need for police to beat the crap out of anyone withholding information.
Lost started off as a promising mystery/sci-fi tale but ended up as a steaming pile with a cop-out ending.
Not just slapstick - in the last few years, the show went right into fantasyland, with Judge Stone seeing Wile E. Coyote as a defendant, and Bull being taken back to his home planet in the final episode. In the early years, even Bull was depicted as a character with unexpected depth to him. By the end, all of the characters were basically cartoons, so I guess Coyote's cameo made a kind of sense. I didn't like it, though. The last two seasons, I've never bothered re-watching.
Hayden Panittiere: "Everyone always tells me how much they loved THE FIRST SEASON of Heroes." Her emphasis! They lost me at the start of season 2 when the act of self sacrifice at the end of season 1 turned out to be a lie. I was quite emotionally invested in the characters by the end of the first season, so the producers having that sort of disrespect for the viewer was a real turn off (literally).
For me it was when Christine Sullivan got together with Tony the undercover cop, and had the child. That took away the mystique of Dan Fielding's attraction to her up to the end of the series. Those last seasons are watchable, but I can do without them.
It started as a show about Bart, really. Quickly, people caught onto the star and it morphed to being Homer-centric by Season 3 latest I'd say.
I would say the MTV UNPLUGGED became a far different creature than when it started. You can see the difference between the relatively amateurish, folk hootenanny presentation of its inception versus the professional, corporate high polish of its eventual incarnation, sometimes with the same band.
I liked Fringe when they were just investigating ghastly occurrences but then they got into the parallel universe and the alternate timelines and I thought they were just trying to do too much. But I'm not a big science fiction guy anyways...
i'll say this . the show is meant to show the transition from early 20's when all you have is your friends until your early 30's when you start a family of your own. i can relate. seems from 19 or so until around 26 i didn't spend as much time with my actual family. i was around my friends more. once we all hit about 32 things changed and we all went on to have families of our own. i'd say the show captured that vibe pretty dead on as by the last 2 seasons you could see they were all other than joey getting families of their own. guess thats why he got the spin off
Re: Friends. Any sitcom that reaches a fourth series tends to either "jump the shark" in its plotlines in order to create a sensation and stay 'fresh and relevant' or it takes on a soap opera aspect as the viewers get more engaged with the characters. It allows a "tragi-comic" element in. I think looking back Friends managed a perfect arc for the target audience over it's ten years. In the UK the only one I can think that achieved something similar is "Only Fools and Horses"
We had Povich here in DC first! DC is where Povich grew up and became successful on TV. I remember how surprised I was that Povich went the tabloid TV route - he'd been a serious journalist when he was here!
"Simpsons" was more Homer - and family - oriented in its abbreviated first season, but Bart became so popular so quickly that he turned into the focus. This balanced eventually, but Bart was by far the most famous/popular character in the early 90s...
I agree that virtually all series have to change their formula to some degree as they go, just because they start to run out of ideas for the original group of characters. "The Flintstones" remains a prime example. First they added Pebbles, then they added Bamm-Bamm, then Hoppy, then various odd new characters like Gazoo. I think that's different than the show itself changing, though. At its core, "The Flintstones" was the same kind of show in Season Six as in Season One - it just had some different supporting characters and was less funny. I think "Friends" remained the same show across its 10 seasons, even though relationships changed among the characters. I think it helped that they could so easily bring in new characters connected to the main 6 via jobs or romances. They never shifted the focus to any new characters, unlike say "Family Matters" and Urkel...
Maury Povich’s father was sportswriter Shirley Povich and yes, Shirley was his first name. He was the 8th child and named after his grandmother Sarah...Povich said he knew four other boys named Shirley growing up in Maine 100 years ago. Shirley didn’t become a girl’s name until Shirley Temple.
Transformers (US) took on a noticeably darker tone in later seasons (notably after Transformers: The Movie).