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Genre Shift
Wait a minute, wasn't this supposed to be a harem comedy? And yes, that's the same little boy.
"Suddenly, Fritz Lang's directing it! ...This is no time to get arty, film."
— "Fun With Shorts: Your Permit to Drive"

The weird cousin of Executive Meddling, except planned in advance by the major writers.

Controversial or extremely different ideas are very hard to get past sponsors and audiences suspicious of anything new and unfamiliar — even in Japan, where some pretty bizarre stuff gets on TV with almost no effort. An easy if sneaky way around this is merely to present your start of the series as something familiar. However, once the main plot kicks in, your audience is probably loyal enough not to notice the quick shift in tone and pacing you were planning from the start all along. In hindsight, they'll maybe notice the little hints you've been dropping. As a side effect, the series will probably also undergo Mood Whiplash.

Extremely common in more unusual anime, and a few shows which simply run very long. Studio Gainax has a particular reputation for presenting and advertising their programs initially as whatever they superfically resemble, then flagrantly satirizing or angsting it up, much to the fans' surprise.

Genre Shifts are sometimes used in followup series after an Ink Stain Adaptation ends.

Genre Shifts sometimes occur at the ends of series when the writers finally get around to soapboxing their opinions. Many fluffy over-the-top bishoujo comedies are (unnecessarily) burdened down with a last episode by making an attempt at drama. On the other hand, some cutesy or romance-based stories can experience Genre Shift simply because they start running so long the writer figured if they have to derail the original plot, they might as well do it with something creative.

In video games, Genre Shifts extend beyond the plot to actual shifts in gameplay genre; a Fighting Game may have one installment Genre Shift into an action/adventure or RPG. This is covered by the article Unexpected Gameplay Change. Usually, these don't turn out that well, and excessive use of this trope can lead to Gameplay Roulette. A game can also experience a Genre Shift due to Adaptation Decay, specifically from 2-D to 3-D gaming.

It is possible for this to work, as long as the creators know what they're doing, and it can pay off quite well at times. Usually, however, this requires planning it from the start, and Genre Shifts motivated by Executive Meddling are likely doomed.

If this happens one time only in a series before reverting back to the main genre, it's an Out of Genre Experience.

Not to be confused with Art Shift.

Examples:

