Favourite 'season one' aspects that get dropped early on

[Quinton O'Connor]

The glowy spine thing got ditched, toio. As for Boxey, the actor apparently encountetred a growth spurt that would have jarred with the show's compressed time-frame; also, the envisaged Tyrol-Boomer-Boxey family unit was voided bythe late decision to make Boomer a cylon. Apparently the consensus is that Boxey dies off-screen from cholera.

Poor kid!

MGM at one time thought it was a huge franchise for them, only second to Bond, now it's dead.

I'm pretty sure despite the financial failures of SGU it's still in second place.

 

[Christopher]

Well, I was only nine and things like that did seem longer. I was surprised when I learned later in life that Battlestar Galactica was only one season, when I was a kid it seemed like a couple years at least.

Well, there was Galactica 1980, so between them they come out to a season and a half. I recently re-watched G80, and I realized that some thing I associated with BSG in my memory were actually from G80 (though somehow I can't think of what any of those things were right now).

 

[Caliburn24]

The two best things about season one of Human Target were Guerrero and Bear McCreary's score. They kept the first, and ditched the second sadly.

 

[backstept]

The two best things about season one of Human Target were Guerrero and Bear McCreary's score. They kept the first, and ditched the second sadly.

yeah, dude

also they totally scrapped the whole 'who is Chance?' 'What's your name?' thing, and the whole backstory mythos . . .
not to mention Baptiste isn't a threat anymore . . .

 

[J.T.B.]

Another: At first, Barney Miller would sometimes be shown at home with Mrs. Miller and the kids, but this was chucked after the first season. Along with Chano.

--Justin

 

[bigdaddy]

Season 1 of Sports Night very rarely leaved the office, but by season 2 they were getting drunk at a bar across the street quite often.

 

[Aldo]

Dark Angel had a rather interesting first season where Max was trying to find others like her while also avoiding capture from the very place she escaped from.

After storming the compound in the first season's finale the show seemed to alter in it's tone. What with introducing genetic freaks and a new villain for Max to face off against.

 

[Christopher]

Another: At first, Barney Miller would sometimes be shown at home with Mrs. Miller and the kids, but this was chucked after the first season. Along with Chano.

Yeah, that's right, though I think Mrs. Miller occasionally showed up after the first season, at least when she visited the 12th Precinct. It was intriguing how the show evolved into a format where it obeyed two of the three classical Aristotelian unities: unity of place (the whole series taking place entirely in one location, with any action elsewhere only described rather than shown) and unity of time (each episode covering a single one-night shift). Although it didn't follow the unity of action, because it always had 2 or 3 plots going at once.

 

[Ethros]

As for Boxey, the actor apparently encountetred a growth spurt that would have jarred with the show's compressed time-frame; also, the envisaged Tyrol-Boomer-Boxey family unit was voided bythe late decision to make Boomer a cylon. Apparently the consensus is that Boxey dies off-screen from cholera.

Seen as he's in a lot of the Season 1 deleted scenes, I always imagine he got horrifically gunned down by the Cylon boarding party in 2.02 Valley of Darkness

 

[Theodore Jay Miller]

1 shot stuns. 2 shots kill. 3 shots disintegrate!

Now that's a strong drink.

 

[Lonemagpie]

As for Boxey in Nu BSG - I was delighted that they forgot about him. It made it an automatic plus point in viewing the new version as a more adult take.

 

[Captaindemotion]

^ Hell, I've forgotten all about him myself ...

 

[marillion]

Can't believe no one has mentioned Kate Mulgrew's turn as Mrs. Columbo... the first season had her doing the amature sleuth thing while her husband, Frank Columbo the cop, was off solving his own mysteries... Falk didn't participate in the series, and in fact, he and the creators of the original Columbo series hated it... There was so much critical backlash that they dropped the whole Columbo connection and it eventually became known as "Kate Loves a Mystery" and was very short-lived.

Also.. and this actually goes beyond season one, but I was really disappointed when Andromeda dropped Alex Lifeson's amazing guitar theme from the show's open after a couple of seasons and replaced with a ho-hum orchestrated piece.

 

[Christopher]

Can't believe no one has mentioned Kate Mulgrew's turn as Mrs. Columbo... the first season had her doing the amature sleuth thing while her husband, Frank Columbo the cop, was off solving his own mysteries... Falk didn't participate in the series, and in fact, he and the creators of the original Columbo series hated it... There was so much critical backlash that they dropped the whole Columbo connection and it eventually became known as "Kate Loves a Mystery" and was very short-lived.

But that first "season" was only five episodes, and then it was pulled for retooling, with its final eight episodes airing the following fall. So it technically didn't even have one full season -- just a half-season order that had a big postponement in the middle.

Also.. and this actually goes beyond season one, but I was really disappointed when Andromeda dropped Alex Lifeson's amazing guitar theme from the show's open after a couple of seasons and replaced with a ho-hum orchestrated piece.

No, Lifeson's theme was dropped in favor of Matthew McCauley's after only one season. And I seem to be one of the few people who considers the change a marked improvement.

 

[Mark_Nguyen]

Some that haven't been mentioned yet:

Space: 1999

Between seasons they changed pretty much everything, dropping all but two of the secondary characters and one of the primaries, and turning it from a pseudo metaphysical space opera into more of an action-adventure show. The sets and outfits were completely revamped, and the two leads who remained stopped being all reflective and philosophical about their situation and got more into shootin' things. Some of these changes could be considered good (I'm rewatching the first season right now and some of the early episodes are INTERMINABLY BOOOOORING...) but others were pretty pointless. I *liked* the main mission set, dammit!

