Executive Meddling / Live-Action TV

The most popular and widely broadcast form of entertainment unsurprisingly gets the most meddling.

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General executive meddling

• Virtually all American television shows produced before the late 1960s were subject to a particularly malevolent form of Executive Meddling. It was common at the time for stations in the Southeastern United States to edit shows to remove black characters who weren't in stereotypic roles — maids, criminals, sharecroppers, etc. If the black characters were pivotal to the story, then the episode, and in some cases the entire show, would simply not be broadcast in the southern market (one station in Jackson, Mississippi, WLBT, lost their license because of this and the outright refusal to carry their network's newscasts because of their critical coverage of the Civil Rights Movement). There was therefore a tremendous amount of pressure on producers to not cast a black actor unless the character he or she was playing was a demeaning stereotype, because losing out on the southern market meant losing out on a lot of money.
• Parodied by a sketch with Rowan Atkinson & Hugh Laurie in which Shakespeare (Hugh Laurie) complains about the changes that Rowan Atkinson's executive is making to his script of Hamlet. The twist is that the changes made by the executive result in the play we know today. The sketch can be found here.
• In The '50s, several Game Show producers started rigging their shows by feeding answers to the contestants that they wanted to win. When rigging was discovered on 21 and Dotto, those shows were yanked off the air and investigated. This led to the Game Show industry being hit with plenty of regulations to make sure that they were absolutely free of rigging, a rare example of negative meddling spawning positive meddling.
• Nearly all reality TV shows go through this. In fact, the term "reality TV" may actually be something of a misnomer these days, since very few of them actually depict straight reality. Very often, executives will step in and try to manufacture drama for the sake of "keeping things interesting", such as telling two close friends or family members to pretend to hold a grudge against one another over a minor slight. In extreme cases, Manipulative Editing or props hung up in a person's house or room by the crew may be used to completely change someone's personality.
• The industry wide executive meddling known as the Rural Purge. TV programming had been dominated by shows set in rural areas such as The Beverly Hillbillies and Green Acres and even variety shows like Hee Haw. Starting in the 1970's, advertisers and TV executives began to perceive these shows as out of touch with the growing suburban and urban youth (aka advertiser's target audience). Dozens of popular shows were cancelled in favor of more "relevant" fare featuring more diverse casts.
• There is also the altering or pulling of reruns due to various rights issues would be considered executive meddling. This tends to mostly happen when they're released on DVD, usually manifested in changes to the show's soundtrack because the asking prices to certain mainstream tunes cannot (or will not) be met. Most infamously seen in the DVD release of WKRP in Cincinnati's first season, and any TV release to come from CBS DVD since the inception of CBS/Paramount.
  • And how about Vanity Plate plastering?
  • There has also been the extremely annoying habit of releasing Edited for Syndication episodes on DVD. Perhaps the most infamous example of this was ALF, where the arrogant studio executives continously ignored the complaints from fans and released the entire series in a butchered form.
  • This as well happened to Mission Hill, where every single song that was played in an episode, except the theme song ("Italian Leather Sofa" by Cake), was replaced with cheaper music in order to be released on DVD.
  • This reason is probably the largest that Daria took so long to come to DVD. The show at the time used every single song played on Top 40 and/or alternative radio during the show's run. This meant that the show used hundreds of songs, most only 5 or so seconds, the longest being the credit closer. The two movies released, Is It Fall Yet? and Is It College Yet?, have their music intact; the two regular episodes included as bonus material are silent, beyond the opening, actual speech, and a generic closer. The full series release replaces all but a handful of songs with mood-appropriate music. Not a perfect solution, but it works well enough, all things considered.

American Broadcasting Company (ABC)