Anime
  • A strange example occurs in the last Steel Angel Kurumi OAV, a far-future prequel done in the format of a fairly serious drama instead of the show's usual bubblegum cuteness.
  • Naturally, Neon Genesis Evangelion also surprised many fans (and parents) at its increasingly dark tone as the show went on.
    • Ditto Haibane Renmei. Though there were some definite hints early on. Any show comfortable with showing the scene where Rakka's wings burst through is obviously not going to be all sunshine and kittens.
  • Mai-HiME starts out looking like a postmodern take on the Magical Girl genre, then turns into something disturbingly like Highlander.
  • Mahou Sensei Negima, as pictured, is practically the poster child for and Most Triumphant Example of this trope. It looks like a harem comedy when it starts, but slowly starts throwing in more and more action sequences... until you hit the Tournament Arc, and suddenly realize that you're reading a shounen action series with an unusual amount of Fan Service. By now, the harem antics are only occasional joke fodder, the story's mainly about Negi's quest to find his long-missing father, and the Power Levels are over... well, you know how it goes. Basically, it's become Dragon Ball Z meets Harry Potter meets Love Hina.
    • The anime adaptation was cut short long before reaching the aforementioned Tournament Arc, but still managed to pull off a slightly different Genre Shift in the last few episodes.
    • Note that the genre was the author's initial intention, but he had to do it this way as a Writer Revolt to counter some Executive Meddling: he wanted to make an action series, but the publisher wanted another harem comedy. So he made an action series that looks an awful lot like a harem comedy at first.
  • Princess Tutu, in its first season, was about a magical ballerina princess/therapist restoring emotions to her love interest. The second season revealed it just wasn't like a fairytale, and it turned into a dark, epic struggle against the sadistic author trying to wreck his character's lives.
  • Similarly, Love Hina became prone to Road Trip arcs as the series lingered and most of the romantic misunderstandings had been resolved. These were apparently brief but enjoyed changes of pace for the author, as the later series Negima's framework allows them to be used more extensively.
  • Ah My Goddess's long run is likewise affected by this. Keiichi and Belldandy's relationship is paradoxically so far along while also being stunted that most chapters are about their quirky slice-of-life adventures rather than a romantic manga.
    • The series, in manga more than other forms, also has a tendency to dip into being a magical action show as opposed to a romantic comedy. More recent manga story arcs have come to focus more on conflicts between the angels and the demons which tend to result in epic battles and intense situations wherein just a few chapters before, everyone was just fighting over what to watch on TV!
  • Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha combines an initial genre subversion (a magical girl show pitched specifically at a male audience) with a genre shift halfway through the series.
    • And then it goes from Shonen-Magical Girl to Military Action-Magical Girl with strategy in Striker S
      • The series has completely dropped the "Magical Girl" title in the latest manga. Magical Wars Lyrical Nanoha Force.
  • Parodied in Excel Saga, which changed to a new genre in nearly every episode (sci-fi, war drama, romantic comedy, horror, etc.), which it also parodied.
    • And then the 2 penultimate episodes were straightforward drama/suspense/action eps. So the shift... metalooped? Is that a word?
  • Gunbuster and its sequel Diebuster were masters of this. They both had a fairly cheerful if a bit dramatic character drama going up until the magic episode, when everything started going to hell.
  • Soukou No Strain had a first episode much like a shojo series, and though its marketing in the bishoujo Megami Magazine could predict that that would change, no one predicted its quick shift to angst and its new motto in Anyone Can Die.
  • Genre shift is pretty much the entire point behind Abenobashi Mahou Shoutengai.
  • Ouran High School Host Club went through most of the anime as an over-the-top parody of Shojo drama, but in the last few episodes became more of a shojo drama with jokes added.
  • One may be excused for thinking that Guyver is a typical school-based shonen anime after the first few issues/episodes. But this changes pretty rapidly when the school is blown up by either Zoanoids or Guyver 2, depending on what medium you prefer and Sho is almost never seen in school again.
  • The Rockman.EXE anime (okay, Mega Man NT Warrior, if you must) shifted from computer-based Mons to some kind of weird Sentai variant right around the third season, and completely gave up on its computer origins in the fourth, with the advent of Cross Fusion. Basically, it forced the human protagonists to merge with their partners and fight themselves, at which point the Mons were rarely seen again. This is one of the reasons the fourth season is disliked among the fanbase. Then, in the fifth season, it switched from computer Mons to normal Mons when an Alternate Universe setting made it impossible to Cross Fusion but forced Navis to be summoned into material space instead.
  • In the first few episodes (both in the Anime and Manga) of Bleach, a reluctant teen fights ghosts (Hollows) in a series of unconnected locations. However, once Ichigo travels to the Shinigami world, the series completely abandons ghostbusting in favor of high-power duels between progressively more powerful rivals. Additionally, the series replaces its largely simplistic good spirit/bad spirit dichotomy with increasingly complicated plots, intrigue, and a much larger cast.
    • The first movie, Memories of Nobody ended up being somewhat of a Wham Movie to those used to the dragging plot lines of the series, with a much different tone still.
  • The OVA Moldiver spends three episodes as a gender-bending superhero send-up before abruptly switching into a serious drama in the final two episodes.
  • Berserk, though it does show a number of demons at the beginning of the anime and a fight with demonic Blood Knight Nosferatu Zodd early on in the anime, goes from grim and gritty medieval fantasy into straight up horror in the final episodes when Griffith makes his Deal With The Devil and becomes Dark Messiah Femto, and the demons start coming en masse to rip apart the members of the Band of the Hawks who Griffith has marked out for sacrifice. Since both Guts and Casca are marked with the Godhand's Brand of Sacrifice as a result of Griffith's betrayal, both of them have to deal with the monsters from that point forward, and they soon become Guts's primary enemies.
    • Also before Guts' group meets Schierke, they find a man who was attacked by trolls while searching for a witch. Serpico lampshades that this had more of a fairy tale atmosphere to it, and that its nice that they've gotten a break from fighting horrible monsters.
  • The Suzumiya Haruhi series (both the original light novels and the anime) begins as a comedy series that, while featuring a very eccentric protagonist in Genki Girl Haruhi, was still a fairly realistic Slice Of Life comedy. Then the aliens, time travelers, and psychics start turning up, and we get the big reveal that Haruhi is God (or at least the next best thing), and her subconscious desires can warp reality, or even destroy the universe if she becomes bored enough. It actually remains a Slice Of Life comedy for the most part, but it's slices of much weirder lives than we originally thought.
  • Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle. It starts out as standard fairly light shonen fare, then takes an extremely abrupt left turn in Tokyo onto Mind Screw Way towards Drama Town.
    • CLAMP seems rather fond of doing this, actually. It's happening also to XXX Holic in a rather similar way.
  • Oh god, Naru Taru. It initially shows signs of being a light-hearted, female version of A Boy And His X... only to suddenly change into a dark, depressing series with High Octane Nightmare Fuel.
  • D.Gray-man has evolved somewhat from being a Horror Gothic Shonen series to more of a... normal Shonen series. Oddly enough, if the High Octane Nightmare Fuel page is to be believed, the switch from horror-style Monster Of The Week plots to a more complicated storyline has actually made it a lot more scary.
  • Katekyo Hitman Reborn had a major Genre Shift after 9 volumes of seemingly unrelated, silly fluff. It changes from a slapstick comedy to a Save The World Shonen series pretty much exactly from the point that Tsuna meets Rokudo Mukuro onwards. From that instance on, Tsuna becomes much more serious and less of a Butt Monkey - this seems to have pleased the fangirls.
  • How have we not mentioned School Days yet? It starts out as a typical romantic comedy, then slowly takes a turn for the worse, going into pretty much horror at the end.
  • Chobits is a comedy series with a touch of sci-fi for the first two-thirds or so. Then it becomes serious sci-fi with a touch of comedy for the remainder of the series.
  • Onani Master Kurosawa is perhaps another poster child of this. It starts off as Death Note with fapping (yes, seriously) but then after a certain Wham Episode the main character decides he'd rather be Holden Claufield rather than Light Yagami.
  • Medaka Box is currently going through this to stave off being cut short due to low popularity scores — going from a quirky series talking about the adventures of a God Mode Sue and her harem into a bloody action series with Dragon Ball Z style art.
  • Full Metal Panic - at least, the later novels. Directly lampshaded by the author, who mentions that he's changing the series to have a darker, more depressing feel. Again, fandom can be quite split on whether they like the change.

