Characterization Marches On / Live-Action TV

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• The supporting cast of 24 all had markedly different personalities from their portrayals in the second season and beyond:
  • Aaron Pierce starts out as an extremely by-the-book field agent, whose only real purpose is giving exposition between major scenes. Starting in Season 2, he becomes a staunchly loyal (and badass) agent who often disobeys orders to help characters like Palmer and Jack.
  • In Season 1, Kim Bauer is a rebellious teenager who (at the beginning of the season) doesn't trust her father, knows enough to understand when she's in a dangerous situation, and escapes from her captors on multiple occasions. Come Season 2, she's a Damsel in Distress who often has to be rescued by other characters and unknowingly gets involved in worse and worse situations.
  • Mandy the assassin is a cold, emotionless assassin in her appearances in Seasons 2 and 4, a far cry from her story in the first season, where she acts much more human, openly displaying emotion to several like-minded antagonists.
• 30 Rock:
  • In the first few episodes, Jack is a Pointy-Haired Boss before becoming Liz's Eccentric Mentor. Liz herself is also much more serious, with only some traces of goofiness, and she and Jack started off having a fairly antagonistic relationship.
  • In early episodes, Jenna is somewhat neurotic and flirty, but otherwise mostly normal. Later seasons have her as an over-the-top Attention Whore. When Jenna gets bumped from Late Night in favor of Tracy in an early episode, her response is to cry, saying that "I just feel like everything's always taken away from me." This would be pretty out of character for latter-seasons Jenna because (a) she wouldn't feel the need to justify her feelings as she would consider them to be justified by default, and (b) she would be more likely to respond to something like this by acting out rather than crying.
  • In the first season episode "Blind Date", it's revealed that Liz has won an Emmy. This is pretty unlikely based on later episodes. According to Tina Fey, it's a Daytime Emmy in some overly specific category.
  • The pilot episode contains a surprisingly somber (at least at first) scene where Tracy shows Liz the poor neighborhood where he grew up and reflects on his troubled childhood. A later episode establishes that Tracy remembers absolutely nothing about his youth, as he had blocked out all of his traumatic memories. He is even reduced to tears after being confronted with those painful memories for (supposedly) the first time in years. In general, however, Tracy has a Multiple-Choice Past throughout the show.
• Adam Ruins Everything: In the original short skits, Adam Conover was portrayed as a Jerkass who ruined things to stroke his own ego and because he liked it when other people were miserable. Once he got his own TV show, his whole character changed, so that now he's genuinely trying to help people, but unintentionally comes off as condescending and irritating due to his poor social skills.
• All About Me: In Series 1, Leo is seen to be deeply obsessed with numbers, to the point that it was even speculated that he was Autistic. This trait is not mentioned in Series 2 and 3, with Leo acting more akin to a typical young teenager.
• John Cage was introduced in Ally McBeal's second episode as the slightly odd founding partner of Cage, Fish, & Associates who frequents prostitutes for the purposes of sex without romance (and is set to go before a judge for his latest dalliance, represented by a disgusted McBeal). A year and a half later this is mentioned in front of the by-then fleshed out quirky, mercurial, and lovable Cage (now McBeal's best friend) and his stunned girlfriend; Cage's defense for this is that he hadn't "found his character yet".
• On Angel, Lilah Morgan doesn't develop into the uber-bitch role she's known for until Season 2. The few Season 1 episodes she's in have her personality remarkably different. Take "Five By Five" where she gets threatened by Faith. Season 2 Lilah certainly wouldn't have been intimidated.
• Babylon 5:
  • In the pilot movie and first few episodes, G'Kar was portrayed as an outright recurring villain, while Londo was the Plucky Comic Relief, and usually also the Unwitting Pawn of the Villain Of The Week. G'Kar was gradually made sympathetic enough that he could alternate between being a Manipulative Bastard and a Guile Hero, while Londo was eventually established as a Retired Badass and a practitioner of Obfuscating Stupidity. Of course, this had all been planned out ahead of time, so the characterization was more fluid and nuanced than in other examples.
  • The pilot movie also has a very out-of-character moment where Delenn does a full-on Psychic Strangle on G'Kar using some kind of magic jewellery, after he annoys her. While she's never exactly nice or harmless, the scene depicts her as bad-tempered and deliberately sadistic to a degree that she never approaches again.
• Barney & Friends: In the initial Barney & The Backyard Gang videos, Barney was more sluggish in his movements akin to a real dinosaur, in addition to having a deeper voice. Beginning with "Waiting for Santa," he went from a lumbering T. rex to a jolly and energetic playmate. His kind demeanor was the only consistent trait between the original Backyard Gang Barney and his portrayal in the TV series.
• Battlestar Galactica (2003): While Colonel Tigh's increased competence can be explained through story-related reasons, an early Season 1 episode has him going to Roslin (whom he's known for no more than a month) to make sure Adama isn't putting the fleet in jeopardy over one missing pilot. By Season 4, however, Tigh is known above all else for his borderline-absurd loyalty to his friends. Most people would agree it's worth it.
• When Bewitched character Serena first appears (in the episode "And Then There Were Three"), she just seems like a caring cousin of Samantha, who happens to look exactly as how she would as a brunette. After the show's Switch to Color, Serena acts more mischievous than Sam does.
• The Big Bang Theory
  • Sheldon started as a less assertive/more arrogant version of Leonard who was nervous around Penny and seemed to compete for her attention (at least regarding their white boards with math equations on them). The Tag at the end even had him comment with a great degree of social insight concerning Leonard's chances with Penny. A couple of episodes in and he had evolved into the asexual narcissist with No Social Skills whom we all love to hate.
  • Penny changed as well — the first episode establishes her as rather ditzy with low intelligence (she's a vegetarian who eats steak) and very randomly emotional as a contrast to the guys being science minded, but those elements faded as the show focused on her being a more normal person around the geeks. Penny's apparent change in personality can be attributed to being uncomfortable around the guys at first while trying to be nice and make a good impression nonetheless.
  • The creator himself said to just skip the first few episodes, it took them a while to figure out what they wanted to do with the characters. Specifically about Episode 5, where Sheldon's complete ignorance of social issues and Penny's sly knowledge about it took hold.
  • Amy began as a female Sheldon, stipulating in their first date (one she was only on because her mother forced her) that there was to be no physical contact (up to, and including, coitus). In later episodes she almost sexually preys on Sheldon. This is explained as her budding friendship with Penny opening her up to larger social experiences, which is an interesting counterpoint to both Penny and Leonard doing the same thing with Sheldon but at a MUCH slower rate. In Season 4, she also seems to have a thing for Penny. This is completely dropped in the following seasons.
  • Bernadette's early episodes had her primary characteristic being that she did not understand anyone else's jokes, later admitting that she sometimes laughs just to make Howard happy. This almost disappeared completely after her third episode and she gets the jokes just as well as anyone else, with her personality now more along the lines of adorably sweet but ready to snap if provoked.
  • Sheldon's mother's early appearances on the show don't match up with her characterization in Young Sheldon. In early episodes of the main show she's a fairly-stereotypical "politically-incorrect Texan" and The Fundamentalist, while in the prequel series she's a lot nicer, more accepting of Sheldon's eccentricities (in the main series, she questioned not having him checked for insanity to his face) and still heavily religious but not nearly as extreme about it.^note Granted, Young Sheldon is framed as a series of reminiscences from the adult Sheldon, who is very much the kind of Momma's Boy that would look at her with rose-tinted glasses.
• A double dose in Blackadder as the series progressed, where the first Blackadder is a violent dolt and his manservant Baldrick is somehow the Only Sane Man. By the time of Blackadder II, the eponymous Blackadder is now a genuinely crafty individual, while Baldrick's IQ has fallen to around that of a turnip. The standard of "clever Blackadder, dimwit Baldrick" persists for the rest of the series. Justified in that these aren't the same characters but descendants of the originals. In the original pilot however, the characters remained the same as they would be later on.
• In the first season of Boardwalk Empire, when trying to find an elusive criminal band of brothers, Richard Harrow suggests killing their innocent family members to flush them out. In the third season, the same Richard Harrow kills Manny Horovitz for killing Angela Darmondy When Nucky Thompson, the killer of Angela's husband Jimmy, finds out, he tentatively asks Richard why did he avenge Angela and not Jimmy. Richard says that while Jimmy was a soldier who fought in a war and simply lost, Angela was simply an innocent civilian.
• Bones:
  • Temperance Brennen starts off as sassy, sarcastic, and socially adept. It didn't take long for her to become the walking stereotype she is now, and flashbacks to earlier in the series completely ignore the way she behaved in the pilot.
  • In the pilot, Zack just seems to be a quirky intern, and shows little to no signs of having any major personality defects outside of using morbid nicknames for the deceased in order to distance himself from the harsh reality of his work. His personality is pretty well solidified by "A Boy in a Tree", however, which makes a point to highlight his social and sexual awkwardness.
  • In his first appearances, Sweets is a little creepy, and pulls some nasty tricks on the main cast—possibly because he was a Gormorgan red herring. Now, he's a trusted and dear friend of all the main characters.
  • Hodgins is also subject to this - the first season sets Hodgins up as the show's resident Jerkass and Millionaire Playboy with serious anger control issues whose paranoia was used mostly for comic relief. As the show progresses, it's quickly shown that he's actually a Jerk with a Heart of Gold with a bit of a Big Brother Worship towards later Squinterns, and who uses paranoia and anger as a way to cope with dissatisfaction in his life and who actively rebels against his privileged upbringing.
• In the later seasons of Boy Meets World, characters constantly reference how Cory and Topanga have been in love since preschool. This is odd to anyone who rewatches the first season in which Cory heavily antagonizes Topanga. This is retconned at one point when Cory claims he went through a phase of thinking "girls are icky". One episode, most notably is "Boy meets Girl" (the second to last of the season) where Amy thinks its odd that Cory is going on a date with Topanga since he often antagonizes her. At that thought she then thinks it actually makes perfect sense. The rest of the episode is a good starting point for the Cory/Topanga relationship, with Cory just maybe having feelings for Topanga. Other episodes that hint at something between them are "Model Family" and "Cory's Alternative Friends" (her very first appearance). These episodes support the notion that Cory was possibly just ending his girls are icky phase, possibly antagonizing Topanga because he liked her as Amy suspects as pointed out above.
  • Speaking of Topanga, middle school Topanga was a Granola Girl, New-Age Retro Hippie, and Cloud Cuckoo Lander. High school Topanga may as well be a new character.