• An old-timey example: Harry O, which ran from 1974-76, was conceived as a realistic take on detective dramas such as Mannix and CHiPS. The titular Harry Orwell (David Janssen) was a cop forced into semi-retirement from a bullet lodged in his spine. Because no surgeon will touch it, Harry is stuck with permanent pain (a precursor to House) and must supplement his disability checks by working as a private eye. Perhaps most shocking of all, Harry's Cool Car is a pile of junk; until he has enough money to fix it, he'll have to rely on the city bus routes, of which he has encyclopedic knowledge. Film Noir by nature, the show was retooled halfway into its first season to be more sexy, with the middle-aged Janssen juggling beautiful women (including a pre-fame Farrah Fawcett)^note something Janssen may not have minded, since he did have a fondness for wine, women and song, and his spinal cord making a miraculous recovery (a simple shove was once enough to knock his lights out permanently). Ratings indeed improved, but the president of ABC decided to take the network in a different direction and canceled the series in favor of Charlie's Angels. D'oh. (Or not, given how that series turned out.)
• The 1983 ABC TV movie "The Day After" suffered from such severe executive meddling in so many ways and by so many different executives that its director vowed he would never work in television again.
• Lois & Clark suffered from two instances of executive meddling:
  • The first instance was between seasons one and two, when ABC forced the writers to retool the show. They added more action (the show was about Lois and Clark, not so much about Superman), more sex, less Cat Grant (despite being a nymphomaniac gossip columnist, they'd rather sex everyone else up than have an extraneous character in a show that was becoming less and less about the Daily Planet), and they switched Jimmy Olsen out for a younger actor (some fans think it was because the first guy looked too much like the lead; it was likely both).
  • The second instance was their insistence on removing focus from the relationship. Clark couldn't reveal his Secret Identity. They could only kinda sorta hint that she already knew. When he proposed to her, they gave them a whole arc devoted to their wedding. The executives made them switch Lois out for an (evil?) clone at the last minute. They finally got married towards the end (and after so many false starts, the episode was literally called "Swear To God, This Time We're Not Kidding"), and found a foundling. And the Execs canceled it because it had "run its course." It would not have "run its course" if not for the fake-out wedding, after which they lost a large amount of their viewership.
• ABC executives tried to meddle around with Lost a few times:
  • At one point in the season 2 finale, the foot of an otherwise missing statue was revealed, sporting only 4 toes. As stated by executive producers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse here, the statue was originally stated to have 6 toes in the script, but the network asked them to change it to 4 toes. According to their own words, Damon and Carlton didn't mind as long as it wasn't 5 toes.
  • Lindelof also revealed here that ABC had mandated some changes to the original draft of the season 2 episode "Dave", which implies that all the events from the entire show had merely taken place inside the mind of Hurley, one of the main characters who had once been an inmate in a psych ward. Supposedly, ABC execs were afraid that the episode might offer an explanation for the mysteries of the show as a whole, years before it would actually end. Since the general implication is still included in the final episode, it's uncertain what changes, if any, were made to the draft to accommodate ABC's concerns.
  • Originally, Jack was supposed to be a one-shot character shown only in the pilot (and played by Michael Keaton), who would be killed off by the Monster before too long. Instead of Jack, it would have been Kate leading the Losties. The ABC executives allegedly had a problem with this, protesting that it would lead to reactions of "betrayal, anger, and bewilderment" in the audience, and insisted that Jack be kept on as a main character, permanently altering the show's dynamic.
  • Before fans of Kate as she exists now get uppity about this change, Kate was going to be slightly older, not a fugitive and traveling with her husband whom she believed was alive somehow even though he had been in the rear section of the plane. If this sounds familiar, it is because those elements were incorporated into the recurring character of Rose.
• The firing of Brooke Smith, Grey's Anatomy's Dr. Hahn, for inexplicably offending network sensibilities by portraying a popular 40-something lesbian character, may well go down as one of the most offensive examples of Executive Meddling ever.
  • Later, the executives at ABC cut Grey's Anatomy overall season budget, which led to Eric Dane's departure and his character being killed off.
• Home Improvement actually depicted in-universe Binford Tools executives repeatedly meddling with Tool Time, the Show Within a Show. Among examples were an executive threatening to fire Tim if he didn't promote an inferior power tool on Tool Time, another exec trying to make Tim fire Al in favor of someone Younger and Hipper (he didn't want to fire Al himself since his grandmother was an Al fan), making the cast wear tacky yellow jumpsuits with the Binford logo on them (except Heidi, who got a yellow bikini), allowing only Binford tools to be used on the show and confiscating all non-Binford tools, and finally trying to Trash the Set for a Grand Finale of Tool Time by staging an accident. (Ironically, the last idea was overturned, but Tim ended up accidentally starting a fire on the set, nearly trashing it except the firefighters were on hand.)
• Positive example: When Penn & Teller did a special for ABC, a trick involving Teller "drowning" in a water tank came in the middle of the show, resulting in an uncommented-on "resurrection". The network suggested that the trick come at the end, leaving Teller "dead". As Teller would later tell The Onion AV Club, "I was amazed and stunned... I think they were absolutely right [about the water tank trick placement]. This may be the first time I've ever said that sentence in relation to some television activity. They were right."
• The Outer Limits (1963) was rife with executive meddling from ABC. First, creator Leslie Stevens wanted to do a serious science-fiction show, but the network wanted a "Monster of the Week" kind of show. Stevens and producer Joseph Stefano reluctantly agreed, calling the monsters "bears", from the old vaudeville saying "bring out the bear", as in when the audience is restless, bring out the dancing bear. The original air date for the episode "A Feasibility Study" was delayed for months because a network censor objected to the ending where a community sacrificed itself to save the rest of Earth from being enslaved. The last straw for Stevens and Stefano was when the network decided to move the show against Jackie Gleason for the second season. They walked. The network then put one of their own executives in charge of the show, in a hope to keep the budget under control. It ended up being cancelled in mid-season.