Comic Books
  • During the tail end of the Golden Age, many superhero characters were changed to civilian detectives, adventurers, horror hosts, etc, to accommodate the changing tastes of the reading public. Earlier, something similar happened to many non-superhero characters who went from pulp-style adventurers to pulp-style adventurers in tights.
    • A character known as Phantom Falcon stands out because he went through both - he began as a non-costumed air ace, turned into a superhero after being presumed dead and then turned into a civilian detective.
  • The initial Strangers In Paradise miniseries was a Slapstick Love Triangle comedy. When creator Terry Moore launched the ongoing series, he added a crime drama plot, and subsequent arcs alternated between this and the Will They Or Wont They love triangle story, which also took on a more serious tone. Then, about two-thirds of the way through, Moore wrapped up the criminal conspiracy plot and for the remainder of the series focused on the romance story which soon expanded into a Love Dodecahedron.

Newspaper Comics
  • Chester Gould's strange twist of Dick Tracy from crime drama (albeit with futuristic technology) to SCI-FI, one of the most obvious genre shifts of all time. This is so (in)famous, it could almost be the trope namer.
  • Candorville began as a somewhat Anvilicious political/slice of life strip in roughly the same vein as Doonesbury. In February 2009, the main character went on a camping trip with his new friend Saxon Kenchu, all alone in the middle of nowhere—and when Saxon decided to show off his "knife collection" the strip suddenly switched to Horror, albeit a rather whimsical sort of horror. This is a particularly notable case both because it involves a massive Revision of the Clingy Jealous Girl's past and motives (bordering on a ReWrite), and because it's been repeatedly suggested that Saxon is an Unreliable Narrator, only for that thought to suddenly be undermined.

