TV Shows That Were Ruined by 2nd Season Retools

[TMC]

http://www.sitcomsonline.com/boards/showthread.php?t=305271

http://www.sitcomsonline.com/boards/showpost.php?p=4738318&postcount=2

Andromeda executive producer Robert Hewitt Wolfe was constantly
fighting with the Tribune suits, and he was ultimately fired halfway
through Season 2. The plot of the show changed drastically at this
point; Dylan's attempts to create a new Commonwealth were rushed to
completion so he could be at odds with them instead.

The John Larroquette Show started off as a quirky off-beat comedy
focusing on the main character's 12 Step recovery from alcoholism.
Network executives forced the producers to eliminate the 12 Step
material after the first season, which took much of the original
unique and edgy flavor away from the show. From there it turned into
another "single people with relationship problems" type of show, the
exact sitcom stereotype the series was trying to stray from. John
Hemingway also lost his cool, brooding, intellectual demeanor in the
process. Larroquette himself despaired when they moved his character,
who worked as a night-shift bus station manager, out of his rat-trap
boarding house to a nice apartment that he obviously couldn't afford
with a couch facing the cameras. The Hooker with a Heart of Gold
character had to find another career, too.

Lois and Clark suffered from two instances of executive meddling:
The first instance was between seasons one and two, when ABC forced
the writers to retool the show. They added more action (the show was
about Lois and Clark, not so much about Superman), more sex (because
men are pervs), less Cat Grant (despite being a nymphomaniac gossip
columnist, they'd rather sex everyone else up than have an extraneous
character in a show that was becoming less and less about the Daily
Planet), and they switched Jimmy Olsen out for a younger actor (some
fans think it was because the first guy looked too much like the lead;
it was likely both). The second instance was their insistence on
removing focus from the relationship. Clark couldn't reveal his Secret
Identity. They could only kinda sorta hint that she already knew. When
he proposed to her, they gave them a whole arc devoted to their
wedding. The executives made them switch Lois out for an (evil?) clone
at the last minute. They finally got married towards the end, and
found a foundling. And the Execs canceled it because it had "run its
course." It would not have "run its course" if not for the fake-out
wedding, after which they lost a large amount of their viewership.

http://www.sitcomsonline.com/boards/showpost.php?p=4740058&postcount=13

That reminds me that these guys -- whose shows were usually evil but
phenomenally successful -- could write a book on how to re-tool a
sitcom: almost every show they were ever involved with was
substantially re-tooled in the middle of its run, sometimes several
times. Like their mentor Garry Marshall, they didn't do the whole
artistic-integrity thing and would basically do anything to keep a
show on the air, whether it was bowing to network demands, playing up
any character who became popular, or changing the setting. Let's look
at some of the shows produced by Miller-Boyett or some variant thereof
(Miller-Milkis, Miller-Milkis-Boyett -- basically, Miller, a former
assistant to Billy Wilder, was the constant factor in all this):

- Happy Days: one of the most famous and successful (commercially
anyway) re-toolings ever. Then it was re-tooled several times to
adjust for the departure of Ron Howard and the departure/return of
Joanie and Chachi.

- Laverne and Shirley: they moved the whole show from Milwaukee
(Miller was from Milwaukee and it was presumably his idea to set these
shows there) to Hollywood, then did it for a year without Shirley (or
Lenny).

- Mork and Mindy: Completely overhauled in its second season.

- Angie: this was one of the few older-demographic comedies this team
did (Bosom Buddies, which underwent a mild second-season re-tool, was
another). Since all their shows were attempts to cash in on the
success of something else, I suspect that this was done in response to
the launch of ABC/Paramount's Taxi, which briefly made it OK for the
network to do smart adult comedies. Then Taxi's ratings tanked and
they abandoned that pretty quickly. Anyway, despite a successful first
season, Angie had a new setting and had dropped some characters by the
time the second season started.

- Perfect Strangers: early on, Larry and Balki were working for a mean
shop owner played by Ernie Sabella. In the third season, they were
working a big glamorous Chicago paper. Apparently the producers had
decided that people didn't want to see the characters working a
depressing dead-end job like Laverne and Shirley; this was the '80s
and audiences wanted successful people.

- The Hogan Family: one of the most notorious and publicized re-
toolings of the '80s, started as a show with Valerie Harper and wound
up as a show about Sandy Duncan.