  • Lampshaded when Cory begs Topanga to hearken back to her Cloud Cuckoo Lander habit of believing everything will always work out and be all right when his baby brother's life is in the balance. He eventually succeeds when she ends the episode drawing hearts on both their faces in lipstick and thanking him for reminding her it was okay to be idealistic.
• In Season 1 of The Brady Bunch, much of the emphasis is on the family's adjusting to their new blended status. Plot lines revolve around the kids' fears that their new stepparents might only love their biological children, or that their own parents might favor the new kids, and such conflicts as the boys not wanting to share their clubhouse with the girls, Jan seeming to be allergic to the boys' dog Tiger, and Alice feeling unneeded now that the boys have a mother. But by Season 2, these plot lines disappear, as everyone has adjusted... so well, in fact, that the family's blended nature is almost never mentioned again, and if not for the theme song, viewers would easily think the kids were all biological siblings.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • Angel, Buffy and Darla had remarkably different personalities in the first few episodes; Angel was mysterious and kind of chipper (especially his first appearance), Buffy was a perky cheerleader and Darla was whiny, cowardly, not particularly smart or capable, and seemingly not even all that important in the Master's hierarchy (Luke, for one, clearly outranked her). It wasn't until the episode "Angel" that they settled into the personalities they are better known for; Angel became brooding, Buffy was a kind of grim optimist and Darla had a distant, haunting persona (since she died in this episode, this is better seen when she returns from the dead in the show Angel).
  • Angel specifically shows very little of his alleged badassness in early Buffy episodes. Mostly he's knocked around by whatever Big Bad they're fighting to show how much stronger Buffy is than he. After his Face–Heel Turn he does actually become majorly badass, then is stuck somewhere in between badass and weak post-resurrection. He finally is shown as the Badass Anti-Hero he's meant to be when he gets his own show.
  • Spike undergoes the reverse of Angel: from a Manipulative Bastard badass villain to defanged Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain. He gradually gains his badass back, bit by bit, as he slowly transitions from Big Bad to comic relief to Anti-Hero. Though even then, largely remains much cuddlier than he originated.
  • Cordelia starts off Buffy as a classic Alpha Bitch who is ridiculously shallow and obnoxious, and even when helping out the heroes is mainly a comical character who Team Dad Giles himself finds exhausting. Season 3 shows more of her Hidden Depths and vulnerability that were hinted at Out of Mind, Out of Sight but she's still largely self-motivated even when crossing over to Angel. Flash foward to Angel Season 3 and Cordy is almost unrecognisable being a All-Loving Hero, Team Mom and someone who is willingly to give up a life of glamor and luxury to do the right thing. Her Back for the Dead episode in Angel Season 5, makes her out as a borderline Messianic Archetype.
  • Willow's infatuation over Xander and love for Oz in early seasons seems somewhat odd given that she's a lesbian. Several instances after her sexual awakening make it pretty clear that she is bisexual, but the word doesn't seem to exist in the Buffyverse.
  • Anya was also initially manipulative and infiltrated herself into Cordelia's social circle almost immediately. Later she developed a No Social Skills personality that left her unable to understand much of human interaction and claimed she had a Villains Never Lie attitude when she was a demon.
  • Wesley in Season 3 of Buffy is a textbox Obstructive Bureaucrat who was quite the Butt-Monkey and outright Hate Sink in some episodes like Consequences, he did mellow out some of the finale but still proved to be useless. When he first appeared in Angel Wesley was immdiately more likebale and showed a lot of Hidden Depths along with more sympatheitc traits, then by the last seasons of Angel (having gone through a Trauma Conga Line) Wes has become a Jack Bauer-esque Memetic Badass and Stoic Woobie.
  • Harmony was an obnoxious but not particularly stupid Smug Snake in her earlier appearances before turning into the airheaded Harmless Villain she is known for. Being turned into a blood sucking demon just might have something to do with that: Other vampires lose their soul. Harmony lost her brain. Ironically in Angel Harmony is nicer especially in Season 5 being genuinely friendly to the heroes when she isn't being selfish as a souless vampire, a sharp contrast to the Alpha Bitch who was crueller than Cordelia in Buffy.
  • Something like this happened to Buffy's dad once he stopped appearing. In the first couple of seasons, he seemed like a decent guy whenever he visited. Starting with a broken promise in "Hopeless", however, he morphed into a quintessential deadbeat dad who couldn't even show up for Joyce's funeral. It says something that his last two appearances are Buffy's memory of a Cosmic Retcon and the Cuckoo Nest episode.
  • Clem was kind of a jerk in his first appearance. On the other hand, it could just be that kittens are his preferred meal.
  • There may have been plans to make Kennedy more than a Jerk with a Heart of Gold Lipstick Lesbian with a dose of Character Shilling before the series ended, but the comics have her turn into the Slayer version of Rainbow Six and something of a spokeswoman for LGBT people, then a Reasonable Authority Figure, before becoming what Price might be like if Modern Warfare had vampires instead of terrorists.
  • Lily aka Anne is probably the most massive case of this in the entire Buffyverse. In Buffy Season 2 she first appears as some airheaded ingenue goth who sycophantically worshipped vampires. She wasn't much better in her next apperance in Season 3 being a hopeless and helpless girl whom lost her Living Emotional Crutch boyfriend and needed Buffy rescue her. Cue her next appearance in Angel and she's a sensible woman who runs a homeless shelter and proves to be The Anti-Nihilist in the final episode of Angel. She's likely had the biggest Character Development of anyone in Buffyverse and she isn't even a main character.
  Lily/Anne: I'm not great at taking care of myself
  Buffy: It gets easier.

  Gunn: What if I told you it doesn't help? What would you do if you found out that none of it matters? That it's all controlled by forces more powerful and uncaring than we can conceive and they will never let it get better down here? What would you do?
  Lily/Anne: I'd get this truck packed before the new stuff gets here. Wanna give me a hand?
• Charmed:
  • Phoebe's boss Elise was introduced as the boss from hell and the rest of the Season 4 episodes reflect this. However all her following appearances on the show have her more friendly with Phoebe and the rest of her co-workers. Part of this is possibly brought on by Jason Dean buying the paper mid-Season 5, meaning Elise is able to relax a little more with a Benevolent Boss in charge.
  • An example brought on by Executive Meddling. Paige began Season 5 as a lot more promiscuous — Rose McGowan eventually going to producers and saying "Paige isn't a ho!" — so this trait vanishes completely. Interestingly enough, Paige was not particularly promiscuous in Season 4 when she was introduced; in fact only being shown with two boyfriends in different episodes, one she had been dating for a couple of months, and the other a friend with benefits who was visiting for a few days. So this was more reverting back to the original characterization.
  • Paige's persona in Season 4 when she's introduced is actually in stark contrast to how she is for the rest of the series. She's very much a Naïve Newcomer who's a borderline Apologetic Attacker when she gets into demon battles, and has to be told off for not taking the boring parts of witch duties seriously. By Season 5, she's thrown herself into Charmed duties, is a full on Deadpan Snarker and practically a Blood Knight when taking on demons. It could be justified by her confidence growing, but is more likely down to the scripts being written for Rose McGowan's strengths after a whole season of working with her and getting to know her, as what happened with the original three leads (see below).
  • Paige and Henry are at each other's throats in the latter's introduction episodes. The Slap-Slap-Kiss element of their relationship gets dropped pretty soon. Additionally Henry seemed rather cynical in his debut but this trait didn't show up in other episodes, with much of his other appearances emphasising what a Nice Guy he is.
  • Overall the three sisters take a while to properly sink into their more familiar personas in Season 1. Prue is considerably more uptight and bitchy, not to mention rather humourless. Shannen Doherty became a bit more quippy by the time Season 2 came around (although some episodes such as "Wicca Envy" and "The Wendigo" would show her having a bit of a playful side, suggesting that this just came out through confidence at becoming a witch). Piper was later famous for her Deadpan Snarker tendencies, which Holly Marie Combs didn't tap into straight away. Phoebe was more of The Heart and delivered her lines very dramatically. Alyssa Milano's gift for comic timing later took centre stage and Phoebe became far more of a fun Genki Girl.
  • Phoebe later becomes known as the show's Serial Romeo and even her sisters joke that she's "the slutty one". In the first two seasons however, it's actually Piper who has the most love interests. Phoebe doesn't get an actual love interest until the third season (though she was meant to get one in Season 2, but producers axed the character).
  • In Dan Gordon's first episode, Phoebe Squees "I saw him first!" to her sisters, gives him advice about dealing with his niece Jenny, and has a heart-to-heart with the girl as well. This seems to point to Dan being originally intended as a love interest for Phoebe, but by the episode "The Devil's Music", they begin setting him up as being attracted to Piper instead.
  • By Season 3, Prue is touted as the one most gung ho about fighting demons and saving innocents, to the point that Phoebe and Piper are constantly lecturing her on taking it easy and not being so reckless. In the first few episodes however, it's actually Phoebe who is the most concerned about helping innocents, and usually has to convince the other two to prioritise that over their jobs and personal lives. It could be justified by the fact that Prue was initially worried about exposure when their powers were still new to them, as well as being in the corporate world like Buckland's; by the time of Season 3, she's a freelancer who can make her own schedule, as well as more confident after three years as a witch.
• Community:
  • The first paintball episode shows Chang as a badass gunslinger in the John Woo mode. By the time the second paintball war rolls around, he's suddenly a pathetic coward who never even picks up a gun. Chang as a whole changed from a Jerkass Sadist Teacher in the first season to a Butt-Monkey in the second season. After getting fired from his teaching job at the end of the first season, he enrolled in the school as a student and was suddenly the biggest loser in the world, and one who gradually became more out-and-out psychotic, at that.
  • As with most Pilots, watching the pilot after watching the rest of the series allows for some striking contrasts — however, possibly the character who's marched on most when compared to her pilot / Season 1 self is Britta Perry. In the early episodes, she's often little more than the Straight Man Love Interest for Jeff Winger, with little indication of the wackier and more goofily neurotic character she would later become. This may be a result of Gillian Jacobs' personality affecting the character.
    Jeff: You seemed smarter than me when I met you.
    Britta: Thank you!
  • Particularly odd is the first season episode "The Politics of Human Sexuality", which featured Annie being very squeamish about sex and ended with her being unable to overcome being sexually repressed. In later episodes, she's a Covert Pervert and her prudishness is clearly an act.
