Defeating the Purpose

Wednesday I talked about revisiting the old Buck Rogers TV show from 1979-1982.  The first season of the show aligned more with the original stories (and also Star Wars) as Buck awakens in the future and helps Earth defend itself from the Draconian Empire and other threats.  But then in season 2 they decided to turn the show into an off-brand Star Trek (like The Orville with less potty humor) and not surprisingly it was canceled after 13 episodes.

Other series have tried this soft reboot approach (sometimes within a season instead of between seasons) and it almost always fails.  I was trying to think of a few examples where it might have actually worked and couldn't find a lot.  Star Trek: Discovery's season 3 turn from a prequel/midquel series to a far-future sequel series came to mind.  The Facts of Life started in a boarding school and then became about the core group and Mrs. Garrett running a bakery and then there was another turn where the core group and Cloris Leachman ran a clothes store or some damned thing; the latter was really one concept change too many.  At the moment I can't really think of any others.

And I'm not talking about when a show like MASH or Bewitched or Cheers or Night Court or ER would recast/replace characters because those shows still had the same core concept of doctors in the Korean war, a witch married to a mortal, a bar in Boston, a New York courthouse, and a Chicago emergency room respectively.  And I'm not talking about a spin-off like the original Facts of Life or Frasier or Daria or Joey because that was starting a new concept independent of the old one.  So don't mention those examples in the comments, Phantom Readers.

Anyway, I think this so rarely works for a few reasons.  First is the timing.  It's usually done because ratings are sagging and so the network wants to do something to "spice it up" and try to win back viewers.  But instead it usually causes the show to lose existing viewers who think, "Hey, WTF is this crap?  This isn't what I came to see!"  And there aren't enough new viewers to buoy the show before it gets canned.  

In the case of Buck Rogers, the change in format pretty much invalidated the whole premise of the show.  What difference did it make if he came from the 20th Century when they were seeking new life and new civilizations and boldly going where Kirk, Spock, and Bones had already gone before?  The original premise it mattered because his independence and new way of looking at things helped the Earth defenders who relied too much on computers and canned answers.  Even if the first season wasn't always faithful to that concept, it was still there most of the time.  Whereas in the second season, his being from the 20th Century doesn't really add anything.  He's just another guy on the ship.  Sure he hasn't seen the shit they see--but neither has anyone else on board!

That's the problem when you change your concept:  you usually lose what made people want to watch in the first place.  And then they're probably not going to watch anymore.

I've run into this problem a couple of times in Eric Filler series.  The first was the Gender Swap Detective series.  The basic concept was that a hard-boiled 30s PI named Dixie gets turned into a beautiful woman.  And then she has to solve gender swap mysteries.  I pretty much kept up with the concept in the first book, where a woman comes to her after being changed by a necklace that was then stolen.  But then it kind of went off the rails in the second story where Dixie goes undercover and finds out some Nazis are experimenting on cross-dressing burlesque dancers.  The problem was that I wound up getting Dixie too involved in the events themselves instead of her just investigating what happened.  So then instead of the series being about her solving gender swap mysteries, it became about her and the people around her.  I lost the thread and really couldn't get back to it.

It sort of happened again in the 24 Hour Gender Swap series.  The framing device was that someone always goes to Mrs. Vantu, a mysterious Gypsy woman who has a lot of magic potions and charms and then someone gets swapped.  The mistake I made was starting in book 6 I again made Mrs. Vantu too involved in things and the series started to become more about her and those around her than about people coming to her.  It hindered her value as a framing device.

To humblebrag a little, I think it's that it's hard for me to not develop a character I use multiple times.  I'm not really good at just maintaining the status quo; I always want to do more with characters and flesh them out.  That's what we're told to do as writers, right?  But there are times when your character isn't so much a character as a framing device or a tool and really you should keep them as that or else you wipe out the whole concept you were aiming for in the first place.

On a side note, sometimes a change in concept isn't so much by choice.  Like when John Ritter died, the whole concept of 8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter had to change from focusing on the father to focusing on the family.  Or like how the NBC show Valerie became The Hogan Family in its second season because Valerie Harper left the show, thus they couldn't really call it Valerie anymore.  The same thing happened when Roseanne was fired from Roseanne and so they changed it to The Connor Family because it wouldn't make sense to name it after a character who was no longer there.  The latter two weren't exactly major concept changes but it was a different focus from really one character to more of a group.  Shows like Happy Days, Full House, and Family Matters were supposed to focus more on other characters but then the Fonz, Michelle Tanner, and Urkel became so popular that the show mostly became about them.  In that case you can't really blame producers for giving the public what it seems to want.  The Simpsons probably could have gone that way early on and made it all about Bart, but they wisely stuck to their guns and 30 years later it's still on.