- Going Places: a show I never saw, but which according to the linked
article had the characters change jobs/settings in the middle of its
short run.

- Family Matters: the focus of the Time article that started this
post; it starts off as a Perfect Strangers spinoff and suddenly it's a
show about Urkel, whom the producers embraced just as they once
embraced the Fonz.

Just about the only show on that list that didn't get heavily re-
tooled was Full House, and even that got changed a lot before it first
aired (change of premise, and an unused pilot with a different actor).

I don't have much to say to sum up, except that Tom Miller and co. are
a test case for what producers can accomplish if they don't really
care what their shows were originally supposed to be about. If they
throw the whole integrity and plausibility notion aside and just
rejigger every show to emphasize whatever the public likes at a given
point, they can actually be pretty darn successful. Frightening, but
successful.

http://www.sitcomsonline.com/boards/showpost.php?p=4784961&postcount=54

Between Last Man Standing’s first and second seasons, the largely non-
distinct sitcom, mostly known for being Tim Allen’s return to
television, had a choice to make. Headed for Fridays, the second least-
watched night of the week (after Saturdays), the program had to do
something to make some noise and hopefully attract viewership. Simply
having Allen in the cast wasn’t going to do it any longer. So, as
Allen and new showrunner Tim Doyle discussed with the New York Post,
the choice was made to try to turn a bland family sitcom into a modern-
day Norman Lear comedy, complete with arguing about social issues,
Barack Obama, and the nation’s legacy of genocide.

Did it work? Having watched all 18 episodes of the show’s second
season, I can’t really say that it made the show better, but it
certainly made it weirder. (And in terms of ratings, it allowed the
show to keep the lights on on Friday, no mean feat.) Its attempt to
put a finger on the country’s pulse made it much more worthy of
discussion than when it was just about some angry guy living with too
many women, as it was in its first season. It’s like when ’Til Death
turned into a strange meta-sitcom in its final season, though somehow
even more misguided.

The basic premise of Last Man Standing is the same as Allen’s former
sitcom hit, Home Improvement, only his character, Mike Baxter, has
three adolescent-and-older daughters, instead of three child sons. The
oldest daughter, Kristin, was the promising one who was going to
succeed, until she had a child late in high school, and she’s lived in
her parents’ house with her son, Boyd, ever since. Middle daughter
Mandy is a ditzy fashionplate. Youngest daughter Eve is the one who’s
closest to her dad, into things like soccer and hunting. There’s an
outdoor-store workplace setting where Mike deals with crotchety boss
Ed (meant to be the even more hyper-masculine version of Mike in
season one) and dumbass employee Kyle. And in the second season, the
show made an attempt to flesh out the neighborhood the Baxters lived
in with a handful of recurring characters, including a black couple
who become fast friends with the Baxters, and a Latina maid. In
addition, the second season added the father of Kristin’s son, Ryan,
as a semi-regular, meant to be the Meathead to Mike’s Archie Bunker.

The problem with Last Man Standing’s attempts to go political is
exemplified by the first scene of the season première, which remains
one of the most uncomfortable scenes of television I’ve ever watched.
It’s not even really bad so much as it’s actively discomfiting, doing
its best to push buttons in the audience that don’t need to be pushed,
as if it thinks what made Lear’s sitcoms a success was the yelling or
the mentions of social issues that people sometimes argued about. Mike
says Obama was born in Kenya. Kristin and Ryan make fun of Romney for
being a robot. It goes on and on and gets more and more squirm-
inducing, but in a way that is clearly meant to be a good time. This
is the new height of political humor?

The characters on Last Man Standing don’t speak about issues in any
sort of nuanced manner, nor do they have terribly deep discussions
about them. They mostly repeat buzzwords and shout at each other a
lot. The show wanted to make Mike into a conservative hero, but it
didn’t bother giving him a consistent worldview. He’s just somebody
who spouts Fox News talking points a lot, and while that may be
somewhat true to life—in that most modern political arguments between
left and right tend to boil down to talking points gleaned from
elsewhere—it doesn’t make the experience of watching people shout
pithy, empty phrases at each other any more interesting or involving.
What’s more, Mike’s main liberal competition—Ryan and, occasionally,
Kristin—tend to speak as if they came up with their own political
positions from reading the list of tags at the bottom of posts on a
left-wing blog.