Film
  • Australia goes from screwball comedy to western to war movie.
  • Audition does this. The film starts out like a romance film, with a middle-aged widower holding a mock audition to find his perfect mate. Things go along this vein for quite a while, until brief scenes start popping up showing the man's "soul mate" alone and acting very creepy. The High Octane Nightmare Fuel doesn't really start to kick in until after the halfway mark.
  • Wild Things starts out as a formulaic Wrongly Accused plot, complete with Bill Murray as a sleazy lawyer trying The Perry Mason Method... until the one hour mark. That's when it's revealed that the defendant was working with his accusers for a damages settlement, but they all have their own plans, which quickly create a Jigsaw Puzzle Plot.
  • Legally Blonde should end about 2/3 through, as technically Elle has accomplished her revised goal (instead of chasing Warner, she has become a serious person). Instead, she gets applied to a legal case. It's still a fun movie, and the musical revises this by making Emmitt a legitimate romantic lead that you want Elle to be with at the end.
    • In all fairness, there's also a strong moral about not conforming to the expectations of others (as the musical puts it: "Back to the game | Back to the trial | But I'm going back in my style!")
  • The original Alien was a haunted house movie in space. Aliens is straight out sci-fi action... and it works perfectly, one of the few sequels that you can't nessecarily say is worse than the orginal, they're apples and oranges. And the apples are awesome, and if you watch the oranges after enjoying the apples... where am I going?
  • Similarly Pitch Black was mostly horror with the protagonists trapped on a dark planet inhabited by monsters. The sequel, The Chronicles Of Riddick is sci-fi action.
  • The Oscar-winning film La Vita è bella (In English, Life is Beautiful) begins as a very charming, but rather generic romantic comedy, except that it happens to be set in Mussolini's Italy, and the characters are Jewish. Now, flash forward three years. The male and female leads are now married, have a son, and the Holocaust is about to start. Amazingly, it remains a comedy, only with an entirely different premise: the father starts telling his three-year-old son wild stories to protect him from the truth of what is happening.
  • One of the classic examples is, of course, From Dusk Till Dawn, which begins as a dark crime drama about crooks on the lam kidnapping a dysfunctional family, but abruptly turns into a slapstick action movie with vampires over the course of a striptease.
  • The fourth Indiana Jones movies is set in The Fifties and based on science fiction of that era. All three previous films were more heavily based on adventure serials of the pre-war period.
  • The movie Miracle Mile starts out as an indie romantic comedy. It sure doesn't end that way.
  • The 2007 film Sunshine starts out as a hard sci-fi film about a mission to reignite the dying sun. Then, at almost exactly the three-quarters mark, it suddenly becomes a horror film in space.
  • Shaun Of The Dead is sometimes considered to feature a genre shift due to audiences expecting a more light-hearted zombie movie parody. As the film progresses, however, it becomes more clear that the film is an earnestly straight zombie film as much as it is a romantic comedy.
  • A better example from the same team is Hot Fuzz, which goes from a Murder Mystery/Comedy with to an over-the-top action flick parody at the climax. This shift is teased throughout the film.
  • The Lost Boys begins as a bleak, played-straight vampire horror film and then takes on a humourous tone in the third act, with the teenage heroes spouting such lines as "Whoa, death by stereo!"
  • A pronounced Genre Shift occurs between the original Buffy The Vampire Slayer film, a parody of vampire horror flicks, and the subsequent TV series which, though it had its share of witty banter, was from the start a much darker and more dramatic effort with strong tragic elements. Joss Whedon's original movie pitch was in fact more in keeping with the tone of the series, but ended up a comedy thanks to Executive Meddling. In contrast, both the WB and the UPN networks allowed Whedon the creative freedom to realize his intended dramatic treatment.
  • Hollow Man. Another sci-fi-into-thriller shift.
  • Click started as a Fantastic Comedy, then very suddenly and very early turned into drama. Guess what part the ads were sampled from.
  • This happens to the Evil Dead trilogy. The first film, The Evil Dead, is a more-or-less straightforward horror film. Evil Dead 2 is a strange hybrid of gory, serious horror, and slapstick comedy. Army of Darkness drops almost all the horror and works instead as an action-comedy and managed to become the most popular film in the series.
  • Adaptation, starring Nicholas Cage, starts as an amusing dramedy about a scriptwriter suffering from a writer's block, but slowly turns darker and darker, with elements of a thriller, until in the climax the protagonist's comical twin dies. It still tries to end things on a high note, though.
    • The really key shift is when Charlie asks Donald for help on his screenplay; due to the highly self-referential nature of the movie, it's implied that everything after that, all the drugs/guns/sex, is being written by or on the advice of Donald. The thing to remember is that [[spoiler:Donald's the only character in the movie who isn't a real person.
  • Pretty much every Scooby Doo movie starts with Mystery Inc solving a mystery, and ends with Mystery Inc fighting an army of the undead/ cat monsters/ ancient samuri ghost/ ancient witch ghost.
    • Not every Scooby Doo movie, but, you have some merit to that, in Zombie Island, which could also count as a Deconstruction, in a way, starts off with the Gang getting together to solve a few mysteries, matching the typical comedic feel of the original show, but, in the middle, it becomes a supernatural horror mystery movie with very little comedy that gives you some very brief clues as to what's going on at Moon Scar island, in a way that arguably, believably worked.
  • The first two-thirds of Death Becomes Her are a very dark supernatural satire based around the rivalry between Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn's characters. Then in the last act it not only shifts into an action film but switches protagonists; Bruce Willis's until then secondary character becomes the point of view character for most of the rest of the movie, until the very end which returns to Streep and Hawn.
  • The first half of the movie Flightplan plays out as an interesting pyschological thriller, where we begin to believe the main character actually imagined her daughter and was completely crazy from grief. But then it turns out her daughter actually WAS kidnapped, and every single one of her crazy and far fetched ridiculous theories were right, and terrorists actually DID kill her husband and kidnapped the daughter to get her to look crazy. It ends up as just another generic action flick with guns, explosions, and cheesy one liners.
  • In-story example: in Addams Family Values, Wednesdey, in Crowning Moment Of Awesome, transforms a cheesy Pocahontas musical into an Nightmare Fuel action play.
  • Million Dollar Baby begins as a scrappy underdog sports movie and turns into a thoughtful but depressing drama about spinal cord injury and euthanasia.
  • This is one of Alfred Hitchcock's favorite tropes, and one that's unfortunately a bit spoiled by how famous his movies have become:
    • Psycho in its first third, is a heist film, with Marion and Sam scheming to embezzle $40,000. Then Marion checks into the Bates hotel under an assumed name and it becomes a psycho slasher film.
    • The Birds starts off as either a quirky romance between two awkwardly charming leads, or perhaps a psychological thriller featuring a paranoid Stalker With A Crush. It's only as the A-plot's gradually eclipsed by the inexplicable bird attacks that the movie's true nature as apocalyptic horror starts to become apparent.
  • Due to its episodic nature, and a rotating set of writers and directors, the Star Trek movies tend to shift dramatically from one genre to another with each film. The first movie was intended as a slow, philosophical 2001-style epic, but critics and audiences simply found it boring, and completely at odds with the feel of the television series. The franchise was dramatically reworked as more of a naval adventure in space, and the next film, The Wrath Of Khan, was a huge success. The third, fifth, seventh and ninth movies aimed more for mysticism and a quasi-fantasy feel (and, perhaps not coincidentally, the odd-numbered Trek movies were all considered to be cursed by inferiority before the latest movie came out), the fourth one broke the pattern as a Fish Out Of Temporal Water comedy, the sixth movie features a Tom Clancy-style political adventure paralleling the end of the Cold War, and the eighth movie involves Body Horror and the crew caught in a Survival Horror situation. The most recent movie combines a Cosmic Retcon with another shift in tone, unfolding as a more lighthearted, fast paced action-adventure story than the previous movies.
  • Hancock starts off as a lighthearted comedy about a Jerkass Super Hero and the ad executive who tries to reform him. Then halfway through the movie it turns into some weird mythological romantic tragedy something-or-other...
  • L.A. Confidential started, and was advertized, as a movie about celebrities from the 50s starring Danny De Vito. It then quickly became a movie about Police Corruption staring Guy Pearce and James Cromwell. Also, somwehere in there, there was something about hookers getting plastic surgery to look like celebrities or something.
    • This really only qualifies as a genre shift if you knew nothing about the book the film was based on, or James Ellroy's work generally.
  • Devils On The Doorstep changes over the course of its running time from a black comedy to an even blacker drama by the end.
  • The entire Batman franchise tends to go through this (usually depending on the director, and not just the movies either.)
  • The third and final Infernal Affairs film made a Genre Shift from twisty but rational gangster film to all-out Mind Screw Psychological Horror, baffling many fans.
  • ''Them!]] starts out as a detective story, investigating the disappearance of two seperate groups of people in the American Southwest. Then they're attacked by giant irradiated ants.