• The American version of Whose Line Is It Anyway? came extremely close to suffering from this. The higher-ups wanted the show to appeal to a younger audience, so they were going to get rid of most of the cast (particularly Colin) and replace them with celebrities with no improv experience. Luckily, the producers of the show (including executive producers Drew and Ryan) managed to override all the ABC execs' ideas, bringing the show across the pond with nearly the exact same format as the original. The only meddling that remained was that the credits reading was removed for being too "weird"—but it was brought back in season 2 when the execs found out that people were switching channels during the vanilla credits.
  • The finalized show suffers a more active form of Executive Meddling: the producers will step in and veto game ideas and order redos if they don't like certain elements. (Like vetoing "Songs of the Mortician" for the game Greatest Hits, prompting Greg to snark, "Wouldn't want dead people calling in.") In one famous example, the audience suggested "Cosby and Hitler" for the name of an unlikely Sitcom pair, only to get shot down because of the Hitler reference. The rest of the episode is a Moment of Awesome for the performers as they work in Take Thats against the director for the veto. This is apparently one the producers will cop to, because the final episode shows all of this, even the part where "Cosby and Hitler" is shot down.
    • Several games were unaired in the first season, probably because they were a little too afraid to air some of them. Part of the reason was that Ryan Stiles and Greg Proops, whenever they messed up on a Hoedown, swore like mad. Later seasons they didn't censor as much.
• In what is probably one of the worst examples of this trope, executive pressure regarding the show's declining ratings (from 34 million to 10 million viewers—although that's still more than Game of Thrones today) forced David Lynch to reveal Laura Palmer's killer in the second season of Twin Peaks, essentially guaranteeing its decline and fall. In a lot of these cases, Executive Meddling is merely irritating, ludicrous, confounding, or, on some rare occasions, justified. In this case, however, it was fatal. The identity of Laura's killer was the central mystery of the series and they wound up having to reveal it in the middle of Season 2, thirteen episodes away from the finale. Without the focus provided by the search for the killer, the show quickly ran out of steam; the sub-plots, which before added colour to the story, soon became all Twin Peaks had to offer. The rationale for this case of Executive Meddling was ludicrous; attempting to end Twin Peaks' ratings slide by revealing the identity of the killer was akin to trying to stop the Titanic from sinking by blowing a hole through the middle of it.
• In a blunder reminiscent of the rounding of Spock's ears in early Star Trek promotional material, some executives at ABC insisted that Happy Days dress the character of Fonzie in a red nylon windbreaker and loafers, because they were afraid that Fonzie's black leather jacket and biker boots would make him out to be a greaser (those 1950s thugs who actually did wear leather, ride motorcycles, and basically said, "Fuck you!" to polite society by committing petty crimes). After the pilot, the network compromised, agreeing to let Fonzie wear the jacket and boots only when he was on or beside the motorcycle, so that they could be perceived as "safety gear". Naturally, this spawned the Running Gag where Fonzie took his motorcycle everywhere, even into living rooms and stores, in order to completely eliminate any moment where they would be forced to put him in the windbreaker and loafers. Audiences were just as non-repulsed by the character of Fonzie as they had been by the character of Spock nearly a decade earlier; and once he became the show's breakout character, the leather jacket and boots suddenly, mysteriously, became far less threatening to the executives, to the point that they later demanded that the producers rename the show to Fonzie's Happy Days, or just simply Fonzie. Threatened resignations from the entire cast (including Henry Winkler) nixed this idea.
• Battlestar Galactica was originally intended to be a series of TV movies, but the network overruled this to have it has a weekly hour-long drama. As the producers feared, they could not produce enough story material fast enough for a weekly series and the budget was not enough to maintain the production values. As a result, the series suffered from an overuse of Stock Footage of the visual effects and they had to resort to recycled plots of westerns to try to keep pace. As such, although still popular, the network decided to cancel the expensive series after one season.
• The Battlestar Galactica spin-off Galactica 1980 had to deal with this constantly. Its spot in the day-to-day schedule caused it to be labeled as a "kid's show" by the network, forcing them to work kid-friendly Aesops into every episode along with a cast full of unprofessional kids, stage moms, and teachers that insisted that they were from on high when they told the show's executives something. The show's ABC censor also apparently saw something wrong with everything, making production almost impossible. She even had problem with the mention of meatballs in one episode, thinking that it was some kind of innuendo. The director got her back for this, sprinkling several more meatball jokes throughout the rest of the episode and its second part.
• Aaron Sorkin fought vicious battles with ABC over Sports Night, most notably in regards to the laugh track (he hated it, ABC wanted it). Interestingly, the Executive Meddling was introduced into the show itself as a Reality Subtext plot point; most of the second (and final) season focuses on the fictional show's fictional executives meddling and planning to cancel it for low ratings. The plot is a representation of what was going on behind the scenes at ABC.
• Scrubs got a beautiful send-off and series wrap at the end of its eighth season. For some reason, courtesy of Bill Lawrence, it then had a ninth season with a third of the original cast.
• Castle had an in-universe example in season 2, when the Body of the Week, a late-night talk show host played by Tom Bergeron, was poisoned because the network execs forced him to fire his best friend and hire a Younger and Hipper replacement.