Again, this is true to life. Few political arguments—particularly
those among family—have the level of nuance one might expect from,
say, a mythical boxing match between Paul Krugman and Milton Friedman.
And, thinking back on All In The Family, Archie and Mike Stivic’s
arguments on that show rarely had much nuance to them, either; the
series gained much of its power from moments when it could step
outside of their limited points-of-view and depict the world as it
actually was. What made All In The Family’s political arguments work—
what made the vast majority of all of Lear’s series featuring such
arguments work—were the character stakes. The idea that Archie and
Mike would love or even respect each other at the end of one of those
knockdown shouting matches wasn’t taken for granted. They really might
end up pushing each other too far, and did on occasion. The
relationship, which grew to a kind of grudging respect and finally
love, was one of the best developed in television history.

It’s unfair to hold a relationship that’s only existed for 18 episodes
of television to that sort of standard, but the central problem with
Last Man Standing’s political arguments is that the show A) never
gives viewers a reason to care whether Mike and Ryan respect each
other at the end of the day (after all, Ryan’s not even a series
regular), and B) takes it for granted that the two will respect, and
maybe even love, each other. Ryan abandoned the mother of his child
and said child for three years and has returned, trying to right his
wrongs. The Baxters have every right to be suspicious of him, and it
would be easy enough to turn Mike and Ryan’s political arguments into
arguments about something more fundamental in their relationship: what
Mike perceives as Ryan’s utter inability to help out Kristin when the
chips were down. That’s interesting. That’s drama. But Last Man
Standing runs away from it at every occasion.

The series has the right idea in trying to ground the political in the
personal. For 99 percent of us, politics is personal. Think, for
instance, of the relief you might have felt when Obama won last year,
or the despair you might have felt when Romney lost. Those emotions
may have been driven by something politically concrete on one level,
but they were also driven by a more fundamental, emotional level. No
matter how much you may believe in [insert issue here], every election
comes down to a choice between something you identify strongly with
and something you do not. The two-party system all but guarantees
this. When the characters on a Norman Lear political sitcom argue,
this is what they’re really arguing about: the defense of the self
against something that would encroach upon it. Too often on Last Man
Standing, however, the characters just argue about politics to give
each other a hard time. There’s little sense of passion, and even when
the characters come up against a problem that’s truly insoluble—where
there are significant arguments to be made on both sides—the show
chickens out and ultimately buries everything under a gloss of, “Well,
at least we all still love each other!” Take, for instance, the
episode “Mother Fracking.”

Mike’s wife Vanessa (the great Nancy Travis, given sadly little to do)
is a geologist, and part of her work involves using the process known
as fracking to gather natural gas. Eve’s terrified of the impact this
might have on the planet, so she stages a one-girl protest. Vanessa
rightly points out that the best current method of finding energy
comes from fossil fuels. The choice is presented along admirably stark
lines: Enjoy the modern comforts that in many cases keep us alive, or
probably **** up the planet irreparably. There’s a real opportunity
here to strain a relationship between mother and daughter, one viewers
actually do care about. Instead, Mike tells Eve that her mother does
her best, and maybe Eve shouldn’t give Vanessa a hard time, since she
really loves her little girl. And… that’s about it.

This question of making giant political issues into smaller, more
personal ones runs throughout the season (though toward the season’s
end, it becomes less about that and more about interpersonal
relationships), and it’s sometimes, frankly, embarrassing. There’s a
whole episode that clumsily creates the impression it wants to make a
one-to-one comparison between the genocide of American Indians and
Ryan leaving after Boyd was born. (Ryan doesn’t appreciate Ed
promoting Outdoor Man with a Western-themed stage show—that arrives
out of nowhere, it must be said—which features rampaging Indians.
Later, when Ryan tries to say that it doesn’t matter what he did in
the past in regards to Boyd, Mike accuses him of turning the tables
and trying to sweep his own history under the rug. It’s… awkward.)
There’s also an episode, talked about in the Post article above, where
Eve gets in trouble for bullying at school, which means well but also
inadvertently seems to suggest that kids should be able to use as many
anti-gay slurs as they want. Because the show is so intent on not
having a definitive political point of view, it comes off as clumsy
more often than not. It also forces the characters to behave in ways
no human being ever would, as in one episode when Vanessa wonders if
she received a promotion because she is good looking, then actually
goes and asks her boss that very question. Who would do this?