Literature
  • Something similar to this—the couching of ideas or stories that may be disturbing and/or controversial within a more conventional, non-threatening story—has happened throughout the history of art and literature. Witness Hamlet turning the standard bloodthirsty revenge plot into a more philosophical meditation on the human condition, thus making a form of this Older Than Steam.
    • Indeed, a lost play by the same title (c. 1589-1594), which if written by Shakespeare would have been one of his earliest works, was apparently a far more straightforward revenge tragedy (and according to one source, not a particularly good one either).
  • The Hedge Knight, the prequel for A Song Of Ice And Fire, reads first as an romantic tale about an up-and-coming knight, but anyone familiar with the author knows it'll turn into tragedy.
  • In Jeff Lindsay's Dexter series, about a serial killer who only kills bad guys (on which the TV show of the same name was based), the first two books (Darkly Dreaming Dexter and Dearly Devoted Dexter) are mainstream crime thrillers aside from the unusual protagonist, but the third (Dexter in the Dark) takes a sharp left turn into dark fantasy territory, pitting Dexter against supernatural forces, ancient conspiracies, and Cosmic Horror.
  • Rant by Chuck Palahniuk is a fictional oral biography of... well, that's just it. He's an interesting character, but what we're supposed to think is significant about Buster Casey changes rapidly. There's a brief mention early on of a rabies epidemic, but by the end it's revealed that he is his own adopted father, and biological father, and grandfather, and great-grandfather, and the villain, via car accident induced time travel.
  • The Discworld series started off as fairly straightforward parodies of Heroic Fantasy. Later novels have been much more heavily focused on social satire, with heavy emphasis on philosophy and topics such as morality, class warfare, religion, theoretical physics, and modern city life. It works mostly because they're still bloody hilarious, though a few of the more strongly Fantasy focused fans have lost interest, or at least prefer the early books. Ditto for those who don't especially share Pratchett's political views.
  • The Harry Potter books started off as a slightly tongue-in-cheek Urban Fantasy and gradually became an epic High Fantasy in which Anyone Can Die. JK Rowling planed from the start that the series would become Darker And Edgier as Harry (and his readers) grew up.
  • In How NOT To Write A Novel, they have a section ("One Ring to Rule them All" said the Old Cowpoke) on genre shifts handled poorly. Opens with a woman writing in a diary hinting at a romance novel (an obvious Affectionate Parody of Bridget Jones' Diary), ends with an entry of OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD HE'S NOT HUMAN.
  • P.C. Hodgell's Chronicles Of The Kencyrath series starts out in Low Fantasy territory in the first book, God Stalk; while there's foreshadowing there, the wider High Fantasy plot doesn't really emerge until the second book, Dark of the Moon. The shift alienated some readers, who wanted more of the same style of book as the first.
  • Orson Scott Card's Treasure Box turns out to be one of his "tales of dread," but you don't realize it's in that genre until well into the story, about the same time the main character does.
  • Rangers Apprentice begins in classic fantasy style - young orphaned hero has to fight against an evil sorcerer controlling an army of monsters. However, in later books there's not a shred of the fantastic to be seen, indeed one story deals with a plot about an old man using primitive science to fake magic.
  • Nikolai Gogol's classic short story "The Overcoat" is set in nineteenth-century Russia and appears to have no elements of the supernatural at all. Then, in the last few pages, the main character dies and comes back as a zombie.
  • The Saga Of The Noble Dead starts off looking like a very standard "vampire hunter" story that happens to have a High Fantasy setting rather than the more common modern one. From the end of the second book on, it becomes obvious that this is, in fact, a High Fantasy epic that happens to heavily involve vampires.