  • In the pilot episode, Annie was much meaner and uptight, to the point that on the commentary track, Dan Harmon points out that she could be considered the villain of the episode (Jeff was also quite the Villain Protagonist in the pilot, since this was before his Character Development).
  • Troy started out as a mix between the Dumb Jock and Jerk Jock obsessed with Football. He quickly became one of the nerdiest and most eccentric characters in the cast, after forming a Heterosexual Life-Partner relationship with Abed.
  • Pierce in the first few episodes had a slight Casanova Wanna Be gig going on dressing in a slight suavely style. Strangely he was also less of a grump and strangest of all, he relatively mildly expressed very few Innocent Bigot traits than he'd be known for later on.
• Criminal Minds features this quite a bit with its revolving door of writers:
  • In the later seasons, Dr. Spencer Reid develops what Garcia calls an "anti-technology quirk," in spite of scenes in the earlier seasons where he analyzed subjects' computers in the field. This turns into Fridge Horror when you realize that the last time he displays a tendency for technology is in a two-part episode where he's kidnapped by an UnSub who uses computers to stalk victims and record his kills.
    • The book "Empty Planet"—about how automated systems could turn into robots and destroy the world—didn't help either.
  • In "Won't Get Fooled Again", Derek Morgan is established as the team's bomb specialist, even educating Garcia on the composition of the UnSub's bomb. However, later on in the series, Morgan is never again called upon to look at a bomb, even when situations would require a bomb expert. The worst examples are "The Fisher King Part 1" (when the team all received strange packages), "Empty Planet" (which featured a "personal cause" bomber similar to "Won't Get Fooled Again"), and "Run", where Prentiss is the one defusing the bomb.
• On CSI, Gil Grissom is less of an introvert and stoic in Season 1. He's even prone to bouts of anger, such as when Ecklie has a crime scene cleared before Grissom had a chance to re-visit it (prompting Grissom to slap a glass coffee pot out of Ecklie's hands). He shields himself more as the show goes on, for good in Season 3 when he starts to battle his hearing problem.
  • In the first few episodes of the first season, Captain Brass is openly antagonistic with the CSIs and acts as a cynical bureaucratic foil to the more idealistic forensic scientists (specifically Grissom). This completely changed with the ninth episode "Unfriendly Skies" which featured Brass helping the CSIs solve a case with no mention of their previously unfriendly relationship, and by the end of the season the character had been Retconned into the most important ally that the CSIs had in the police department.
• Dad's Army
  • Frazer's main occupation in the series is as an undertaker; However, In the pilot episode, when Frazer first introduces himself, he explains that he runs a Philatelist Shop (Stamp Collecting).
  • In a Season 2 Episode; "Under Fire", Godfrey casually mentions he's not a Conscientious Objector. Just a dozen Episodes later, in the Season 3 Episode; "Branded", Godfrey reveals that he is indeed one.
• Deadwood: Richardson's first appearance has him squeeze Silas for a bribe before giving him some basic information. Later appearances establish Richardson as an idiot Manchild without the cunning or inclination for such schemes.
• Doctor Who:
  • In the first season, the First Doctor is an acerbic, prickly personality who gradually grows into a lovable eccentric over the later seasons. In a frequently-cited example, in the first Doctor Who story, "An Unearthly Child", the Doctor was about to "mercy kill" a caveman with a rock so that he couldn't slow the rest of the party down. His companion Ian Chesterton stops him, the Doctor mutters an excuse and they go on. In the next story, "The Daleks", in another commonly mentioned example, he deliberately sabotages the TARDIS so that they can stay on Skaro and explore. By Season 1's "The Reign of Terror", he starts charging around meddling with things and getting in way over his head with hilarious consequences, and by Season 2 he declares himself a defender of Earth while talking down a Dalek, a big difference from his Heroic Neutral characterisation before. From that episode onwards he's an enthusiastic, benevolent, sharp-tongued Creepy Good eccentric with a distinctively sneaky and ruthless streak and a real love of getting himself into trouble, then back out of it - all of which remains constant for him and for all other Doctors.
    • This is lampshaded in "The Chase", in the episode "The Death of Doctor Who" - Barbara correctly identifies the Doctor's evil Dalek robot duplicate in a Spot the Impostor situation because the robot tells Ian to bash the double over the head with a rock, making Barbara exclaim that the Doctor would never do that (even though he tried to in "An Unearthly Child"). It can be speculated that the 'death' in the title is actually the 'death' of the Doctor's old characterisation.
  • The Second Doctor was the first time they regenerated the character and no-one quite knew what effect this could, or should, have on the Doctor's personality - only that he would have to be different to the First Doctor. He started out being written as an interstellar 19th-century ship captain, then as a 'Mr Hyde' version of the First Doctor who took on distorted, dark versions of his quirks, before settling down into the cuddly but dangerous Hobo character he'd be for the rest of his run. Fortunately, this worked really well - this initial confusion over his personality was explained eventually as the result of the shock of undergoing an obviously physically traumatic process, and became a stock feature of regeneration ever after. Later Doctors, even ones whose personalities have already been planned out in full, traditionally kick off with a story in which they are completely loopy (ranging from confusion to yelling non-sequiturs to thinking they're their previous incarnations to trying to murder their companions) before settling into their main personality.
  • This was cleverly used in the Fourth Doctor's first story, "Robot" - thanks to production scheduling, Jon Pertwee's producer Barry Letts was forced to produce it instead of the producer lined up for the new Doctor, Philip Hinchcliffe. Having the difficult task of establishing the new Doctor as different from Pertwee while having no idea what Hinchcliffe planned on doing with the character, Terrance Dicks wrote the Doctor as a broad clownish comedy character (with some inspiration from Harpo Marx) but establishes that he's in a loopy, unsettled post-regenerative state for almost the entire story, only indicated as settling down into his real personality at the very end of the episode where the Doctor injures his hand on a brick now that his overdriven physical processes have worn off. While a lot of the Fourth Doctor's quirks are established in this episode (such as the natural funniness, the childishness, the bottomless pockets, his fondness for jelly babies and his resentment of all authority) Hinchcliffe took the character into a more Gothic Horror influenced direction, giving the Doctor a brooding and Byronic side to add an edge to his funniness, and playing his capriciousness and unpredictability For Drama at times as well as for cheap laughs. Even when he became a comedy character again later, he became a playful wit rather than a clown.
  • The Seventh Doctor was depicted in the twenty-fourth season as a somewhat clownish and ditzy Malaproper who was conceived deliberately as an antidote to the controversially abrasive and personally violent Sixth Doctor. During the hiatus between Seasons 24 and 25, both the writers and Sylvester McCoy decided that this portrayal was too lightweight and limited, and the very first story of the next season introduced the characterisation for which Seven is best-remembered, as a world-weary, calculating, and ruthlessly manipulative Chessmaster who only occasionally reverted to his original characterisation as obvious Obfuscating Stupidity.
  • The Second Doctor started out with several gimmicks, such as his fondness for ridiculous hats, playing the recorder, and his love of disguises. As his character became more fleshed out these were gradually abandoned. His hat obsession is gone for good after "The Underwater Menace", his disguises are dropped in favour of Master Actor bluffing after "The Enemy of the World" and his recorder is last seen being (inexplicably) used as a telescope in "The War Games", with it last being played in "The Web of Fear". Season 6 gives him "Oh my word" and "oh my giddy aunt" as Catchphrases and alters his sense of humour to be more of a Deadpan Snarker rather than a clown.
  • Some companions suffer from this as a result of writing artifacts:
    • Steven was introduced in his first full story "The Time Meddler" as a Loveable Rogue and extremely hot-tempered character who (being a space pilot) was already familiar with the way most things worked, condescendingly calling the Doctor 'Doc' and knowing lots about aliens and time travel science. In "Galaxy 4" he suddenly develops a much less hot-headed way of voicing disagreements, due to the serial being written for Barbara, and his lines just being hers with some tweaks. In his third story he takes a middle route between these two characterisations - the more sombre and respectful air of "Galaxy 4" while getting his confrontational personality from "The Time Meddler" back, which remains his default personality from then on.
    • Jamie is a fairly severe example, as he was not originally intended to be a companion and was added on after they'd already filmed a scene of the crew saying goodbye to him, with the next few scripts ("The Underwater Menace", "The Moonbase" and "The Macra Terror") written initially without his character. As a result, he's playing virtually a completely different and unexpectedly minor character in "The Highlanders", and in "The Underwater Menace", while he's a fairly active player in events, his dialogue and actions are mostly pilfered from Ben, Polly and some of the Ragtag Bunch of Misfits characters in the episode and rewritten in Scottish dialect, leading to a lot of out of character behaviour (notably, slapping Polly). He gets a little scene penned specifically for him in "The Moonbase" that expands upon his backstory, but he's playing a damsel role where he's sweet and vulnerable and gets menaced by the monster. In "The Macra Terror" he again gets a little scene capitalising on his Scottishness (when he dances the Highland Fling for the cheerleaders) but spends most of the script as a substitute Polly. He doesn't settle down into his main personality until "The Faceless Ones", which gives him a lot of things to do, some solid character development and even a Girl of the Week.
  • The Daleks in their identically-named debut serial are technocratic scientists who keep the Doctor and his companions prisoner, feed them, paralyse Ian temporarily at one point and need radiation to survive. Had they acted like the Ax-Crazy Omnicidal Maniacs they would later be well-known as, the series would've only lasted five episodes and thirty seconds. The Daleks are also far more talkative than normal. Meanwhile their space Nazi tendencies are much less pronounced; killing the Thals with a nuclear bomb is more a beneficent side effect motivated by an old score with the real goal revolving around flooding the planet with radiation that they need to survive.^note However, this is because these Daleks are Davros's early prototypes who were left behind while the other Daleks went off into space.
• Ellen:
  • A friend named Audrey has the job of annoying the title character all the way through...except that in her early appearances, she does this by being extremely pessimistic, but at some point she flips and is depicted as being obnoxiously perky for the majority of the series.
  • And then there's the episode (probably back when it was called These Friends Of Mine) where Ellen is ecstatic after finally making love with her boyfriend.
• Emmerdale's Ashley Thomas was, for the most part, a fairly likeable and well-intentioned country vicar, albeit with a few foibles, until he suddenly turned into a father-beater.
• Early in the fourth season of Farscape, the episode "A Prefect Murder" gives one of the season's new characters, Sikozu, a Boy of the Week relationship with the male juvenile lead guest character, and has her seriously consider staying on his planet with him. This looks definitely OOC compared to her colder and more pragmatic nature when her characterisation stabilises, and is even more incompatible with the revelations about her secret origin and motivation towards the end of the season.