There are stabs at character complexity here and there. Ryan is
liberal to a fault but also subject to his own unexamined prejudices,
particularly when it comes to how he, deep down, believes the mother
of his child should submit to his authority. And Eve’s a gun-toting
wannabe Marine who’s also really concerned about the potential
destruction of the planet, and recoils in horror at the Wild West show
when she finds out about the plight of the Indians. I’d feel more
strongly supportive of these stabs at complexity, however, if the
series didn’t leave the impression that it simply forced the
characters into whatever straitjacket it needed them to be in for that
particular episode. Eve will be a budding hippie in one episode, a
budding military member in the next, and never the twain shall meet.
Considering the show does take stabs at consistency of setting and
story serialization, it’s just a little strange, as if Last Man
Standing understands that people are complex but wants to present all
of its characters as different archetypes in different episodes, lest
they get too complex.

That Last Man Standing doesn’t really work is all the more
disappointing because it comes close enough to suggest a show worth
watching. Even if the show’s first season was more consistent across
the board, it was much less interesting than the second, which was
fitfully fascinating, as in an episode when Kristin learns Mandy is
infatuated with Kyle, whom Kristin earlier dated, and takes this
occasion to reignite her relationship with Ryan. It’s a wonderfully
ambiguous moment, where Kristin’s motivations are surprisingly nuanced—
until the next episode, when she and Ryan are just happy together
again. In its second season, it was incredibly evident that Last Man
Standing had seen some of the best shows in TV history and was trying
to ape them, but had mostly just captured the surface of them.

http://www.sitcomsonline.com/boards/showpost.php?p=4788424&postcount=58

Great TV Shows That Hit the Wall in Season 2:
http://www.sitcomsonline.com/boards/showthread.php?t=239948
http://officialfan.proboards.com/thread/202057/great-shows-hit-wall-season

http://www.sitcomsonline.com/boards/showpost.php?p=4790353&postcount=59

But I think another retool from the same era may be even worse: Buck
Rogers in the 25th Century. You'll recall that the first season of
this Glen Larson production was the cheesiest thing ever: bad '70s
fashions in the future, an annoying robot sidekick (voiced by Mel
Blanc, who didn't even bother to make up an actual voice for the
character; that was basically just his real voice), and lots of space
T&A. But it combined everything people liked in the late '70s and
early '80s: cornball humor, action, robots, sci-fi, and jiggle TV. The
abbreviated second season had a serious and depressing setting,
serious and depressing plots, a serious and depressing supporting
cast, and few female guest stars. I'm not saying Buck Rogers was a
good show in its first season, though it was better than the second.
What I'm saying is that I don't understand the logic: how did anyone
think the show would get more popular if they included less humor,
action and sex appeal? It would be like retooling Star Trek to make
Kirk suicidal and celibate, and replacing every member of the crew
with that alien from the Filmation cartoon.

“The Clown Show has been put on hiatus for retooling:” 20 cases of
mutant TV:
http://www.avclub.com/articles/the-clown-show-has-been-put-on-hiatus-for-retoolin,25099/

[Professor Bubba]

In article
<565809fb-792a-4139...@tz3g2000pbb.googlegroups.com>,

TMC <tmc...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Lois and Clark suffered from two instances of executive meddling:
> The first instance was between seasons one and two, when ABC forced
> the writers to retool the show. They added more action (the show was
> about Lois and Clark, not so much about Superman), more sex (because
> men are pervs), less Cat Grant (despite being a nymphomaniac gossip
> columnist, they'd rather sex everyone else up than have an extraneous
> character in a show that was becoming less and less about the Daily
> Planet), and they switched Jimmy Olsen out for a younger actor (some
> fans think it was because the first guy looked too much like the lead;
> it was likely both). The second instance was their insistence on
> removing focus from the relationship. Clark couldn't reveal his Secret
> Identity. They could only kinda sorta hint that she already knew. When
> he proposed to her, they gave them a whole arc devoted to their
> wedding. The executives made them switch Lois out for an (evil?) clone
> at the last minute. They finally got married towards the end, and
> found a foundling. And the Execs canceled it because it had "run its
> course." It would not have "run its course" if not for the fake-out
> wedding, after which they lost a large amount of their viewership.

ABC forced the original showrunner out early in the first season
because she was trying to do a show about a young guy who was trying to
learn how to be Superman, and ABC wanted a Batman-like show with a
villain of the week. Then there was the clusterfrack about Clark's
proposal. They ended the season with him popping the question. Then
they spoiled Lois' surprising reply ("Who's asking me? Clark ... or
Superman?") in the print ad copy for the next season's premiere. What
they should have done was end the season with Lois' answer, but they
weren't smart enough for that. Of course, they ended the series with a
cliffhanger that was put together long after the series had been
cancelled. The contempt for the audience was obvious.