• The reason the first season of Baretta in 1975 had an instrumental theme instead of the vocal version heard from season two onwards is because of this; star Robert Blake had gotten the ball rolling for what ultimately became "Keep Your Eye On The Sparrow" by Dave Grusin and Morgan Ames, but it was nixed because (so the powers that be told Ames and company) "the reason was, you can't open a white show with a black singer." (Times have changed since then.) Several high viewing figures later the song got vocals (by Sammy Davis Jr., instead of original singer Jim Gilstrap).
• Although Roy Huggins created Maverick (one of ABC's first real hits), Warner Bros. compelled him to base the official pilot ("The War Of The Silver Kings") on a property they owned so that they wouldn't have to give him "created by" credit and the royalties thereof (something they hated to do on ANY of their television series in the beginning). Huggins understandably wasn't thrilled.
• One notorious example came with Mork & Mindy. After the first season was a hit, ABC executives wanted Pam Dawber to wear sexier clothing, hoping to bring a fanservice element to the sitcom; Robin Williams and others on the show protested and the idea was scrapped. Later, in order to appeal to younger audiences, Mindy's father and grandmother were written out of the show, and instead of Mork and Mindy hanging out in Mindy's dad's music store, they moved the hangout spot to a downtown delicatessen and wrote in a younger brother and sister couple running the deli as M&M's friends. More bizarre supporting characters were written into the sitcom to play off Robin, and the one-shot character Exidor, a hit with viewers, became a series regular. The second season's theme was given a disco feel, and the series was also moved from its original Thursday night slot to Sundays, resulting the show losing a large chunk of viewers. Near the end of the run, an attempt to win back viewers led to Mork and Mindy becoming an officially married couple, and son Mearth (played by Robin's hero Jonathan Winters) was a regular character. The show went from the #3 show on network television to #60.
• Fridays, ABC's answer to Saturday Night Live was doing well after a rough first season and was poised to take SNL's spot as the edgy, late-night sketch show, owing in part to Saturday Night Live having a horrible sixth season due to budget cuts and Jean Doumanian's incompetence. Sadly, ABC didn't see it as such.^note (Which is odd, considering that the show was an obvious attempt at raking in the same critical acclaim and success that SNL had, only with a more in-your-face sensibility, hipper musical guests, and stronger sense of danger and surprise that many viewers felt wasn't in SNL anymore or never was to begin with.) First, they tried to crack down on content after viewers complained about two sketches during the third episode ("Diner of the Living Dead," about a human couple who stop at a diner for zombies and eat human body parts ^note though a sketch like that today would be lauded as a brilliant parody and be considered viral video gold and "Women Who Spit," about prim and proper ladies with a bad spitting habit), which did nothing but encourage the writers to go further with more sprawling, creative, and subversive works, like "Road to El Salvador,"^note a Bob Hope/Bing Crosby "Road to..." parody movie that has the duo and Dorothy Lamour discover that El Salvador's dictatorship tortures its subjects and that the United States is funding it "The Moral Majority Variety Hour,"^note a variety show run by ultraconservative televangelists "Popeye's Got a Brand New Bag,"^note a live-action cartoon in which Bluto becomes a fascist dictator and Popeye is brought in to start a people's revolution "The Ronnie Horror Picture Show,"^note a The Rocky Horror Picture Show parody in which Brad and Janet meet a cross-dressing Ronald Reagan who creates the ultimate Republican — a member of the Black Panthers, and a Marx Brothers parody centered around the Iranian Revolution. The next blow was one that would do more damage to the show: Nightline had gotten great ratings for covering the Iranian hostage situation in the late 1970s into the early 1980s and ABC execs were wondering why they were giving up Friday nights to some wannabe Saturday Night Live sketch show when they could put Nightline on for an extra day (not that it mattered one way or the other, as most people would be asleep or out dating/partying on Friday night), so Nightline got the 11:30 spot while Fridays aired at midnight. When ABC realized their "mistake," they made up for it by giving Fridays a one-off primetime special in April of 1982 — where it got its butt kicked by Dallas and was subsequently cancelled (and even if ABC didn't interfere, Fridays still would have had a crisis of quality as the show's humor and energy peaked following the infamous "Andy Kaufman fights Michael Richards during a restaurant sketch" stunt and when news hit that Saturday Night Live was firing most of its season sixth cast along with showrunner Jean Doumanian).
• Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. struggled through an excruciatingly stretched-out first season. Marvel and ABC's parent company Disney wanted to use episodes of the show to promote both Thor: The Dark World and Captain America: The Winter Soldier so the show had to go on multiple mini-hiatuses to wait for those films to premiere. Also, because of the game-changing nature of The Winter Soldier, the producers had to use more than a few filler plots to pad out the first season before being able to dive into major plot twists that also marked an uptick in quality and pacing. To make matters even worse, the second half of that first season was also preempted for over two months due to the Sochi Olympics. The execs realized that this wasn't helping the show so, starting from the second season, Agents aired in two, largely uninterrupted blocks, in the fall and in the spring with a winter break to allow for the broadcasting of Agent Carter.
• After a focus group told Mark Goodson that the original format for Trivia Trap (where contestants eliminated wrong answers one-by-one) was a "gameplay flaw", the show was retooled partway through into a generic Q-and-A game in December 1984. It lasted until the following April.
• Kenya Barris and ABC didn't always see eye-to-eye when it came to addressing rather controversial issues about race relations on Blackish, but the final straw came when ABC decided to shelve an episode criticizing President Donald Trump (seen by many as a move by ABC to appease the more conservative audience the network is now trying to attract); this led Barris to depart as showrunner of Black-ish and ended his association with Disney. He then made a deal with Netflix not too long after.
• Invoked in The Mole; the gimmick of this reality show was that while the players were trying to complete tasks to earn money, production had hired a fake contestant to infiltrate the group and sabotage them.