• When Leonard Snart (AKA Captain Cold) is first introduced in The Flash (2014), he is a cold-blooded, calculating Bad Boss, who shoots his own men for attempting to back out of a job. He also kills a person just to test Barry's reaction time and nearly kills a train full of people as a distraction. We see him develop over being one of Barry's recurring foes, at first restrained from killing by his deal with Barry, and then his more honorable side showing itself one encounter at a time. By the time he's a regular on Legends of Tomorrow, Snart has become an Anti-Hero, who only kills bad guys and is a firm believer in True Companions, claiming that he would never abandon his crew.
  • Killer Frost was introduced in season 3 as Caitlin's Superpowered Evil Side, essentially comprised of all the negative emotions that Caitlin normally keeps bottled up. She had a That Man Is Dead attitude about Caitlin, but Team Flash's "I Know You're in There Somewhere" Fight clearly had an impact on her, and the season ended with the implication of a Split-Personality Merge. Season 4 onward established while Frost had a definite Heel–Face Turn, she and Caitlin are treated as far more independent personalities, almost to the point of Sharing a Body, with Frost now being overly protective of Caitlin.
• In Frasier, the characters of Frasier and Roz hit the ground running (with Kelsey Grammer in particular having had an unprecedented nine years of character prep), but Niles, Martin and Daphne change markedly over the course of the first season. Indeed, it isn't until arguably the episode "A Mid-Winter Night's Dream", towards the end of the first season, that Niles finally begins to acquire some depth.
  • For example, Niles was originally . . .well, there's a reason Replacement Flat Character used to be called The Niles: he was a Flanderized copy of the uptight, prissy, snobbish Frasier of Cheers, which even gets lampshaded by the Cheers Characters upon meeting Niles. By Season 2, it was established that while he was more rigid and neurotic than Frasier, he was less arrogant and insensitive and acquired completely independent personality traits such as overeager cheer and insecure Woobieness, among other sharp differences between his and Frasier's personalities. Also, Daphne was far more innocent and more of a Cloud Cuckoo Lander in the first season, as well as more stereotypically English, whereas she became more hot-tempered, snarky, and down to earth in later seasons' and Martin, who started out as something of a bitter, grumpy old has-been transmuted into a cheerful old slob who never let anything bother him. Most impressively, all these changes made the characters more nebulous rather than less, a rarity in sitcoms.
• The first season of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air had Carlton Banks as a pompous Smug Snake rival to Will. Starting in Season 2, after being a Butt-Monkey and having emotional breakdowns, he became the lovable nerdy goofball we all know today. Likewise, in the first season, Hillary is portrayed as a shallow, spoiled, socialite and environmental activist. Since season two she became just shallow and spoiled.
• Friends.
  • In the first episode Joey has an average intelligence, and in later episodes he is presented as Book Dumb. It isn't until the next season that he becomes through Flanderization the absolute idiot he is known as. This came to be a real problem when they attempted to spin him off into his own show.
  • Phoebe started off as a well-meaning, Cloud Cuckoolander character, complete with cleansing auras. By the later seasons she had become a lot harsher and more selfish especially to Ross and Chandler. Her high sex drive also wasn't really present in the first couple of seasons.
  • Phoebe's half-brother Frank Jr. was a lot more of an unlikable Lazy Bum in his early appearances, and Phoebe's first attempt to bond with him ended with them being largely incompatible. Then Phoebe's actress got pregnant and the writers needed a way to explain it, so they brought Frank back and had Phoebe be the surrogate for he and his wife's babies. As a result, he was made a lot more sympathetic.
  • A cross-series example. Ursula Buffay first appeared on Mad About You as a more Innocently Insensitive waitress who didn't pay attention a lot of the time. When she appeared on Friends she was instead Phoebe's Evil Twin. Lisa Kudrow recalls being surprised when she got the script for the crossover - seeing how mean Ursula was being written.
  • Monica and Ross's parents seem to be mostly indifferent to Chandler in early seasons. However, when Monica and Chandler have been dating for a year, Monica reveals that she hasn't told her parents because they dislike Chandler. The reason for this is that in college Ross smoked pot in his room and framed Chandler, and his parents never found out the truth. Eventually Ross confesses that he, not Chandler, was the one who smoked pot, and also tells them about Chandler and Monica's relationship.
• Full House
  • In a Season 1 episode, the guys' mothers all descend on to the house to make sure they're running the house right, and thus the boys have to clean every nook and cranny in that house. Should be no problem for Danny Tanner, a man so obsessively clean he cleans his cleaning products, but in this episode he's not very happy at all about having to scrub up the place.
  • Jesse also suffered from a milder form of this. In early episodes, once or twice, he was shown enjoying sports on TV or playing something simple with the others (one episode had him betting on a basketball game with Joey). This is the same Jesse who would later have an episode dedicated to his inability to play basketball. Also, he wasn't always Greek and they changed his last name at John Stamos's request to better reflect the actor's own Greek heritage.
• Game of Thrones:
  • In the first season, Osha recommends returning North to give Bran, a relative of Night's Watch First Ranger Benjen, to Mance Rayder. By Season 3, she's dead set against ever going back beyond the Wall. Similarly, by the third season she's become such a Parental Substitute towards Bran and Rickon, she'd probably brutally murder her past self for even suggesting such a thing!
  • In the early seasons, Tyrion was portrayed as a brutally cynical Jerk with a Heart of Gold with a prodigious degree of cunning and a ruthless edge; a depiction that was closer to his book counterpart. The later seasons have changed his overall presentation. While still a Deadpan Snarker, Tyrion is now much more heroic, often going out of his way to be a Nice Guy to everyone he meets. Furthermore his supposed brilliance is now more of an Informed Attribute. Lately his biggest contributions have come from the emotional support he provides for others rather than any plans he's drawn up.
  • In the Night King's very scene, he can be seen smiling as he turns Craster's last son into a white walker. In all subsequent appearances, he is a Perpetual Frowner who never shows emotion, even when things are going very well for him.
  • In Loras Tyrell's first appearance in Season 1, Finn Jones portrays him as a lot more effeminate and stereotypically gay. He quickly dropped this and Loras became more of a Straight Gay — ironically as the writing itself Flanderized being 'the gay character' into his defining attribute.
  • Cersei in Season 1 is able to hold polite conversations with Ned, Catelyn and Sansa — with only hints of Sugary Malice. Her bitchier moments come out when she's directly being threatened or her children are. Somewhere around Season 3 she becomes more shamelessly evil and it's a massive character trait how bad she is at diplomacy. A justification could be made for her Season 3 onward self to be her true persona that she just got sick of repressing.
  • Talisa Maegyr in her first episode is much more outspoken — chewing out the king for starting a war. In her second appearance, she's much softer (she addresses Robb as "your grace") and develops a playful side. Take a scene near the end of the season — Robb yells at her in a fit of anger and she says he doesn't need to apologise. It's quite different from her outspoken persona in her debut episode.
  • Ellaria Sand is closer to her book characterization as a Nice Girl in Season 4. In Season 5, they decided to give her Adaptational Villainy to make her a War Hawk who willingly poisons an innocent girl as revenge for Oberyn's death.
• In the first few episodes of Gilmore Girls, Sookie is an ungodly klutz who lit her expensive stove on fire and nearly chops her own fingers off. By the mid-first season, this is gone.
  • Shades of this are seen throughout the first few seasons, but its not as exemplified like the first few episodes.
  • Luke in the pilot and a bit of the first season was large health nut (*serves fries* "These will kill you"; also begging Lorelei to not drink coffee), but this was more or less dropped by the end of that season in favor of things like fighting with Taylor and actually running a diner where he serves the kind of food that will "kill you".
    • Of course, his "health nut" attributes could be attributed to the fact that he's always been really protective of the girls.
• In her first few appearances in Glee Brittany's facial expressions give the impression that she's just as devious as her cheerleading cohorts. It isn't until later episode that she ends up being The Ditz and the resident Cloud Cuckoo Lander.
• Gossip Girl:
  • in the pilot episode, Chuck was a psychotic who tries to rape first Serena and then Jenny within a day of each other. While his character in Gossip Girl generally gets positive character development throughout the series, there's a marked difference just from his third episode and his first, going from an almost date rapist to a normal Manipulative Bastard. Word of God gives the reason for this change is that Chuck was originally meant to be a villain, so in the pilot he is, but because of his chemistry with Leighton Meester (Blair) his character was retooled.
  • Chuck's uncle Jack Bass starts out the series as a genuinely evil Corrupt Corporate Executive who attempts to, among other things, rape Lily and is (ironically) stopped by Chuck. Later on in the series, he becomes a much more amiable guy who is more Affably Evil or even just a Manipulative Bastard, since he stops doing evil and even teams up with Chuck against his dad during the tail end of the show. Like Chuck, this change isn't fueled by character development, it just happens. He apologizes to Lily for his actions, saying he was on cocaine at the time, is Blair's only call when she and Chuck hide from police after Bart's death and is one of just a few characters who witnesses Blair and Chuck's emergency wedding. He's even there at Dan and Serena's wedding, where it is revealed he has gotten together with Alpha Bitch Georgina Sparks.
• Mork from Ork in his first appearance on Happy Days was a far cry from the cute and cuddly innocent pacifist he became in the spinoff. His mission was to collect Richie as a specimen, and he would freeze people at the slightest provocation, and his final trick to defeat The Fonz in the "hollytacker" would have been to put his two fingers together and make Arnold's Diner collapse (he mentions he has even killed a few people doing this before!). He was, for lack of a better term, a complete and utter dick. And for the spinoff to work, they had to change that.
  • Changing the fact that in the Happy Days episode, the whole Mork thing turned out to be All Just a Dream.
    • A final scene was added later for syndication where Mork reports to Orson about moving from the 1950s to the late 70s, the time setting of his new show.
• Xena as she debuted in her original trilogy of episodes in Hercules: The Legendary Journeys went through different stages of her character that didn't really resemble her when she got her own show. In her first appearance she was The Vamp using sex to gain her soldiers loyalty and even sending them to their death if it suited her plans. By her second appearance all aspects of The Vamp were removed, no hint was made that she was sleeping with her soldiers, and she had a code of honor that seemed contradictory with the character we first met. In her final episode before getting her own series she was more or less just Hercules Distaff Counterpart. The Xena of her own show most resembles the second interpretation.
