20 television shows that changed premises

Cougar Town was pitched on two things. One was the presence of Friends alumna Courteney Cox. Two: Cox was playing a forty-something woman who — get this — was going to date younger men! Many rolled their eyes, and that was abandoned quite early. It became a hangout sitcom about a group of friends, and Cox’s character even got married during the run of the show. The producers wanted to change the name, but it never happened.

Roseanne returned after many years to take on modern family life and what it means to be working class in the 2020s. Then, Roseanne Barr tweeted some problematic stuff, and that was that. ABC didn’t cancel Rosanne but pivoted to calling the show The Conners, which is essentially considered its own show but is obviously a Roseanne pivot. The character Roseanne was killed off, but The Conners has thrived, having aired almost 100 episodes with more to come.

Here is another show that pivoted after losing the star, but at least this story is less sordid. Valerie Harper is best known for playing Rhoda on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and, well, Rhoda. She got her own sitcom in Valerie. However, Harper walked off the show to try to get a salary increase, which had apparently worked for her on Rhoda. This time, the network executives called her bluff. Harper’s character was killed off. For one season, it was Valerie’s Family: The Hogans, and after that transition period, we got three seasons of The Hogan Family.

This ABC sitcom saw a lot of changes, from cast to premise to, well, title. You may recall that when the show debuted, it was called Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place. After the first season, two new recurring characters were added. Then, before the third season, the pizza place that two of the main characters worked at was completely nixed from the show, hence the name change. One of the lead characters, “Berg,” began his medical residency instead. Berg was played by a young Ryan Reynolds, a big reason why anybody remembers this show at all.

Before Disney+ became the home of MCU TV shows, ABC got to air a couple. First up was Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., which brought back the previously dead Phil Coulson and focused on the government agents dealing with superpower-infused assignments and cases of the week. However, the folks over on the movie side didn’t really care about some network TV show, and in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, it was revealed that Hydra had infiltrated not just the U.S. government but S.H.I.E.L.D. as well. This led to a version of S.H.I.E.L.D. that existed in something of a murky space until the end of the third season, when it was made a legitimate government organization again.

Angel, a character from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, got his spinoff, where he moves to Los Angeles and becomes a private eye. Of course, he’s also a vampire with a soul and dealing with supernatural stuff. Much of the time, Angel is doing battle with Wolfram and Hart, a law firm fully ensconced in the occult. However, before the fifth and final season, Angel is given the Los Angeles branch of Wolfram and Hart to run for himself, and so in the final season, Angel uses the firm’s resources to work his cases instead of battling them.

Now, the plan was always for The Good Place to pivot its premise, but it pivoted a couple of times. Let’s stick to the twist at the end of the first season, though. Early on, the premise that we are provided is that Eleanor was accidentally let into “The Good Place,” i.e., Heaven, and hilarity ensues. However, in the season one finale, Eleanor realizes that she and her compatriots are actually in “The Bad Place,” i.e., Hell and that Michael is not an angel but a demon. This led to a reset that completely changed the show going forward.

When Ellen began, it wasn’t even called Ellen. Instead, the show was called These Friends of Mine. Ellen DeGeneres played a bookstore owner, and the sitcom focused on her and her wacky friends. Ellen, the character, never really dated, much to the network's chagrin. Things changed with “The Puppy Episode,” where Ellen, the character, followed in the footsteps of Ellen, the real person, and came out as gay. That led to some dating storylines in Ellen and changed the landscape of the show. It didn’t make it any funnier, and the show basically only lasted one more season.

Archer began life as an Adult Swim-style raunchy spoof of James Bond and the spy genre. Of course, when you work in that realm, you can get away with abandoning your premise if you’re bored with it. Suddenly, Archer and company were dealing cocaine in the fifth season. In the seventh, they are working as L.A. private eyes a la Angel. Then, there were three “coma” seasons that just did whatever they wanted. Eventually, Archer would go back to the spy world, but it took a minute to get there.