A&E

• Two episodes of the Reality TV show Criss Angel Mindfreak, both dealing with gun-related illusions, including the infamous Bullet Catch trick, were kept from airing by executives due to concerns of viewers attempting the stunts themselves. This wouldn't have been too much of a problem... had the executives not gone so far as to remove the rights to the episodes from the show's Executive Producer and star Criss Angel himself to ensure they couldn't be aired. He eventually regained the rights, and is attempting to gain permission to release them in upcoming DVD specials.

AMC

• AMC is showcasing Executive Meddling brilliantly. They started showing original programming, and they've done so with Emmy Bait that is nothing short of marvelous. Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and The Walking Dead have all been incredibly popular with fans, critics, and award shows. AMC's response? Slash the budgets and fire the show-runners.
  • The Walking Dead merits an expansion. Just before shooting of the second season began, AMC ordered twice the expected episodes, slashed the budget in half and vetoed a big budget flashback episode that would center around the soldier that Rick finds inside the tank during the Pilot and reveal how Dale met Andrea and Amy among other things, even though several scenes had already been filmed. The result was a very questionable second season that moved at a snail's pace and took place mostly on a highway and Herschel's farm. The same plotline was addressed and completed in the source comic in the span of four issues.

BBC

• Doctor Who

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• Screenwipe demonstrates this trope with brutal cynicism by illustrating how an anthropomorphic "Idea" is gradually altered and diluted for the worst as a result of changes requested by multiple television networks.
• Monty Python's Flying Circus occasionally suffered from this. A particularly blatant example is the final sketch of the second series set in a funeral parlour where the funeral director suggests that the grieving man eats his mother. The BBC said they could only broadcast it if the studio audience was shown reacting with disgust. The audience reactions were not particularly convincing.
• Sherlock is a positive example. It was originally suppose to be six hour-long dramas, but executives asked Gatiss and Moffat to retool it into a 90 minute format, which we all know and love.
• Blake's 7 had wound down after Series 3, with a solid ending that satisfied most everyone involved. That was, until the cast and crew were watching the programme during a party, only to hear the announcer mention that Series 4 would air later that year. It was the first anyone—supposedly including the writers themselves!—had heard about a fourth series, and some were contractually obligated to other things. The slap-dash nature of things required killing a regular character whose actress had signed for other roles believing the show was over, and throwing together a replacement quickly, as well as finding a new ship for the crew to fly, as the Liberator was destroyed at the end of Series 3.
• And the way The Goodies has been treated by the BBC, despite it being one of the most popular comedy shows ever, a ratings-topper for ten years, and a money-spinner in overseas sales as well as a European prestige awards winner. Apparently because a powerful BBC executive utterly despised the show and said it would only be broadcast again "over my dead body", it disappeared completely, was never re-run, and it took several decades for a compilation of the best shows to be released on video and DVD.
• Foreign Affairs (1966): Frank Muir ordered "The Foreign Body" to be rewritten by Brian Cooke and Johnny Mortimer, claiming the original writer wasn't very good. Cooke and Mortimer went on to write every episode.
• It's Awfully Bad for Your Eyes, Darling...'s director was changed after the Pilot, and the new man found the series to be too silly and set about changing everything.

CBC

• Executives forced the second season of The Red Green Show to take on a more "sitcom" approach, with longer plot lines and more character interaction, instead of the existing format of Red and Harold primarily narrating sketch comedy to the audience. This season also introduced a cast of new characters, none of whom were seen again when creator Steve Smith got control of the show back in the third season and reverted it to its existing format.