• Homicide: Life on the Street:
  • The first few episodes characterized Howard as being rather abrasive and a superstitious Agent Mulder. She later was portrayed as one of the most rational and amicable detectives.
  • The first two seasons portrayed Scheiner as The Bore and a Flat Character. From the third season onward, he was depicted as a rather eccentric Grumpy Old Man.
• How I Met Your Mother:
  • The characters' general personalities take a few episodes to really gel. Robin isn't nearly as quirky, brash, or hardnosed as she would become near the end of the season, Lily is a lot more gentle, Willow-y, and socially-conscious than she's known for, Marshall is kind of shy and quiet rather than being energetic and extroverted, and Barney's more of a sitcom-typical suave womanizer rather than the very specific form of over-the-top hedonism-overdosed character he developed into. Only Ted really hits the ground running right from the pilot.
  • In an early episode, Marshall tries to fight a guy who he thinks hit on Lily, and when he finds out he's gay, he's incredibly relieved, saying "I've never been in a fight before." Yet, by the fourth season, we found out that he and his brothers used to fight quite brutally and has an Offscreen Moment of Awesome by beating violence-crazy barman Doug.
  • A Season 9 episode has Robin saying that she doesn't have any female friends because she was raised as a boy and that she sucks at making them because she finds them annoying. She's never showed this much animosity toward females in the past and even has had female companions outside the group in previous seasons.
  • Judy, Marshall's mother, behaves normally toward Lily in her first appearance, but becomes the mother-in-law from hell eventually. While never stated in-universe, it could be due to Lily breaking off the engagement at one point.
  • Ted’s girlfriend Jeanette is a downplayed example. In the episode where she is introduced she acts like a normal person, but is then slowly revealed to be a creepy Stalker with a Crush who stalked him for over a year before they met. By the next episode she is textbook Axe-Crazy; she has constant violent outbursts, Cloud Cuckoo Lander-tendencies and absolutely no sense of self-awareness. While we didn’t see much of their relationship before her true colours were revealed, Ted was still able to date her for the entirety of her first episode (which takes place over several days) without noticing anything wrong with her.
  • In "Okay, Awesome" Barney goes to the nightclub just wearing a nice shirt, which looks quite odd for the guy who would later be portrayed as obsessed with wearing suits at all times.
• It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia: Over the course of the show's run, all of the main characters have undergone a large amount of Flanderization, gradually molding them into different personalities over time.
  • Mac is perfectly straight in the first few seasons of the show. He's merely less successful with ladies than Dennis. Later episodes start to increasingly play up the homoeroticism of his obsession with buff action stars and imply that he's an Armoured Closet Gay, until the gang starts openly discussing it and Mac eventually admits it.
  • Dee was originally written as a Only Sane Woman in the first season. However, the actress Kaitlin Olson campaigned against being stuck playing the Straight Man and being limited to saying "You guys..." all the time. After a few episodes, she became just as dysfunctional and depraved as the rest of the cast.
  • Dennis was always vain, but his earlier portrayal was that of a preppy, Jerkass casanova and a far cry from the psychotic sexual predator he is today.
  • Charlie is a more subtle example. While always the most eccentric of the gang, his odd habits were much less pronounced in the early episodes, making him look more like an awkward loser than an illiterate lunatic. The later seasons have him fully embracing his Cloud Cuckoolander tendencies.
  • Frank's degradation was written into the overarching plot. He starts off as a fairly normal but shady businessman who decides to join the gang's antics, but still largely acts as their authority figure. As seasons go by, Frank gets more and more deranged and physically unkempt as his lifestyle takes its tole on him.
• Just the Ten of Us:
  • Cindy is the ditziest of the older girls, but in the Growing Pains two-parter where she debuted, she seemed witty and down-to-earth.
  • Connie is a budding Teen Genius and fairly perky Little Miss Snarker, while she's more of an Emo Teen in her Growing Pains appearance.
• Believe it or not, in the early episodes of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, it was Olivia Benson who was the fly-off-the-handle-violent-templer hothead partner and Elliot Stabler who was the stable, analytical, don't-let-it-get-to-you partner. In the first five episodes alone, Benson browbeats the victim's wife to the point of tears, lets the perp of the same victim get away with murder because she sympathised with her, kicks a person of interest (not even a suspect) in the family jewels just for being a creep, and repeatedly gets berated for not following procedure. Stabler meanwhile, is so levelheaded that when he told a shrink that he imagines killing perps, it was a genuinely shocking moment. A Season 3 episode even has him derisively refer to a fellow detective as Wyatt Earp, because said detective would do things like beat up suspects, rail road innocent men into making a false confession, and aggressively & illegally pursue leads, traits that would become fixtures.
  • Dr. George Huang's first appearance is vaguely sinister, with his perv-stache and line delivery suggesting his interest in the criminal mind is a little creepy. Less than a season later, he got a full makeover, wears dapper suits, and is a sensible, trustworthy ally whom both Benson and Cabot have gone to for personal advice.
  • Sonny Carisi arrives at Manhattan SVU after several extremely short stints at SVU in the other boroughs. It's heavily implied he's been shuffled around because he's generally abrasive, unsympathetic to the plight of victims and ignorant of issues that SVU typically addresses. He's set up as a stereotypical working-class Brooklyn Rage kind of guy, with an accent to match. This is largely absent from his later characterization, in which he's much softer, much more in tune with his emotions, deeply devoted to his family, and has a strong moral code. His first episode has him playing a Guile Hero in interrogation and lying to a witness that he has pull with immigration—a complete 180 from later seasons, which has him as pretty much the only main character not to engage in misconduct.
• In the London's Burning TV film Sicknote is a malingerer, faking illness to do as little work as possible. During the series it is established that although he is a hypochondriac, worrying and complaining about imaginary illnesses, Sicknote is nevertheless a dedicated member of the team.
• Dr. Zachary Smith of Lost in Space was originally going to just be the villain for the first few episodes and then get killed off. He was written as an evil, murderous man who would even kill children to get what he wanted. But the way Jonathan Harris portrayed him was so entertaining that he was spared and became part of the main cast as the Jerkass Large Ham Token Evil Teammate everyone knows and loves.
• MacGyver (1985) used a gun in the pilot episode of his series. Another episode in the first season ("Countdown") says he served in Vietnam, which seems incredibly unlikely given the rest of the series. They acknowledge that in a way. When they pair Mac up with the Phoenix Foundation in the second season, they also did an episode rewriting his meeting with Pete. In the first season, they're depicted as having met for the first time ever in a combat situation where upon they exchanged info and Pete recruited Mac to join his government agency. In the second season, they meet for the first time ever in a US City. While running a cab for his buddy, Mac ferries an enemy agent. He notices them being followed, and accidentally foils Pete's sting. The creators state that this is because they wanted to quietly retcon his military service.
• Margo from The Magicians initially had no characterization beyond being Eliot's bitchy sidekick; she's so irrelevant to the plot in the first season that she is absent in three consecutive episodes. Later seasons show her growing in prominence and developing her own character traits, namely her feminism and her ruthless dedication as ruler of Fillory. These led to her becoming a Breakout Character, and the Margo-centric episode "All That Shiny Armor" in Season 4 is considered by many a high point in the series.
• On an early episode of Married... with Children, Al is shown having too much sex-drive for Peggy. Likewise, Peg was shown doing (albeit a crappy job at) housework, Kelly was of average intelligence (just not giving a crap about schoolwork), and Marcy was more of a stereotypical housewife.
• M*A*S*H:
  • Radar somehow went from a worldly prankster to a naïve farmboy embodying lily-white innocence, all while his actor approached middle age. In some early episodes, he can be seen drinking or smoking, but later episodes painted him as someone who wouldn't drink anything stronger than Grape Nehi and choked if he tried to smoke. He also seems to have regained his virginity at some point.
  • Margaret Houlihan went from hypocritically strict Battleaxe Nurse to feminist heroine. It's pushed aside with some Character Development, but the show still tried to Retcon her into being a decent person all along and that everyone just didn't understand her enough. This was a prime example of Writer on Board, as it reflected the makeup of the show's writing staff at the time of the portrayals. Originally, when the show began, the writers were all male, and were mainly interested in staying as true to the original book and film as possible. However, once Linda Bloodworth-Thomason was hired as the show's first female writer, she immediately began downplaying or even eliminating almost every single negative attribute of Margaret's. It's not really surprising that Ms. Bloodworth-Thomason would do this, given the fact that she later became famous on her own account as creator and executive producer of one of the most ultra-feminist programs on American television, Designing Women.
• Merlin:
  • Uther has always hated magic, but in the first few episodes he would react to it by steadfastly denying its presence; these days he takes the slightest hint of its presence and immediately becomes paranoid (even when there's a rational explanation). Also, in Season 1, Uther wraps his hands around Morgana's neck and makes it very clear that the only reason she's still alive is because of the promise he made to her father. Then, suddenly, in Seasons 2 and 3, he seems to love Morgana more than his own son. Then it turns out that he is Morgana's father.
  • Ensemble Dark Horse Sir Leon had a few appearances in the second season before becoming something of a series regular in Season 3; one of his first appearances involves him violently tearing apart Gaius's study in the search for evidence of magic. The sight of him smashing bottles and ripping down tapestries is completely at odds with the gentler character of later episodes.
  • Arthur and Morgana spent Season 1 as Flirty Step Siblings. This trait had vanished completely by Season 2 to make room for the Arthur/Gwen pairing. Just as well, since Arthur/Morgana would be (Half)-Brother–Sister Incest. Similarly, Gwen and Merlin had an awkwardly flirtatious relationship in the first season; but by Season 2 this has abruptly changed as Merlin becomes the biggest Shipper on Deck for her and Arthur.
• Mimpi Metropolitan: In his early recurring appearances, Alexi's quirk is that he is an unfunny prima-donna, but is only a little overdramatic and for the most part he acts like a regular person. Once he becomes a regular, he becomes a Large Ham everytime he speaks and a Manchild when bad things happen to him.
• In the early episodes of Modern Family, when he was still The Ghost, Javier, Manny's dad and Gloria's ex-husband, was a typical deadbeat dad who only seemed interested in his own hedonistic pleasures. ^note  Jay comments in one episode that he couldn't take Manny to Disneyland like he promised because "he couldn't pull himself away from a craps table." When he started appearing on the show, he was made into a Latin Lover, who seemed to excel at everything, but clearly loved his son and even spoiled him.
