TV Shows That Became A Different Show From How They Began

Lifelong DC resident - I knew Shirley's work firsthand, as he continued to write for the "Washington Post" until he died in 1998.

That's why I was acquainted with Maury well before he became nationally famous...

 

I was a ten-years old Transformers kid when Transformers: The Movie was released. The show (up to that point) was relatively innocuous, though fun (for a ten-year old). The movie was very different. It opens with several major characters (including some fan-favorites) being killed, and the, er, bloodshed, so to speak, doesn't let up through the end of the movie.

The real world explanation was that Hasbro wanted to clear the decks for a new set of toys/characters, but kids like me didn't understand that. We only saw these characters we had invested in being slaughtered onscreen, including everyone's father figure, Optimus Prime. Hasbro later decided they had made a mistake in that case, and brought Prime back in the television show. My guess is that people at the toy company, considering these characters as just robots, didn't foresee how kids were going to react.

 

You can claim him as far as I'm concerned. There's a lotta *&^% that comes out of DC!

 

Quincy, M.E. began as a mystery/whodunit series and after about the third or fourth season morphed into a weekly showcase for raising public awareness of various social issues such as child abuse, lax airline safety, hazing, and infamously, the dangers of Punk Rock.

 

Honestly, Maury's a talented guy who was good as a serious newsman.

I guess he decided $$$ meant more to him than credibility!

 

News reader at many local shows.including years at KYW TV where he also did a midday interview show.
Nowadays,I'd much rather see Pedro Martinez host a "Who's Your Daddy? show.

 

I never saw past about 10 mins of that movie - my parents had to turn it off because I'd cry when Optimus Prime died....

 

I think the first few episodes of Heroes were fine, then there was a writers strike, and when the strike ended, they had to start up again and lost so much momentum, it went right off the rails and never got back. We were told that there was a lot of turmoil behind the scenes with writers, producers, and the network. I noticed that a few times they'd introduce a new character, then after a couple of episodes, they'd vanish for no good reason. I think Heroes had some problems with "tone," as they say.

No, showrunner Vince Gilligan has said that his concept was, "what if an ordinary guy wound up as the biggest drug dealer in the Southwest?" So it was always going to be about drug dealers, with each episode determining how to get from this point to that point. Basically, almost every character in the show (except maybe the son) makes a series of bad decision that winds up killing people or causing terrible unanticipated problems. We just re-watched all of Breaking Bad in 4k HDR as part of Quarantine Theater, and I was amazed at how well all the episodes fit together. In particular, the shows about Jesse's girlfriend and her father who turns out to be the air traffic controller... oh, that was a domino thing that nobody could see coming. That's a brilliant show in every way. I think it might be the greatest TV drama ever made -- a rare show that never jumped the shark -- at least for me.

 

British cop drama The Bill: it started out as a gritty, naturalistic portrayal of the day-to-day life of a London police station and then the producers decided to skew it to a younger audience. They brought in a show runner who had learned his trade in soaps and suddenly there were same-sex relationships between officers, drugs, corruption and weird plots involving all manner of implausible goings-on. Nonetheless it was a good show for the best part of 25 years until it was rebooted again for a post-watershed slot, alienated its core audience and was cancelled.

 

Yep and that is when I stopped watching. I couldn’t take the constant preaching about the cause of the week.

 

Exactly right.
Used to be essential viewing then lost the plot. Pun intended.

 

Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place ......eventually losing the pizza place.

 

Blakes 7 - lost Blake after series 2(?), but carried on regardless, like if Kirk went missing from Star Trek and no one noticed or commented.

 

Good points here.

I'll add -- I feel Cranston's acting was so much better early on. He really seemed to get inside the character and the nuances.

By the time he was shouting "Say my name!" and calling himself "Heisenberg," it became more about the broad strokes and dramatic effects.

 

He was reminding me of some of my favorite broken-man characters in cinema. I was thinking of Gene Hackman playing Harry Caul in The Conversation and Jack Lemmon playing Shelley Levene in Glengarry Glen Ross. Both of these characters were professionals who maintained a happy facade but inside they were full of rage at how their lives had turned out. By the fifth episode we saw that Walter had a ton of suppressed anger at things that happened decades ago and Cranston played it so convincingly.

At one point Walter was talking about building a drug empire and was thinking, "Who is this guy? What happened to Walter White?"

 

I learn something knew every day. I'm familiar with both men in their respective fields, but I had no idea they were father and son.

 

Me too. Quincy was my favorite show prior to it becoming preachy. I remember I stopped watching it regularly about halfway into the 1979-80 season, and saw it only occasionally after that. I admire Jack Klugman for wanting to bring some of these things to light, but it ruined the series for me.

 

I don't remember any preachiness. Unless you consider having stories that touch on issues of the day as "preaching". I learned so much about world issues when watching some of the dramas of the 70s and 80, from homelessness, immigration, neo-Nazism, abortion, migrant workers, etc. Seeing issues contextualized into stories that were relatable so you could see what affected people's lives really brought home to me as a young person that there was more to the world than my own little environment.

 

I remember it originally having police investigation/procedural plots in which we found out some medical fact that solved the case, but at some point the plots were more about one or more bad guy characters who were stupid or ignorant, or were selfishly causing harm.

At the time I was into punk rock, so the silly episode in which we found out that punk rockers were all angry and disturbed teens who supported murder really turned me off the show. I think that was the last one I watched.

 

Last Man Standing has seen plenty of cast changes over the years (Amanda Fuller replaces Alexandra Krosney...Molly McCook replaces Molly Ephraim...)

 

I think you have it backwards if anything

The first 2 or 3 seasons were much more violent and mobster like (which is why I preferred them)

 

Yeah. TV until at least the 90s did not have the creative freedom that it does now.

 

I found Breaking Bad to get a lot better around Season 3. It's not that I need constant violence or anything, but I found the characters to simply be better.

Skylar and Jesse's characters were unbearable to me in the first couple seasons.

 

As a counter example can I put forward family favourite Death in Paradise that has changed it's lead characters several times over but retains the shows essence. We've almost finished series ten in our house, and it looks like another character is leaving, but hey ho, the Saint Maire police will still get through another case with another new officer.

 

Blake was the weakest link. Avon and Servalan made the show great. The last episode is one of the best things ever on British TV.

Also the plot of the last season was looking for Blake.