Live Action TV
  • Lost was initially presented as just a drama about people stranded on a desert island, but increasingly seems to have become a sci-fi/fantasy show in disguise.
    • In its defense, though, some bizarre elements such as the (for the better part of the first season unseen) "Monster" and the polar bears (on a tropical island!) were there from the start, so it's not like the show initially pretended to be a different genre altogether. For that matter, the 4th episode, "Walkabout", revealed that John Locke couldn't walk until after the plane crash.
    • Also, the show was originally conceived as a drama called Nowhere, with none of the supernatural elements. The script was pretty much universally loathed at ABC, where it was thought to be boring and uninspired. J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof were brought in to Re Tool, came up with the idea that the island is a character in itself, and the rest is history. However, the guy who wrote the boring script still gets 60% of the creator credit.
    • The show was meant to be revealed as a sci-fi show at the start... but the network decided not to let the producers make it "too sci-fi" at the start, so they cut references to how time works on the island among other things.
      • When all's said and done, the show went from being being more subtle SF/F to full-blown science fiction in Season 3 when Desmond started time-travelling, and cemented that change in Season 4 with an episode written with the specific purpose of smacking the viewers around the head with the message "LOST IS SCIENCE FICTION".
  • M*A*S*H famously began drifting away from being a Black Comedy after the departure of Colonel Blake and Trapper John, and by the time Radar left in the 8th season, it had lost most of its dark humorous edge and has rebranded itself a "Dramedy."
  • Passions started out as a typical soap opera and quickly mutated into a supernatural weird-fest. Ditto for Dark Shadows.
  • The early episodes of lonelygirl15 were in the style of a realistic video blog. Over time, it turned into a sort of soap opera/drama/thriller hybrid with evil cults, conspiracies, guns and laser beams. For an example of just how different the show has become, compare classic episode "Proving Science Wrong!"[1] to one of the early season 2 episodes, "Home Invasion"[2].
  • House was pitched to Fox as a show somewhat along the lines of Diagnosis Murder, where the doctors use their medical skills to solve crimes. It quickly moved away from this and became a drama centered on the fact that "everybody lies", from the patients to House himself.
  • Star Trek Deep Space Nine is a slightly odd example since, in hindsight, the static setting seems an obvious way to do more arc-based storylines and use lots of recurring characters but, in the beginning, it was just normal Star Trek with a gimmick—the only important difference was that the alien of the week from the Planet Of Hats came to them instead of the other way 'round thanks to the wormhole discovered in the first episode. The first season is almost indistinguishable from other Treks, and only when the characters are established do the writers start doing different things.
    • The story is a bit more complicated. The beginning of DS9 is basically Babylon Five in the Star Trek Verse. JMS stated he offered the outline of the series first season to Paramount years before both series started and while opting not to do it, they took it as an Inspired By for the continuation of the franchise. If you compare the first season of both shows, the similarity in tone and premise pretty much speaks for itself. After this, both shows drift apart heavily explaining the Genre Shift. Of course, whether you opt to believe this or not is another matter.
      • The two differ mainly in the details; the broad strokes are very similar. Sheridan gets the super-advanced Whitestar, Sisko gets the similarly-advanced (at least it seems like it at first) Defiant. Sisko becomes a leading figure in the Dominion War, Sheridan in the Shadow War. Sheridon rebels against his government (which sits out the Shadow war) and ultimately overthrows it, while Sisko... um... doesn't. (He does, however, deal with a conspiracy or two within his own government, and puts down an attmepted military rebellion agianst it.)
      • B5 changes commanders in the second season; Sisko stays in charge but changes hairstyles.
  • For much of its long life, The Bill was a Police Procedural, but when a new executive producer took over in 2002 it rapidly shifted into a Crime Time Soap, alienating many long-term fans.
  • Baywatch Nights. Goes from action to sci-fi in season two.
  • Look Around You is one of the biggest users of this trope—the first and second seasons are, for all intents and purposes, different shows. The first series is a series of 10 minute spoofs of educational videos from the 1970s, while the second is a 30 minute studio-comedy parody of shows such as Tomorrows World. Apart from a couple of shared Running Gags and a brief mention of shared minor characters, the two series are connected only by having the same writers.
  • As lampshaded by the announcer, following the move from TechTV to G4, the video game review show X Play became less about reviewing games and more about employing successive "lame vaudeville gags". At one point, the show was able to provide thorough reviews of at least five games in one single airing, but thanks to the space the gags took up, they were barely able to get through three. They have become less frequent recently, and X Play now only has one or two sketches a week.
    • Really it can be argued that the opposite then happened. It used to be a sketch comedy/video game review show, but now it's just about the reviews (and even then, there's only about two an episode) and video game news (that are significantly less comical) as it's the only thing on G4 still about video games, and X Play has simply become a 22-minute distillation what G4 was 24 hours a day not even a few years before.
  • Red Dwarf has had a number of shifts throughout its run. The show was was pitched as, and started out as, a Slice Of Life situation comedy with a spaceship as the setting, that morphed into a more action-oriented Sci-Fi Comedy in its third series, eventually morphing into more of an Action Comedy by its sixth Series, then more of a Sci-fi Dramedy in Series 7, and then, of all things, a Prison Comedy in Series 8. The shifts in tone were relatively subtle, but if it weren't for the consistent characters, episodes from different series would appear to be from completely different progams.
  • The Practice started as a gritty legal show focused on a firm that struggled to make the rent and convince clients to pay for traffic court. By the time the show was over, the firm was representing increasingly bizarre clients, getting cases related to current events, winning impossible cases, and having endless episodes about the lawyers' personal lives. Boston Legal completed the transition and added comedic elements. The universe therefore shifted from legal procedural/drama, to a soap opera/drama, and then finally to a soap opera/dramedy. Watching an early episode of the first show and a late episode of the second show is highly jarring.
  • Single episode example from Torchwood; "Countrycide" contained no elements of the supernatural or aliens.
  • Likewise, the Supernatural episodes "The Benders" and "Family Remains".
  • Doctor Who, the parent show of Torchwood, can and frequently does change genres from one story to the next. A show whose premise is that the main character travels throughout time and space lends itself to this.
  • 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' started out as an action/comedy, but the comedic elements were increasingly downplayed as the series continued and drama took the foreground.