CBS

• In her autobiography, Eve Arden blamed Executive Meddling for the fourth season Retool of TV series Our Miss Brooks. Madison High was razed to make room for a freeway, Miss Brooks and Mr. Conklin went to work for a private school, and Walter and Harriet disappeared from the show along with Mr. Boynton (although the latter would eventually return). Canon Discontinuity was the result as the radio program continued at Madison High as per usual. The Movie also chose to ignore the controversial fourth season.
• The original series concept for The Mary Tyler Moore Show was about a young divorced woman, but CBS executives were afraid that viewers would think that meant Mary had divorced Dick Van Dyke (Moore having previously played Van Dyke's wife in The Dick Van Dyke Show). To protect their investment from the legions of morons they believed were watching, the execs forced the producers of the show to turn Mary into a young unmarried woman fleeing a failed romance. They were probably also running off prejudice; in 1970, a divorced woman was usually thought to be morally suspect and deeply flawed (even at that late date, divorce was still thought to be almost always the woman's fault). Having a divorced young woman as the main character would have been a problem no matter who she'd been played by.
• The American version of Big Brother has had numerous cases of this. Obviously such cases would wind up slanting the game... but slanting it towards a few houseguests won't always work. (Janelle winning would have been best for ratings... yet Maggie wound up taking home the prize in the end.) But there were several notorious instances where it severely affected the outcome of the game on top of player stupidity.
  • In season 3, they found out the hard way that letting the houseguests see what was going on in the house after they were evicted and would cast votes for who should win made a large impact on the game. Danielle was known for playing the best game and by all means, they'd vote for her to win, right? Well even if she made it with Jason in the finals, the other houseguests saw her insulting them in the Diary Room and would have picked the person who was nicer to them. (Jason or Lisa.)
  • Though less apparent on Season 7, it happened in that season as well. On one of the live feeds, James and Janelle agreed that a particular veto challenge was "fixed for George to win." James said, "What's the point of winning HOH and giving Big Brother your strategy when they're going to create contests that are ultimately going to fuck up your strategy?" He said his comments against Big Brother would probably result in his getting nominated next week. "So myself and the other nominee get there," James said, "and all of a sudden, it's an Arabic-speaking contest when it's me and Kaysar up on the block."
    • Howie also explained on one of the live feeds how Big Brother influences contestants to vote a particular way in the Diary Room. "If Big Brother shut up, this game would be so much easier," he said. "They go in there and they incite them to do things. ... They say they don't cheat and help people? Bullshit!" He said in one of his Diary Room sessions, Big Brother had tried swaying him to put Dr. Will on the chopping block.
  • Season 8 tried to keep the Donatos around because they were good for ratings. The idea of "America's Player" wound up affecting the game in their favour because viewers loved to see him prank people and just be mean. There was also a time in which he was practically assaulting another player with cigarettes. If anyone else did that, they'd have been kicked out of the show in a heartbeat. There are also rumors of how they allowed them to break rules that would have earned other players reprisals because they were good for ratings, and how one player's machinery during a crucial veto competition was malfunctioning and they never noticed. If it was them, they'd have stopped the competition in a heartbeat.
    • Evel Dick also revealed on one of the live feeds that the letters he got from his son had secret codes the two of them had come up with before the show. The first and last letters of the last paragraph were initials of houseguests Dick shouldn't trust. Whether Dick could trust his tightest alliance or not, his son would put in a letter that either everything was going well with his girlfriend or, alternatively, that he had just broken up with his girlfriend. When Dawn from BBUK pulled a similar tactic, she got kicked off the show for cheating. But he seemed exempt.
    • On top of this, America's player also revealed that when he could have turned the game around with a crucial veto win, he was ordered by producers not to use it. (Subsequently... his #1 ally was evicted the following Thursday. Oy...) Then there were other rumors about how he wasn't even in the option to play for Veto for similar reasons. ("But we can't decide who to use it on without spoiling it ahead of time!")
  • Season 9 also had a highly controversial HOH competition. One houseguest who needed that one question to win HOH (in the final four, the 2nd most important one in the game) managed to get it wrong...well that was her fault, right? Her fault for not being on the same train of thought as the producers. The question was "True or false...There were more than two pre-existing relationships in the house". She answered false, like every person who had been watching the show would have in her boots. But then there is a slight pause and Julie Chen reports there were three. What was this third relationship? Were two houseguests' lies about being a lesbian couple true? Nope....it was the guinea pigs that served as the house pets. Now how on earth was anyone supposed to figure that out? This wound up screwing houseguest Sharon.
    • Other conspiracy theorists believe that in the slight pause in between the houseguests revealing their answers and Julie Chen revealing the Guide Dang It! answer that she was even told right there on the studio on live TV that it was three, and that for the MST-PST feeds that this was edited out.