Kevin Can Wait was supposed to be Kevin James replicating the success of The King of Queens . However, Leah Remini wasn’t there to play his wife, and the kind of people who watch a Kevin James sitcom are apparently the kind of people who think, “The lady is different! I don’t like it!” After the first season, the wife character was killed off, and suddenly, James was working at a security firm where his partner was played by…Leah Remini. However, Kevin Can Wait was still canceled after the second season.

Halt and Catch Fire always worked within the realm of the computer industry, but the premise would still pivot. There were time jumps to help take the show from 1983 until the early 1980s. The action moved from Texas to San Francisco. Also, the goal went from creating a new personal computer to, well, basically being at the forefront of the internet. The AMC show was not one of the network’s big hits, but it was one of the better shows in terms of quality.

Surely, neither the creators of Once Upon a Time nor ABC were distressed that the show was successful enough to run seven seasons, but the original story ran out of real estate, leading to a pretty big late-run pivot. To explain the premise and the pivot for the seventh and final season would mean having to lay out a ton of backstory that would get convoluted really fast. Years after the final battle in the prior season, the character of Lucy wakes up in Seattle, and there is a new curse and a bunch of other stuff going on. Basically, it was enough to keep the show going for another season, kind of like the last season of Scrubs.

CBS sitcom Mom began with two recovering addicts who happen to be mother and daughter living together. They also happened to be played by Allison Janney and Anna Faris, two talented actors. However, prior to the last season, Faris decided to leave the show, so her character was written off. As such, the show focused on Janney’s Bonnie as she dealt with trying to stay sober while not having her daughter around, and she and her friends became the focus of the show.

It started as a show about, well, an affair. However, The Affair could not mine five seasons from that. While the show continued the multiple perspectives conceit, it became a murder mystery show. Also, the fifth and final season takes place in multiple timelines. Things really started to unravel, but they got to the endpoint, whatever that was supposed to be.

Here is a pivot that went hard, and we appreciate that kind of effort. Baywatch Nights is a spinoff of Baywatch that features David Hasselhoff’s Mitch as a private eye. Devoid of, you know, all the attractive people running around on the beach, the show lacked audience enthusiasm. So, they decided to glom off the success of another show, The X-Files. Suddenly, Mitch was working on supernatural cases. Really. It was still a trash show, but at least Baywatch Nights became entertaining.

Originally, Family Matters was about the Winslow family, and the Winslows were always part of the show. Then, the TGIF sitcom introduced a one-off character named Steve Urkel. The thing is, Urkel didn’t end up being a one-off character. Instead, he joined the regular cast starting with the second season, and quickly, it became the Steve Urkel show. Later seasons featured robots, time travel, you know it. Given that the youngest Winslow daughter, Judy, was retconned out of existence effectively to make room for Urkel, we’ll count this as a pivot.

How do you keep a show like “Prison Break” going after they break out of prison? Well, first you have them do a “Fugitive” type thing, which makes sense. Then, you realize “Prison Break” could also mean a prison break…in! Somehow, in the end, you figure out how to mine five seasons out of the show.

Wait, Homeland ran for eight seasons? No, that can’t be right. We knew that it continued even after Damian Lewis’ Nicholas Brody was written off, leaving Carrie and Saul in need of a new target. However, we will admit we had no idea just how long the show continued to run and how Saul-focused it became. So…maybe the pivot worked?

Cast changes were prevalent early in the run of Newhart, Bob Newhart’s follow-up to The Bob Newhart Show. Things rounded into form at the start of the third season. The lying, conniving neighbor Kirk was written off, with Larry, Darryl, and Darryl taking over his café. Then, the character of Michael — played with gusto by Peter Scolari — was turned into a full-time character. This gave Stephanie a love interest, but Michael was also a producer at the local TV station. He gave Newhart’s Dıck a local talk show, which gave Dıck a job outside of writing books and running the inn with his wife that sparked the storytelling. While “Newhart” was good in the first two seasons, it became great after that.

The thing about college is that, ultimately, you are supposed to graduate. What does that mean for your sitcom? Community began with Joel McHale’s Jeff Winger returning to school to get his law license back. Ultimately, he does graduate but returns to the school as a teacher. Later, other characters would graduate but stick around to help save Greendale and to work there. Also, Chang’s role changed quite a bit over the years. Maybe it was a gas leak or something.