Video Games
  • Max Payne likes to tease the player with hints and suggestions of genre shift. For example, the first portion of the game seems to be a shooter set in a "normal" world with normal enemies, specifically a mafia group that the titular Payne had infiltrated, but then was exposed after being framed for murdering his partner. Following the connections up the hierarchy leads to a Hellfire Club-like nightclub called Ragnarok, where multiple references to The End of the World are brought up, and it seems the mafia heavy who uses it as a front is worshiping demons and practicing dark magic. However, it turns out that he's just a little insane and full of crap, even if he was killing people in his demented worship—no dark magic, just lots of creepy atmosphere, and then it goes back to what it was. Well, with a few bizarre dream sequences that seem to have installed a door in the Fourth Wall.
  • Drakengard starts off as Heroic Fantasy, but slowly and surely turns into a Hack And Slash version of Survival Horror, the horror aspect being the emphasis here. When things start to really get weird, they hang a lampshade on it when one of the mission descriptions is "Time and space fall apart, and the fantasy begins."
  • The Monster Rancher series started life as a Nintendo Hard Mons series that blended elements of a management simulation with action-based RPG combat. Monster Rancher EVO, however, threw it all out the window and was an ordinary RPG with weird, half-and-half combat (half "classic Monster Rancher" style and half standard RPG) and a stats system based on playing a rhythm mini-game. No, really. It also added towns, missions, almost completely axed tournaments, and it had a bizarre circus theme.
  • Halo: Combat Evolved: Two words: The Flood.
    • And the Trigens in Far Cry.
    • And the cannibal mutants in Uncharted: Drake's Fortune.
      • Seems to be toyed with in Uncharted 2 when you bump into what seems like a yeti-type monster while in the mountains. However, later on it turns out to be a bunch of apparently bullet resistant natives in suits.
  • In Medal Of Honor: Airborne, after 5 missions of largely realistic gameplay based on actual historic World War II campaigns, the final mission throws bulletproof, heavy-machinegun-wielding Nazi Super Soldiers at you, and takes place in, as Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw put it, "a giant concrete tower that can only be described as a Doom Fortress."
  • Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath starts out as the Oddworld equivalent of a western. Mysterious Bounty Hunter? Check. Gun toting outlaws? Check. Hick Towns populated by chicken men? ...Um, Check. But then in the final third of the game, after stumbling into an ambush set up by the Big Bad, and getting hit with a Tomato Surprise, the game shifts to a more traditional Oddworld setting as you help the native Grubbs overcome the Big Bad. This change completely overhauls the game. Stranger's costume changes, the concept of Moolah (and therefore the concept of enemy bounties) is removed (enemies are turned into ammo instead. Don't ask), the soundtrack changes from spaghetti western music to epic orchestrated pieces, the enemies change from gruff outlaws to military Mooks, new gameplay mechanics are added, and the scenery colors shift from browns and reds to blues and greys.
  • The Chzo Mythos goes from fairly conventional (but good) horror, to SPACE horror, to Cosmic Horror.
  • Similarily, Earthbound starts off as pure humour, then goes to sci-fi at the Cave of the Past, then shifts to Cosmic Horror at the end of said cave.
  • In terms of in-game Genre Shift, Spore goes from the hunt/gather adventure-game-esque "Cell" and "Creature" stages, to real-time strategy for "Tribal" and "Civilization", to a Wide Open Sandbox for "Space".
  • Okami gets a bit of a shift towards the end, from a feudal Japan mythical fantasy to a feudal Japan Sci-Fi fantasy.
    • To Elaborate: Near the end, you see Kaguya, a woman born from a Bamboo shoot in the myth, have a rocket that looks like a bamboo shoot, and in the last part of the game, the eponymous Ark of Yamato turns out to be a fucking spaceship, also implying that these monsters you've been facing... They're aliens...
  • The stealth gameplay in the Metal Gear Solid series remains mostly unaltered, but the story and style subtly shift between games.
    • Metal Gear Solid is gritty modern military (unless playing The Twin Snakes).
    • Metal Gear Solid 2 is postmodern magic realist.
    • Metal Gear Solid 3 is shamelessly martini-flavored Spy Fiction.
    • Metal Gear Solid 4 is relatively gritty military science fiction.
    • Also the final boss battles: MGS1 ends with a fist fight and chase sequence. MGS2 ends with a sword duel. MGS4 ends with hand-to-hand brawl. MGS3 avoids this, as stealth is a very effective tactic when fighting The Boss.
  • KOEI's Dynasty Warriors was a 1997 PS1 Fighting Game using characters from the Romance Of The Three Kingdoms storyline; starting with 2 for the PS2 it morphed into a Hack And Slash that over time became possibly more popular than the turn-based strategy game (one of KOEI's flagship series), and in turn spawned its own Genre Shift, the Empires standalone games (for Dynasty Warriors 4 through 6, plus Samurai Warriors 2: Empires) that uses Turn Based Strategy between the battles, where the dynamic focused less on enemy commander defeat and more on controlling bases, which would end up getting worked into Dynasty Warriors 6.
    • Dynasty Warriors 4 had a so-called Duel mode (certain officers could issue challenges which if accepted would turn into 45-second duels inside an enclosed square that however used the same controls and camera as normal gameplay), while Warriors Orochi 2 has a versus mode that harkens back to the original Dynasty Warriors game in being viewed sideways.
  • The original Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni game started out in the style of a basic Dating Sim, but shifted gradually into the horror and Gorn over the course of the arc. Later on, starting around Tsumihoroboshi-hen but becoming most evident in Matsuribayashi-hen, though, the series slowly shifted into being less about horror and more about The Power Of Friendship to Screw Destiny.
    • The first arc of the sequel series, Umineko No Naku Koro Ni, is a definite horror story once the murders start. However, while the later arcs have more gorn, the simple fact that there's a Big Bad to be confronted and argued with shifts it over much more to a "mystery" feel.
      • There has also been a running joke in the fandom that, given the focus Umineko places into the various relationships between the characters (George and Shannon, Jessica and Kanon, and ESPECIALLY Beatrice and Battler), the series' true genre is in fact romance. Which might actually be true, if Ep6 is to be believed.
  • The first Dune game was an Adventure Game. Dune II established the Real Time Strategy genre.
  • Perfect Dark is a first-person shooter through and through. But while it starts off as a spy thriller similar to Goldeneye (to which Perfect Dark is a Spiritual Successor), the story becomes increasingly sci-fi to where the final level takes place on an alien planet that's entirely a shrine to war.
  • X3: Reunion has one in the second mission, where the space simulator combat of the rest of the game is replaced by an incredibly buggy, poorly implemented rail shooter sequence.
    • Not to mention the very annoying banter between your pilot and the pirates.
  • Resident Evil began as an atmospheric horror series, the fifth numerical installment, which took place largely in broad daylight, substituted fast, intelligent opponents for the slow, plodding (but frightening) zombies of the original trilogy and supplied the player with ample ammunition and explosives to deal with them. The fourth game has similar gameplay to the fifth, but still had a horror tone to it.
  • Magical Starsign does this, in much the same way Earth Bound does.
  • Arguably, the game Psychonauts. During the first parts of the game, the game is very quirky, and quite a few jokes are made, but then, it develops into a fight against a conspiracy involving stealing brains of fellow Psychonauts, from that point on, the game's humour becomes a little darker, the minds more and more creepy, and the final level being a rather infamous example of Nightmare Fuel (And Scrappy Level).
    • Though to be fair, the game is pretty dark at the start when you look into their mental vaults, or after you complete the game.
  • The original Star Control is an action/strategy sci-fi game with very little plot. The sequel is a plot-heavy action/adventure game, and much better for it. The creators have said that this was quite deliberate; they weren't too excited by the idea of a sequel that was just more of the same.
  • The first three Warcraft games were all RTS games where you could build and command entire armies In fact, Warcraft more or less refined the RTS format. World Of Warcraft, however, is a MMORPG where you command ONE character. But the first three games provide most of the backstory, and there's even places in the World of Warcraft where you can site where specific events in the previous games happened. For example, the throneroom above Undercity was directly based on a cinematic from Warcraft III where Arthas betrayed his people and murdered his father.
    • The shift from RTS to RPG started in Warcraft III. Although it is definitely an RTS, you can recruit heroes that level up, learn new abilities, and carry items and equipment. The maps also contained many mooks that could be slain to level up heroes and earn treasure.
  • Thunder Force is an arena shooter. Thunder Force II is part arena, part sidescroller. Every TF game past II is a sidescroller.
  • The independent game Suguri is a side-scrolling shoot-em-up, while its sequel, Acceleration of Suguri, is a one-on-one arena shooter.
  • Eversion does this intentionally.
  • The cute and sweet dating sim series Angelique did this a few times for spin-off titles, but the best example is the RPG "Tenkuu no Requiem" which flirts with getting Darker And Edgier by bringing in a group of villians who aren't afraid to kick some dogs. (Quite literally in the accompanying Radio Drama.) This was a temporary shift though as following games returned to the series main genre.