Earth: Final Conflict

This one steams me a lot, as I really liked the first season. The lead was a good actor, there was decent chemistry with the rest of the cast (especially his principal character foil in Sandoval), and the whole setup with conspiracies upon conspiracies was just fun to watch, as was the constant theme of humanity adapting to alien influence upon it. Second season: new (and very poorly acted) lead, conspiracies out the Doors (sic) to be replaced by straightforward actioner stuff, and the begining of the dreaded revolving Doors (sic) syndrome to sonsistently dumb the show down. People keep telling me it recovered in the fourth season to fall down a bottomless pit right afrterwards, so I never got back into it after the second season.

The Listener

In case anyone's watching this one, it's a prime example of stuff beign abandonned RIGHT NOW. After a semi-decent qualitied first season, the American sponsors fo the show backed off and the whole thing was retooled for a second season that begins this week. The main character, a telepath who generally sticks to being able to read people's minds, is advanced to "five years later" and instead of helping out people he runs into as a paramedic, he engages part time with a special crimes unit of the RCMP (we *have* these things here?!) and as such delves into the minds of deranged criminals. Fun? Maybe, but IMO the show I was watching was doing just fine...

Mark

 

[marillion]

Can't believe no one has mentioned Kate Mulgrew's turn as Mrs. Columbo... the first season had her doing the amature sleuth thing while her husband, Frank Columbo the cop, was off solving his own mysteries... Falk didn't participate in the series, and in fact, he and the creators of the original Columbo series hated it... There was so much critical backlash that they dropped the whole Columbo connection and it eventually became known as "Kate Loves a Mystery" and was very short-lived.

But that first "season" was only five episodes, and then it was pulled for retooling, with its final eight episodes airing the following fall. So it technically didn't even have one full season -- just a half-season order that had a big postponement in the middle.

Also.. and this actually goes beyond season one, but I was really disappointed when Andromeda dropped Alex Lifeson's amazing guitar theme from the show's open after a couple of seasons and replaced with a ho-hum orchestrated piece.

No, Lifeson's theme was dropped in favor of Matthew McCauley's after only one season. And I seem to be one of the few people who considers the change a marked improvement.

Bah! a pox on you! Lifeson's theme is amazing.
I thought it lasted beyond the first season, but I lost track of the show somewhere along the run....

 

[Mark_Nguyen]

^ The producers certainly did. Ba-ZING!

Mark

 

[Christopher]

^ The producers certainly did. Ba-ZING!

No, the producers didn't lose track, they lost their jobs and were replaced. Tribune had a habit of firing its series' original showrunners and bringing in inferior/cheaper replacements. Robert Hewitt Wolfe lasted a season and a half on Andromeda, which is perhaps a record; Steve Feke lasted one season on BeastMaster and Richard C. Okie lasted half a season on Earth: Final Conflict.

 

[Captaindemotion]

^ The producers certainly did. Ba-ZING!

No, the producers didn't lose track, they lost their jobs and were replaced.

I took it that he meant they preferred the later theme tune (hence their using it).

^I never felt it made much sense to take the concept of 24 beyond a single season, at least not with the same characters. Some ideas work great in a limited form, but get stretched too far if you try to sustain them indefinitely. (Not that I thought 24 worked great. I gave up on it after 2-3 episodes because Bauer was too violent for me. But I thought it was a clever idea in principle. As a one-season thing, that is. Having the same guy keep getting into equivalent "you have exactly 24 hours to save the world" situations year after year after year was just ridiculous.)

I think the '24 hours to save the world' (or US) thing just requires the same sort of willing suspension of disbelief the viewer needs to afford the Die Hard or James Bond series. Besides, given the nature of CTU, it's perhaps more credible than they find themselves in this situation than e.g. Bruce Willis' John McClane, perenially 'the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time.'

And it wasn't always '24 hours to save the world.' For example, in S2, Jack spent the first 12 hours or so trying to stop a nuke going off in LA, then the next 12 trying to stop the US going to war with the wrong country, which had been framed for the attack. S8's first 2/3 were about the attempt to assassinate President Hassan, the last 1/3 about Jack avenging someone. And the 24 hours usually changed from time-frame to time-frame, S1 was the only series set over the course of a single day.

But, all in all, if the relatively restrained Bauer of early S1 (where the most he did was, er, shoot his boss in the leg with a tranquilizer dart - I did say 'relatively restrained') was too much for you, then you were wise to avoid later seasons, given that in S2's opener, he murdered a paedophile in cold blood and then demanded a hacksaw to chop his head off, all so he could infiltrate a terrorist gang!

Same with Heroes. Its first season was great, but that's largely because it was designed to be a single-season story with a beginning, middle, and end. The idea was to start over with mostly new characters and situations in the second season. But the actors proved so popular that the network insisted on keeping them around, even though their stories were already over. And so the next three years were just going through the motions and repeating the first season's formulas. So that's kind of the opposite of this thread's topic -- the show suffered because of what wasn't dropped after the first season.

I never thought of it like that before, but that makes a lot of sense all right. Of course, they could have made great subsequent seasons - S2 could should have been an X2/ Superman 2/ The Dark Knight, compared with season one's pilot/ origin story - but the writing just wasn't there.

 

[Skellington]

But, all in all, if the relatively restrained Bauer of early S1 (where the most he did was, er, shoot his boss in the leg with a tranquilizer dart - I did say 'relatively restrained') was too much for you, then you were wise to avoid later seasons, given that in S2's opener, he murdered a paedophile in cold blood and then demanded a hacksaw to chop his head off, all so he could infiltrate a terrorist gang!

Hey, it was a great "Jack's back" moment after he had squandered minutes - MINUTES! - as a scruffy slacker.