• Mystery Science Theater 3000
  • Pearl Forrester was introduced as a stereotypical "mom" character—superficially sweet, but naggy, controlling, and neglectful.^*She also had a mustache identical to her son's in her very first appearance, but this was dropped when she was promoted to a regular. After Dr. Forrester's actor left the show and Pearl was made the new Big Bad, she was immediately reworked into nearly the same character as Dr. Forrester, perhaps slightly more crude in her sadism. Over the course of the SyFy era she also gradually developed a series of Lower-Class Lout interests like gambling and cheap flavored crackers.
  • In the first season, Gypsy is very autistic-like, mostly to her having to run the higher functions of the satellite, and hanging out with the SOL crew at the same time, thus, revealing to be dim-witted at anything else. At Season 2, she slowly gets better, as shown when see her lucid side in The Wild Rebels when Joels turns off the higher functions, from that point on, she became more smarter, and the Team Mom of the group, while still maintain a few of her silly antics.
• The cinephile Tony from later seasons of NCIS would be appalled by the Tony of the first season, who misses several classic film references and who never saw Shane or The Maltese Falcon. He was also something of a Butt-Monkey.
  • Gibbs was the one who made all the film references in the pilot. Additionally, he was more sociable in Season 1, often seen with a redhead.
  • More glaringly, in the pilot of NCIS, Agent Tobias Fornell of the FBI doesn't recognize Gibbs as he enters Air Force One, to the point of being surprised when he learns 'those agents' were NCIS and not the local coroner. Later episodes establish that not only are Gibbs and Fornell old friends, Gibbs warned Fornell not to marry one of his ex-wives. This was a conscious decision rather than a mistake; the creators loved the chemistry between Gibbs and Fornell so much they decided to give them a past and make Fornell a recurring character.
  • According to later seasons, McGee was a Webelos scout and retains outdoors skills from those days, which makes his falling victim to poison ivy in Season 1 or 2 a little odd (but still hilarious).
• In the earliest episodes of The New Adventures of Old Christine, Old Christine is initially portrayed as a little dippy, but a reasonably competent parent and business owner with a modicum of empathy towards others. Before long, she morphed into a completely ignorant, bi-polar narcissist who all but abandons day-to-day running of the gym to new partner Barb, and quite often doesn't even know where her own son is.
• Night Court:
  • In Season 1, Dan Fielding starts out as a stuffy, pipe smoking prosecutor. By the second season, he became the sex obsessed lech and was that way for the rest of the series.
  • Dan went from being The Casanova in the second season to a perpetually disappointed Casanova Wannabe by the series' end.
• The first few episodes have Summer from The O.C. as a vapid, party-girl who drops her unconscious friend off at her front door, but is changed to a more likable person after her character became part of the cast.
• The Office (US):
  • You could make a case that nearly every character that is not part of the lead quartet characters (Michael, Jim, Pam, Dwight) could fall here. In the first season most of them spend all their time in the background as Recurring Extras with no real personality yet.
  • Kelly Kapoor was first a normal worker, created only to be a foil for Michael's racist jokes. Soon after she evolved into a bubbly and adolescent ditz, a very drastic change. Thanks to an extreme hair and fashion change between Season 1 and 2, she also managed to look 20 years younger.
  • Andy started out as an unsympathetic Dwight-esque antagonist, and now he's one of the most likeable characters on the show.
  • New receptionist Erin went from being able to say John Denver's "Country Roads" is one of her favorite songs in her first episode, to not knowing who Snoopy and Woodstock and Marlon Brando are a couple of episodes later.
• Once Upon a Time:
  • The Blue Fairy appeared in Season 1 using a very high pitched cutesy voice. From Season 2 onwards, the voice was dropped. Starting with "Quite a Common Fairy" in Season 3, flashbacks portrayed her as a Stern Teacher and stickler for the rules — almost none of which was part of her character in the first two seasons. One could hand wave the voice as being something she puts on for the 'customers' in the Enchanted Forest, since her Storybrooke self speaks normally even after the curse is broken.
  • August and Emma appeared to have a lot of Belligerent Sexual Tension in August's first few episodes, heavily hinting that they would eventually become a couple. This vanished towards the end of the season, and whenever August reappeared, he and Emma acted like Platonic Life-Partners instead.
  • Characters on the show originally didn't match their Disney counterparts in terms of looks. Some characters like Maleficent and Lady Tremaine later have their looks retconned to match the animated films.
  • Zelena used much more of a clipped RP English accent in her first appearance in Season 3. When she was upgraded to regular in Season 5, they seemed to give up on making Rebecca Mader posh up her voice and she just used her normal accent from then on.
  • Regina's characterization in the first season is remarkably different from the rest of the series, redemption arc notwithstanding. She was portrayed as an outright Hate Sink, with Sugary Malice and irredeemably evil and mean, with only the occasional Pet the Dog moment to Henry. While she had the tragic backstory episode, the very end of the flashback saw her switching to the evil persona almost instantly after her lover's death. The next season began framing her in a far more complicated light, showing her as someone in her backstory who tried to move past the latter but kept being Forced into Evil by Rumpelstiltskin, and her present self tries to be good. She also develops a Deadpan Snarker side that didn't really factor into Season 1.
• Only Fools and Horses: Trigger initially started as a small time criminal/trader along the same lines as the Trotters before evolving into the Cloud Cuckoo Lander he's famous for being.
• Combined with Early-Installment Weirdness, most of the characters of Parks and Recreation behave very differently in the first season compared to how they are in the second and onward. It's obvious that the characters were expies of the characters from The Office (US) (as was the rest of the show), but that was phased out once the series found its own voice and style. Specifically:
  • First season Leslie was a Pointy-Haired Boss in the vein of Michael Scott and was implied to have gotten her job through her mother's connections. Contrast her in the second season and later on, where she evolves more into a Bunny-Ears Lawyer who's still childishly quirky but is also the most reliable and hardworking member of city hall.
  • Andy starts off as a Lazy Bum Jerkass who takes advantage of his girlfriend Ann's hospitality. After she breaks up with him and he lets her go, he becomes more of a ditzy Manchild. He also undergoes Character Development to being much more responsible (thanks to getting an actual job) and becoming a more supportive and loving boyfriend (and later on, husband) once he hooks up with April.
  • Season 1 Tom is far more straitlaced, with only a few of the quirks he'd have later on, and most of the humor mined from him was focused on his South Asian heritage and trying to get out of work. Season 2 added in the love of style, ramped up the perverted aspects, and gave him far more screen time with other characters.
  • Early Ron Swanson doesn't share Season 2-onward Ron's hyper-manly aspects or begrudging respect for Leslie.
  • Donna (who, like Jerry, is little more than a background extra in the first season) wears prim outfits and outdated cats-eye glasses, making her look like a librarian. When she eventually became an actual character, her look and style completely changed to fit her Sassy Black Woman persona.
• Kirsten from Party of Five was the show's only real normal character as a nanny for Owen in Season 1. In Season 2 a bit of a wacky side emerged, particularly when confronted by her annoying mother. This gets subverted in Season 3 when she ends up suffering from depression.
• Petticoat Junction was a Long Runner that suffered from heavy cast turnover. It was about an innkeeper and her three daughters, two of whom were played by multiple actresses over the run of the series. Each of the daughters underwent a gradual but major personality shift after the next actress settled into the role. One daughter, Billie Jo, started out as a troublesome man-chaser, but after her part was taken over by the wholesome-looking Meredith MacRae, she became independent and sensible. Her sister, Bobbie Jo, was a brainy wallflower to start out, but after she was recast with Lori Saunders (and even moreso after MacRae's casting), she became a goofy Cloud Cuckoolander.
• Bulk and Skull, the Plucky Comic Relief duo of Power Rangers, originally started out as school bullies and they even got into fights with the rangers' alter-egos. As the show went on, this aspect of the duo was downplayed and they became more like class clowns that were capable of acts of heroism at times. They were eventually treated more like friends to the rangers and they even became junior police officers, and by the In Space season finale (intended at the time as the SERIES finale), they were willing to sacrifice themselves by letting the villains believe they were Power Rangers in an effort to save innocents.
• Since The Real Housewives tracks the development of relationships, changes often take place as more is revealed about the cast members. Camille of Beverly Hills began as strongly disliked, but gained a lot of popularity during her second season; New Jersey's Teresa, on the other hand, showed a less likable side of herself after her sister-in-law joined the cast, and then an even less likable side after her legal problems came to light.
• Red Dwarf:
  • To put it politely, Dave Lister starts off as an immature asshole. He isn't just slobbish, ignorant and lazy; he revels in it. By Season 2 and especially 3, they softened these traits. He gains an honourable streak, he will go the mile to protect his friends, and he no longer leaves all the work to everyone else. This becomes a plot point in the much later episode Back to Earth with this (in-context) rather meaningful retort to an alien squid trying to break his spirit by mocking him: No. I'm pretty cool, I don't take any smeg, and even though I'm disgusting... sometimes I can be quite brave.
  • Rimmer’s worst qualities were more apparent in the first season and it wasn’t until Season 2 and onward that we see he’s really a Jerkass Woobie who has does have genuine and hilariously tragic reasons (namely his terrible past) to act like a Smeghead. Oddly enough Rimmer actually was also braver earlier on trying to fight Cat (and passing right through him) when the latter first appeared to scare him and Lister (later Rimmer would just cower in fear). In the first two seasons Rimmer also believed strongly in aliens with “aliens” being his answer to every unexplained occurrence — right down to missing toilet paper. From Season 3 on, Rimmer is skeptical about meeting alien lifeforms (ironic since it’s the season where they encounter Xenomorph Xerox Polymorph).
  • Cat in the beginning was more... well like a cat, wanting Lister to feed him constantly, lapping up crispies, eating raw fish, hiding in wardrobes to the poo in Lister’s shoes, attacking a stuffed fox a rich lady wore around her neck and playing with string. These overt cat mannerisms got heavily downplayed overtime with only his feline sense of smell and his nimbleness remaining. One acceptable explanation is that spending so much time around humans has made Cat more human-like. This is confirmed when we see other Felis sapiens in Red Dwarf: The Promised Land and they have Cat’s Season 1 and 2 hilariously cat-like mannerisms full force.
  • Kryten initially along with being played by a different actor (David Ross) was in the able to rebel against Rimmer, give him the finger and went off astroid hopping on a spacebike. When Kryten is re-introduced properly (played by Robert Llewellyn) he’s nigh-incapable of disobeying or insulting Rimmer without either getting his guilt removed or knowing that a Cosmic Retcon is about to happen and Rimmer won’t remember the sick burns. Kryten was also more bonkers in first appearance, not at all realising that his three female owners on the Nova-5 were long dead. While slightly unhinged in later seasons, Kryten is never that doddering again.