Web Comics
  • El Goonish Shive's change from comedy to dramedy was apparently planned from the very beginning.
  • Ditto Unicorn Jelly, which goes from a quirky almost-but-not-quite Fantasy series (the main character is a witch with apparently no magic) to science fiction spanning hundreds of thousands of years and multiple universes. A Powers Of 10 map on the site really hits it home, going from the main character's home out out into the multiverse.
  • College Roomies From Hell is looking like it might be doing this. The strip started out as the standard light college campus humor, but little hints and bits have added up so that it looks like it might have always been intended to end up with an apocalyptic ending. If the author has stated for sure one way or another, I haven't heard.
  • Wapsi Square started out as a lightweight and slightly surreal urban Sit Com, but gradually began adding elements of Science Fiction and/or Fantasy with the introduction of characters who might be gods, immortals or aliens, the concept of humans possessing (or being possessed by) inner demons, and a 12,000 year old mystery. In spite of all this, the sitcom elements are still present, and often just as strong as ever.
  • Penny And Aggie began as a relatively light-hearted, family-friendly Betty And Veronica comic with brief story arcs and a long stretch of unconnected gag-a-day strips. Word Of God says this was because the creators tried to pitch it as a syndicated newspaper comic. When the syndicates failed to show interest, the creators took advantage of the Webcomic medium's greater flexibility by increasing the drama-to-comedy ratio and by introducing more experimental storytelling techniques ("Second Looks," "20 2020 Pennies"), mature themes ("Behind Closed Doors," "Awakening"), and arcs running several months ("Dinner for Six," "The Popsicle Wars").
  • Sluggy Freelance, while quite often is still the Science Fiction/Fantasy/Slice Of Life comedy it started out as, has made increasing use of darker, more dramatic storylines as it's continued.
  • FOG Club began life as a romcom about four college anime fans, before - with little to no explanation - having the cast sucked through a portal into an alternate dimension based on Trigun, where they fought an evil scientist called Falco Amadeus and an android duplicate of the main character.
  • Achewood shifts back and forth between domestic, observational strips that find humor in the mundane, and surreal fantasy arcs involving Mexican Magical Realism, three-hundred-man outdoor brawls, and Heaven burning down.
  • Numerous webcomics have experienced Cerebus Syndrome, which is somewhat similar to, but not the same as, Genre Shift.
  • Questionable Content started out about a post-college Indie rocker, his friends, and his weird little Robot Buddy. Then Faye got her tragic backstory, Pintsize got increasingly destructive and psychotic, Raven got kinda skanky, etc, until you can barely recognize the characters from the early strips. Some call this "character development," but as to what extent this is true... well, Your Milage May Vary.
  • Yu Me Dream - ye gods, does it ever?

Web Original

Western Animation
  • The first two seasons of Moral Orel mostly consisted of Orel wanting to do the right thing, but ultimately interpreting the lessons wrong and taking them to their literal end. However, the last two episodes of season two and the entirety of the third season took a sharp turn into dark territory, going from a satire of authority and conservitism to the semi-deconstruction of the effects of such a setting.
  • The entire first season of Venture Brothers is pretty much just slapstick comedy in a parody setting; season 2 downplays the raw slapstick and up-plays the parody/satire/Deconstruction elements of the show, culminating in a funny but fairly serious season finale. Seasons 3 & 4 still feature a lot of humor, and it's definitely still a comedy show, but there's been a significant shift from it being a parody of sci-fi/action/everything to now being a genuine example of those genres.

Fan Fiction
  • Gaijin started as a darkly comic Self Insert Fic in which the SI character was essentially Murphy's Law incarnate (despite being more powerful than he had any right to be). Then he started disguising himself as Spider-Man. Then more analogues of Marvel characters started appearing, the most recent as of this writing being the Fantastic Four and "Tako-sama" (Doctor Octopus)...

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