I agree that the drawn-out wedding killed the series, which was already
in deep trouble because of the frog thing.

[Murdoc]

I beg your pardon. The "frog thing"?

[Professor Bubba]

In article <1tjgv7ljgrvx0$.z4fk2syta1f5$.d...@40tude.net>, Murdoc

Clone Lois ate frogs, presumably as part of a complete breakfast. In
fact, the first time we saw Clois eat a frog was how they revealed to
us that she wasn't really Lois.

I am not making this up, unfortunately.

[Ian J. Ball]

In article <190420130835342684%bu...@nowhere.edu.invalid>,

Yes, Deborah Joy Levine (who, IIRC, went on to do shows like "Army
Wives").

Like Hewitt Wolfe with "Andromeda" and Larry Hertzog of "Nowhere Man",
Levine was the driving creative force behind the original vision of L&C,
and her excision, along with firing Michael Landes, unequivocally killed
the show and made it unwatchable.

--
"Surf-crazed aliens... Of course." - Amber, "Alien Surf Girls",
Episode #1.1, "Wipeout".
Wait a minute... "Of course"?! "*Of course*"?!! Did I miss a step here??!!

[anim8rFSK]

In article
<ijball-NO_SPAM-1E2...@news.eternal-september.org>,

Oh, I don't know; I don't think any of the stuff she inflicted was any
good; I think what little was there first season was there despite her,
not because of her. I like Landes, but I agree he was wildly wrong for
Jimmy. Cat Grant was incredibly miscast. Dean Cain wasn't exactly
great shakes, and the constant changes in his costume, even scene to
scene, were annoying as Hell. Perry and Lex were great. I don't see
anything else she's worked on that impressed me (and a lot I haven't
even heard of). I thought she moved onto Charlie Grace after L&C but
IMDb doesn't show it; I remember his kid watching L&C and saying it
wasn't very good. I think it peaked in season 2, with Tempus saying
Lois was galactically stupid, and then collapsed in season 3, taking the
comic wedding down with it, and then season 4 became such a Rao-awful
train wreck that ABC payed millions in penalties just to get rid of it,
inflicting Prey upon us in the bargain.

--
"Every time a Kardashian gets a TV show, an angel dies."

[Your Name]

In article <190420130835342684%bu...@nowhere.edu.invalid>, Professor Bubba

wrote:

And yet "Lois and Clark" was still infinitely better and more "Superman"
than the horribly awful "Smallvile" ... which was ruined in it's second
(or third) season when lazy writer simply ran out of even remotely
sensible ideas. :-(



Another show that was ruined in it's second "season" is the real
"Battlestar Galactica", although they also renamed it to "Galactica 1980".
Ditching most of the original cast and changing the show into "Super
Scouts" meets any-other-do-gooder-saves-the-day show of the time.

"Buck Rogers" also suffered a similar fate, although kept it's name and
wasn't quite as badly detsroyed by meddling.

[JRStern]

On Fri, 19 Apr 2013 03:07:13 -0700 (PDT), TMC <tmc...@gmail.com>
wrote:

>Great TV Shows That Hit the Wall in Season 2:
>http://www.sitcomsonline.com/boards/showthread.php?t=239948
>http://officialfan.proboards.com/thread/202057/great-shows-hit-wall-season
>
>http://www.sitcomsonline.com/boards/showpost.php?p=4790353&postcount=59
>
>But I think another retool from the same era may be even worse: Buck
>Rogers in the 25th Century. You'll recall that the first season of
>this Glen Larson production was the cheesiest thing ever: bad '70s
>fashions in the future, an annoying robot sidekick (voiced by Mel
>Blanc, who didn't even bother to make up an actual voice for the
>character; that was basically just his real voice), and lots of space
>T&A. But it combined everything people liked in the late '70s and
>early '80s: cornball humor, action, robots, sci-fi, and jiggle TV. The
>abbreviated second season had a serious and depressing setting,
>serious and depressing plots, a serious and depressing supporting
>cast, and few female guest stars.

Bidibidibidibidi - that's the first one that comes to my mind whenever
this issue is discussed!

J.