  • Similar to Kryten, Kochanski had a different personality with her first actress (Clare Grogan) compared to her second (Chloë Annett) — namely she was more laidback working class style and went along with Lister’s flirting with playful enthusiasm. When she becomes part of the cast Kochanski is more of a English Rose who’s a Tsundere with Lister. While some this can be Hand Waved with her being a Alternate Universe version, it’s still retroactively treated in-story that Krissie was always like this.
  • Captain Hollister in the first season was a Reasonable Authority Figure who cared for the crew and had understandable reasons for being a Drill Sergeant Nasty to the incredibly incompetent Lister and Rimmer. When he comes back in Season 8 we discover Hollister is really just as much as moronic loser as the main boys behind his veneer of command and actually lied and cheated his way into becoming The Captain (he’s actually Dennis the Donut Boy) and his reasons for picking on Lister and Rimmer are instead purely petty and hypocritical.
• In the first two episodes of Robin Hood, Marian advises Robin to let several prisoners hang so that he can "play the long game" and work the system from the inside out; on the other hand, Robin isn't prepared to let individuals die in favor of "the bigger picture". By Season 2, their standpoints have been completely switched around.
• Season 1 of Sabrina the Teenage Witch had a few character differences:
  • Sabrina was much more of a Shrinking Violet and desperate to fit in, often needing reassurance from her confident best friend Jenny. In Season 2 onwards, Jenny was Put on a Bus and replaced with Valerie — who took on the role of awkward wannabe and left Sabrina to become capable and not actually bothered by Alpha Bitch Libby's taunts.
  • A few episodes had Harvey being oblivious to Libby's Alpha Bitch tendencies, thinking she was nice because she was to him. Later on in the season, he's fully aware of what a nasty piece of work she is. Additionally Harvey is a lot more clueless and Oblivious to Love in early episodes — before getting a bit smarter in Season 2.
  • Aunt Zelda in Season 1 was the Only Sane Man and a strict disciplinarian. While still the responsible aunt in later seasons, she got a lot more Not So Above It All moments and took part in a lot more slapstick. Her overall character became a little softer.
  • It's subtle, but in the pilot, Salem Saberhagen is a decidedly darker character who threatens to be a bad influence on Sabrina, and mostly funny by virtue of being the warlock who tried to take over the world and is now trapped in the form of a housecat. In most of the series, he's more comedic, less sinister, and typically comes off as harmless.
• In some of the early "Celebrity Jeopardy" sketches on Saturday Night Live, Sean Connery is portrayed as being as stupid as the other contestants; later on, he's perfectly capable of answering questions correctly, but he chooses to do things like misread category names just to annoy Alex Trebek.
• Scrubs:
  • J.D.'s (and to a lesser extent Elliot's) personality quirks didn't really gel until the second season. A notable example is his switching from drinking beer to watered-down appletinis. (Although in the eighth season, he mentions that while he has had beer before, he simply prefers appletinis because they make him feel fancy.) He also had sports memorabilia in his room in early episodes; eventually, his cluelessness about sports (for example: he thinks that basketballs come "three to a can") became a Running Gag.^note  This particular case of characterization is due to a Throw It In! moment where Zach Braff mentioned to series creator Bill Lawrence that he knew almost nothing about sports. Lawrence, recognizing its comedic potential, made that part of J.D.'s personality.
  • In the early episode, Dr. Cox calls J.D. by his name a few times. After that, it's always "Newbie" or a girl's name. Although that has been broken on a few occasions. The fifth season episode "My Fallen Idol" had him use it in a touching moment while thanking him for his emotional support. Also, there are times when Cox has addressed J.D. by his surname "Dorian", but that's only when he's super pissed, or after J.D. leaves the hospital in Season 8 and they become equals.
    • Another one with Dr. Cox that is big because of how prominent it is...the punchline of one episode is that he does, in fact, have friends, or at least a bunch of guys to watch the game with. When later episodes make a big deal about how he doesn't.
  • In the first several episodes the Janitor was a lot meaner, fairly humorless and never did anything except randomly clean and terrorize J.D. This is partially explained that the character wasn't meant to go beyond the first episode, and the entire first season was written as him possibly being just a projection of J.D.'s paranoia and self-loathing, he wasn't acknowledged by or interacted with any other character until the first episode of the second season. He became more Affably Evil and Cloud Cuckoo Lander as the show went on (and Neil Flynn started improvising more and more), with his personality fully gelling as a man who desperately wants respect in the world but doesn't care if people like him.
  • In the second season, Elliot was made to be unable to use dirty words, often making up funny euphemisms such as "bajingo" for "vagina". However in a few Season 1 episodes she uses the words "penis" and "vagina" normally. In the first season, she was also portrayed as a competitive and smug know-it-all; her neediness and neurotic tendencies didn't properly surface until the second season. Even more egregiously is how she went from a coolly efficient doctor that struggled with connecting with patients and had no interest in children at all to someone that became a doctor because she wanted to take care of everyone and wanted nothing more than to get married and have kids.
  • Lampshaded with Danni Sullivan. When she was first introduced early in Season 3, she was portrayed as a more-or-less perfectly nice person with a slight quirky streak and a snarky sense of humor—effectively a milder version of her older sister Jordan. When she reappeared later on in that season, her personality was overhauled into her more familiar characterization as a selfish and obnoxious brat who enjoys casual sex. When J.D. points this out, she claims that her earlier personality was just an act, as she was pretending to be the kind of person that she thought J.D. wanted her to be.
• Seinfeld
  • Early episodes often have George advising a more naïve Jerry on the little particularities of life that are relevant to their situation. These roles would be reversed through most of the show's run. The four main characters (with the possible exception of Kramer) also developed into Comedic Sociopaths as the show found its voice: their early-season incarnations come across as far more sympathetic and self-aware than they do throughout most of the series.
  • Jason Alexander also had his own "click" moment similar to that of Leonard Nimoy: initially he thought George Costanza was based on Woody Allen and played him as such until one day he walked up to Larry David claiming to be unable to make heads or tails of one of George's antics seeing as "not only could this never happen but no human being would react like this". David explained it happened to him and this was how he reacted. It was then he realized George was David's Author Avatar all along.
• In early Sesame Street, the monsters were slightly more monstrous. Cookie Monster in particular was portrayed as likely to steal cookies (usually from Ernie).
• In the first episode of Sex and the City, when Carrie mentions the idea of "having sex like a man", Charlotte without batting an eyelash asks "You mean with strap-ons?" As she evolved into more of a priss who talks far more euphemistically than the other three, it sounds weird to hear her say so so blithely.
• Shoresy: The character of Shoresy is significantly modified from his appearances in Letterkenny to make him more suitable as a series lead. He no longer talks in a falsetto voice, though his voice is still in the higher end of actor Jared Keeso's range. While before he was The Faceless, his face is now always on display. As a result, he no longer wears tinted eye-shields on his helmets and will often leave the stall door open when he takes his mid-game shits. While in Letterkenny, Shoresy is a mostly one-note hockey goon with an inexhaustible supply of insults, in his own show he's given more nuance and nobility beneath the jerkass.
• Season 1 of Sons of Anarchy had Bobby as a bomb expert as well as Opie. Sometime during either this or the following episode he makes a claim that his "big Jew brain can barely count his fingers." Fast forward to mid-season and he's now the club bookkeeper and has never been tasked with blowing anything up since.
• In the pilot of Stargate SG-1, Jack O'Neill is seen looking through a telescope on his roof and seeming fascinated by the heavens. By the end of the first season, he was already The Watson with no interest in astronomy or any other kind of science. And from there he would only become more clueless about anything that didn't involve Stuff Blowing Up or being a Big Damn Hero.
  • Later episodes at least made sporadic callbacks to Jack's knowledge of astronomy and telescopes. In "Singularity", he was the one who gave the technical description of a black hole's accretion disk, before remembering that he was pretending not to know stuff like that, and he stays behind on the planet to run the telescope observing the black hole. In "1969", he's the one who goes to the observatory, to use the telescope to confirm that the times the general gave them were for solar flares. Overall, given that his entire team is made up of experts in different areas, he enjoys playing dumb in comparison.
  • In the very early episodes, Samantha Carter was a borderline Straw Feminist. She was still a feminist in later seasons, but after the first few episodes she decided to shut up about it already and actually be helpful. Her early characterization is thus over-the-top and rather shallow compared to the character she was for most of the series. At several points they revisit the infamous "reproductive organs" speech from the first episode, and intentionally make it sound as awkward and silly as it really would be. In the director's cut of the premiere, they removed that line entirely.
  • Dr Rodney Mackay is an interesting example because he never stops being the rude, sarcastic, cowardly, quick to anger and slightly bigoted genius he was introduced as; they merely temper this by adding layers to him once he became a regular in Stargate Atlantis. Deep down he does care greatly for others, he will often go the mile to help others albeit reluctantly, and his cowardice becomes more an example of being the Only Sane Man alongside his danger-loving teammates.
• Star Trek: In early episodes, Spock wasn't quite yet the emotionless Vulcan we all know him as and was even seen to smile a few times. In a scene from "The Cage" where the aliens snatch two female crew members, Spock shouts, "The women!" in a very emotional manner. The end of "The Enemy Within", where after Kirk's Evil Twin attempts to rape Yeoman Rand and Spock leeringly teases Rand about the duplicate's "interesting qualities," is surely the most misogynistic moment in the entire Trek canon. Spock hadn't been given his emotionless personality because that was meant to be part of Number One's character. The network was not comfortable with the idea of a cold, unemotional woman (let alone one with a measure of command authority), so the character was scrapped and the trait transferred to Spock. Leonard Nimoy has admitted that in early episodes he was mainly playing Spock as a military officer. In "The Corbomite Maneuver", there's a scene where the Enterprise is seized by a gigantic and apparently hostile vessel and Spock merely says "fascinating" (for the first time). Nimoy has cited this as the moment the character really "clicked" for him, although it still took a few more episodes for Spock to fully settle into his stoic characterization.
• Star Trek: The Next Generation
  • Data went through a similar period of uncertainty and a period of No Social Skills during the first (and to an extent, second) season of TNG. It's not clear at first whether he's supposed to have emotions or not, as he grins awkwardly, gets drunk and subsequently seems to act on sexual desire, and often speaks in an oddly musical tone. He also uses contractions. The show only cemented its characters and premise in the third season, and that's when Data's famously emotionless and inquisitive personality really took hold. Fortunately, a conversation he has with Riker in the first episode does help pave the way for his future characterization. Initially Data was a bit of a walking thesaurus who would make very precise estimates in the initial seasons, something that went away in later seasons as Data realized that people seemed to be annoyed when he did that.
  • First season Picard is a bit of an asshole. He wasn't just aloof or professional; he was a short-tempered hardass who hated kids and had little patience for practically anything. Later, he developed into the diplomatic father to his crew that he's remembered as. Picard also briefly carried on Chekov's habit of attributing everything to his home country. This running gag ended quickly, and seems very strange in light of the extensive knowledge of history and culture that he displays later on.
  • In the pilot "Encounter at Farpoint", Ferengi are a warlike and savage people whom are implied to eat their nominal allies. In The Last Outpost Ferengi were portrayed as being so physically strong that even Data and Worf had difficulty holding their own against them. The Ferengi were intended to replace the Klingons as primary antagonists, but the crew quickly realized that the short, big-eared Ferengi were too ridiculous-looking to be taken seriously. The show quickly pivoted to making their hat about insatiable greed and turned them into a race of cowardly but cunning merchants who did not have an unusual amount of physical strength. The show did keep their institutionalized sexism, however.
  • In an early episode, it's stated that Riker wants to be a ship's captain more than anything else. He proceeds to decline the opportunity to command his own ship twice in later seasons and it's implied that he could've taken any open captain's slot in the fleet after the events of "The Best of Both Worlds".^note The second time turned out to be quite lucky for Riker, since within a week of turning down command of the USS Melbourne, the ship was destroyed in battle and the entire crew died. And Riker was then temporarily promoted to captain and commanded the Enterprise itself until Picard was rescued from the Borg. Riker is a good example of this overall, as lampshaded by Q:
    Riker: I don't need your fantasy women.
    Q: Oh, you're so stolid. You weren't like that before the beard.
  • In "Encounter at Farpoint", Tasha Yar loses her temper and essentially goes into a tirade against the illusionary postapocalyptic courtroom. This may be a carryover from The Series Bible where her character was originally called Macha Hernandez and was essentially meant to be an expy of Vasquez from Aliens (whom the series bible specifically refers to), in that she was fiery and feisty. This was evidently forgotten immediately when the producers realized that a characterization based on a Space Marine was not exactly compatible with the non-violent, Mildly Military vision of Gene Roddenberry's future. After this, Tasha was regularly shown to be somewhat mild mannered but still capable and independent.
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
  • In an early episode, Odo realizes that Quark was lying to him because Quark told him Rom fixed the replicator, which he deduced was impossible because Rom is an idiot. But Rom is later established as a technical genius, who thoroughly impresses Chief O'Brien with his ability and efficiency. It would be considered just a character mistake, except Odo is firmly established as being very good at observation and "sizing people up." This is eventually lampshaded by Rom's assertion, "I've always been smart, brother. I just lacked self-confidence." Also possibly justified by the fact that Quark would undoubtedly engage in further criminal activity, so it would make sense for Odo to give Quark a false explanation for how he caught on, otherwise Quark might actually learn from his mistakes.
  • Rom's first appearances had him acting much more like a regular Ferengi than his later My Species Doth Protest Too Much persona. In one first season episode, Rom gets tired of working for Quark and attempts to kill him by flushing him out an airlock. Even in Season 2, when Quark gets shot, his mood improves considerably when he's reminded he'll inherit the bar if Quark dies and he's horrified when he inadvertently saves Quark's life. All of this seems very at odds with the meek and gentle Rom of later seasons. His voice even changed to reflect the shift in his personality; in his early appearances he had a harsh timbre to his voice, much like other Ferengi, but over time it softened to sound more humble and slightly dopey. In addition, Rom at first was portrayed as someone who had no engineering skills and "couldn't fix a straw if it was bent." As the series went on Rom was portrayed as a Genius Ditz who his son Nog claimed could have been a "chief engineer" somewhere if he hadn't been so determined to be a good Ferengi and earn profit. Rom eventually leaves the family business to take an engineering job on the station.
  • The Klingons themselves weren't always the Proud Warrior Race they were in later series. On TOS, they could be quite deceitful, sometimes conducting espionage within the Federation ("The Trouble with Tribbles"). One of their number, who's portrayed as very much a Dirty Coward, even manipulates a Proud Warrior Race, who eventually turn on him after deciding he's "without honour" ("Friday's Child"). You know, like the later-era Klingons would do. It was the Romulans who were the honorable warriors Starfleet faced ("Balance of Terror", "The Enterprise Incident"). But starting with TNG, these characteristics were firmly flipped between races, as Klingons became the race of proud warriors while the Romulans were established as a race of Smug Snakes. Mind you, about a century of history passes between TOS and TNG, including such significant changes as the Klingons and Federation becoming friendly towards each other, and the Romulans retreating into isolation after some brief hostilities with both of the other factions. There's still the oddity of DS9's reintroduction of Kor, Koloth and Kang, who are all now standard honorable Klingon warriors. Though fortunately the Blood Knight element was already in place for each of them in their TOS appearances.
• Star Trek: Discovery does this by way of actually establishing Captain Pike as a character. His previous appearance on the Original Series was the initial pilot (the footage repurposed for the two-parter "The Menagerie"), and at one point he comments to Number One that he's not used to women on the bridge (referring to Yeoman Colt and following up the comment by saying Number One is the exception). Considering this was more reflective of the 60s attitude towards women in the military, and by his appearance in 2018 we'd already had Enterprise firmly establishing that women had always been officers on the bridge of Starfleet vessels since the organization's inception, the second Starfleet vessel even captained by Captain Erika Hernandez, to say nothing of the previous season introducing Admiral Katrina Cornwell as a superior officer, this attitude was entirely ignored, and, by the finale showing the Enterprise bridge crewed almost equally composed of, if not skewed in favor of, women, seemingly outright refuted.
• Supernatural: In "It's the Great Pumpkin, Sam Winchester", Castiel's bluff when he claims that he intends to destroy the entire town is very convincing, in contrast to his later characterization as a Bad Liar. Although admittedly, the Bad Liar moments mostly crop up when he doesn't understand why he's lying — give him a good reason (which he no doubt thought he had in the Halloween episode) and he can dissemble pretty well. This is showcased quite a lot in Season 6.
• When Robot Girl Cameron on Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles meets John Connor in the first episode, she is able to act like a normal high school girl and completely fool him. Right after she reveals herself to be a terminator, she forgets how to act human around people for the rest of the series.
• S Club 7 were all rather different from their more familiar personalities in their first TV show Miami 7. By the time LA 7 came around, they had all settled into their more familiar personas:
  • Tina started off as something of a Team Mom figure. She morphed into a more bossy and pushy character.
  • Paul was rather normal if a little unlucky. He became more of a Manchild.
  • Jo started off as a bit of a tough cookie but eventually morphed into a full-on Lad Ette.
  • Rachel was more ditzy and obsessed with her looks. Later on she became a Girl Next Door who was more innocent than actually stupid.
  • Bradley was always a bit of a ditz but developed Serial Romeo tendencies.
  • Jon started out with pretty much no personality but became a bit of a Pretty Boy and frequently took on the Only Sane Man role.
  • Hannah underwent real Flanderisation and became a Genki Girl Dumb Blonde. She's much less quirky when the series begins.
• That '70s Show:
  • Eric eventually turns into a Star Wars fan who is a huge geek about it, and the other characters easily get tired of his habit of constantly making irrelevant references to the movies. However, an early episode has the characters watching Star Wars: A New Hope, and all of them like it, with no hint that Eric is especially enthralled by it; if anything, Kelso is the one who is too obsessed with it. Hyde, Donna, or Jackie show no sign that they feel it's a Guilty Pleasure or that "only a geek would like it" (certainly their stance in the later episodes, when making fun of Eric). Red's attitude, however, is consistent, with no need for any Retcon at all; he has only scorn for Star Wars in both the early episode and the later seasons.
  • Red was infamous for supporting Richard Nixon and even believed he was set up during the Watergate scandal. However, in a Season 1 episode, he condemned Gerald Ford for pardoning Nixon.
  • Red wasn't as much of a jerk, Eric was far less of a Deadpan Snarker and more a put-upon, everyman, This Loser Is You kinda guy. This didn't really change that much, but he did start developing real flaws beyond a lack of assertiveness later on.
  • Hyde has a crush on Donna, making him the third of the love triangle the creators were writing at the time. This went nowhere, and in later seasons, Hyde doesn't even act like he sees Donna as anything more than one of the guys.
  • Fez, of all people, calls Kelso "stupid" after listening to a tape they made of themselves talking while high. In later seasons, it would be Hyde, or even Eric, and Fez would jump to his defense.
• In The Vampire Diaries, Klaus is depicted slightly differently in his first few episodes. He first appears in Season 2 while possessing Alaric, which is described as his "favorite trick". He keeps his real body inside a coffin that he has his servants transport around, seemingly out of paranoia. Later episodes depict Klaus as arrogant, Hot-Blooded and powerful enough that he doesn't need to waste time with stealing bodies, and usually prefers to just kill his enemies himself. The only other time he possesses someone is in the third season finale, but it's not by his own choice. Later seasons — and especially his spinoff The Originals that features flashbacks from his entire 1000 year long lifespan — make no mention of Klaus possessing other people.
• Yellowjackets:
  • Mari's introduction in the first episode is playfully teasing Akilah on the plane, in a joke that isn't mean-spirited, and she then becomes friendly to her. Pretty much the second episode onward showed her as a shameless mean girl with no filter, as well as something of a ditz.
  • Shauna and Javi share a few moments in Season 1 where they bond, Shauna going out of her way to be kind to him, and him being something of a Morality Pet as her friendship with Jackie dissolves. This is actually a holdover from early plans where Adam would turn out to be him as an adult, but come Season 2, Shauna happily lets him drown so the group can cannibalise him, and she even carves him up herself.
  • Lottie has an incredibly mean Kick the Dog moment to Travis in the second episode, where she taunts him with his Embarrassing Nickname and seems insensitive to the fact that his father literally just died saving them all - that Natalie has to give her a giant What the Hell, Hero? for. Pretty much every episode after this would show her as a much shyer and softer spoken character, only ever sassing someone else when they've been mean to her. While one could argue that emotions are running high after the crash, it's still uncharacteristically mean of her.

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