  • In season 13, it seemed kind of convenient that instead of the usual Majority Rules competition, they had a competition where the outgoing Head of Household was allowed to pick the order which people would make their shots in. Rachel's alliance, the Veterans, are the returning players and are obviously on the producers' good sides, so people are watching and wondering if they had this in mind. Rachel even said on the live feeds that they (the veterans) were promised to at least make the jury.
    • Season 13 is known for being one of the most slanted season of the series. It even features one of the most blatantly contrived bailouts in reality TV history. When the game turned around and resulted in Jeff being voted out, Porsche (who was not on Jeff's side anymore) won the next HOH. Before she can even make her nominations, she is forced to open Pandora's Box (which she confirmed herself) which re-introduced the "Duos" twist: meaning that people would be nominated and saved as duos for the week. Conveniently she didn't get to pick the duos herself. The following Veto required the houseguests to grab onto a dummy that was suspended above the ground and hang on as much as possible - The exact same challenge as the first HOH, which was won by...Rachel. Rachel then proceeded to win the veto and take herself and Jordan, another Ratings Machine, off the block, and forced Shelly to be completely and utterly screwed. A few days before the live eviction, Rachel talks about the first have-not competition in Big Brother 12, which she said she did very well in. What was the next Head of Household competition? The exact same challenge as that have-not competition.
  • In Season 14, when Frank won HOH and fan/producer favorite Dan came under threat, a new Pandora's Box appeared, which entered a second Power of Veto into the game. Ian won the POV, and was heard on the live feeds saying that in the Diary Room, the producers are trying to influence him to use the POV.
    • Frank has also benefited from this. While drawing names for one POV competition, he "dropped" the bag and the chips fell out. He palmed the "Player's Choice" chip and "withdrew" it from the bag. On the feeds, he told Boogie what he did (Boggie told him never to mention it again). Frank cheated and not only did Big Brother allow it, they gave him a generous edit that didn't let anyone know it had happened at all. He's also bragged on the live feeds about Big Brother giving him advance information about the challenges, which would help explain why he's done so well at them. The week the coaches entered the game, Frank was on the chopping block and set to go home, but Big Brother canceled the eviction entirely — only time in show history that they've canceled a promised live eviction. Allegedly, one of the Big Brother producers was friends with Frank's Dad, Sid Vicious, when he worked at the WWE. Though some assumed that the reason the live eviction was canceled was because Willie had been kicked out of the house in week two, putting them one week behind.
  • In Season 16, it's decided that Caleb, the "Beast Mode Cowboy", is going to throw the Battle of the Block competition, ensuring that he and Frankie will be on the voting block this week. Frankie has lost a lot of trust and the guys want to vote him out. But Frankie's got a famous sister (Ariana Grande) and CBS wants to keep him around. Coincidentally, the competition is one that's arguably EASIER when played alone and Frankie wins, vowing to tell the rest of the house about his famous relations. A variety of reactions were shown on the live feeds (including Frankie threatening to sic his sister's online followers onto Nicole for daring to say something negative about him) are not included in the show. But he irritated the viewers badly that he ended not being in the Top 3 for Fan Favorite.
  • One example where it was for the better was an Obvious Rule Patch between seasons five and six. In season five, several houseguests noticed a loophole in the rules which allowed them to eliminate a player without giving him a chance to even compete for the veto. The houseguests plotted and nominated two people who the Head of Household had no intention of evicting, and selecting players for the veto who were in on the plan or would have used it to take themselves off anyways.
    • Another example that was for the better in Season 15 is the producers realizing how lethal a combination of a well-known contestant's relative and a sub-HOH be. Where they swiftly changed it to an American's nomination in Week 4.
  • Some have also argued that the act of selecting people for reality TV is this in itself. The people in charge try and pick a diverse series of contestants (There is almost always at least one openly gay guy, one princess, one dimwit, etc) but they try and pick the contestants who are most likely to clash and fight with each other because that's what drives ratings. If they pick huge fans of Big Brother they won't pick the people who can practically predict the flow of the game a week in advance because they'll be sitting around observing...they want people who'll be up and about picking fights and confronting other houseguests. The same has often been said for other shows like Survivor or The Amazing Race.
    • This would be subverted for its Canadian counterpart Big Brother Canada where the majority of houseguests that have been on the show are die hard fans of Big Brother. Not to mention, Big Brother Canada host Arisa Cox is a super fan of Big Brother and has watched the American version it's based off of and many international versions of the show.
• The commentaries on the DVD release of The Weird Al Show reveal the truly epic levels of stupidity that were constantly forced on the show, mostly from the network's constantly fluctuating standards of behavior they were worried kids would imitate. For example, one of Al's few victories was to keep a gag about sticking his arms into a barrel full of melted chocolate, by arguing that most kids wouldn't have a barrel full of melted chocolate on hand to imitate the scene.
• In the later seasons, Survivor not only overuse Manipulative Editing highlighting a Creator's Pet, but many fans suspect that they're slanting the actual game in the Pet's favor as well. (Disclaimer: None of these have been confirmed as deliberate producer interference.) Examples include:
  • In All-Stars, the tribal switch-up has both teams picking one of two different colored flags from a pot, with the chance of being put alongside new players. It ends with the teams staying exactly the same as they are, but switching camps - except for Amber, who picks the last flag and is forced to go away from her original group and her new boyfriend Boston Rob, which fuels the uncertainty over whether she'll be eliminated or not for the rest of the episode. The whole scene seems highly, highly improbable, and spurred accusations that prior to shooting, the production crew laid out the flags inside the pot in a certain order to get the desired result. Likewise, it has been suggested that the producers threw puzzle challenges constantly at the teams, as Rob excelled at these challenges and often won.
  • In Heroes Vs Villains, there seemed to be a preference for the Villains. Isn't it amazing how James (from the Heroes tribe) had to sit out of a challenge, yet the challenge continued without the Villains being asked to sit someone out or asking the Heroes to put Colby back in?
    • It's obvious that the game was borderline-fixed towards the Villains. Not only was one immunity challenge much more easy for the villains (due to "Villains" having more recognizable fragments than "Heroes" on the box-stacking challenge) but the villains team is almost entirely composed of players who are good at Puzzles. And guess what all the immunity challenges have been? Puzzles. And what happened to the puzzle immunity challenges after Rob was voted out? They mysteriously disappeared.
  • One that has been confirmed: Russell somehow knew that he didn't win Samoa during Heroes vs. Villains...This is rather strange. Considering that the filming for Heroes vs. Villains begun less than a month after the filming for Samoa ended, and that the finale for Samoa didn't air until December. There would have been no way for him to know unless somebody in the crew told him. However, it's not clear whether other players were told this as well, and it would have had little effect on Russell's chances in the game, so is not as bad as the other examples here.
  • Redemption Island either was slanted or the players were just idiots to let Rob walk away with the win (or both, if you think production deliberately cast idiots, but you'd think they would have done the same for Russell's tribe). The players of Ometepe were just that dumb to not realize there's a huge threat sitting right in front of them, with the exception of Kristina. This shows a good example of how producers might have the ability to slant these kinds of shows. Take a look at the challenges post-merge for Redemption Island - Balance, Obstacle Course, Endurance, Puzzle, Logrolling, Memory, Puzzle, Puzzle, Puzzle Race, and the final immunity challenge, a maze and a puzzle. It may have looked more diverse, but those are the challenges that Rob had to compete in. The Redemption island duels? Card Stacking, Shuffleboard, tile breaking, table maze & Puzzle, Endurance. Note the disproportionate amount of puzzles on the ones that Rob had to compete in. And again, What's Rob good at? PUZZLES.
• Despite all the negative examples of this in Survivor, there were actually still positive examples of Executive Meddling in the forms of Obvious Rule Patches from season-to-season, and shows that this is not always a bad thing. These include:
  • Eliminating the Purple Rock from being used as a tiebreaker...only at the Final Four, though. Instead it was replaced with a firebuilding (And later Firemaking) Challenge between the two contestants. (Why they still do that at other parts instead of a nature quiz or vote countback like in previous seasons is beyond several viewers, though.) Jeff Probst admits that using the purple rock in the final four was a mistake because there was no fair way to do it at that point - as if there's actually a fair way to do it period.
  • The removal of the "$1,000,000" fan favourite prize. Producers feared that people would be trying to cater to the fans instead of playing the game since it was as much as the prize for winning the game.
    • When Russell Hantz came in third, he gestured towards the audience as proof that "America needs to control a portion of the votes" should have been part of the game. Jeff Probst immediately told him "That's not Survivor".
  • Several times they stepped in and gave the players food outside of a reward challenge when they had run out. This did not come free; as the two times they did this they had to either give up their shelter and start from scratch or have a player give up the reward.
  • Changing how the Hidden Immunity Idol worked. In Guatemala, you had to play it before the votes. Granted; this didn't affect the outcome outside of some dramatic blindsides in later seasons. In Cook Islands, it more or less made Yul nigh untouchable and gave him a free ride to the final three. In later seasons, it could only be played as late as the Final Six.
  • In Nicaragua and above, the clues to Hidden Immunity Idols were changed and they were hidden in different spots due to Russell managing to find them before clues were even given.
  • Evacuating injured players; usually a good thing.
  • It's rumored that this is why they changed some of the challenges in Nicaragua. Specifically to avoid injuries like those in the previous few seasons that caused sometimes numerous evacuations/people being voted out, and the challenges pre-merge were more puzzles and tribal cooperation efforts. It's another case of positive meddling because the theme of Nicaragua was "Young vs. old". Fighting/Wrestling type challenges would be a very bad idea not only to avoid evacuations which potentially set the show behind a week but also for balance issues. (Only Yve, Tyrone, and Jane would have survived such a challenge.)
  • Due to Kelly and Naonka quitting yet still landing on the jury, the rules around quitting have changed. (ie, the producers are now allowed to take quitters off the jury.)
  • Frosti was actually allowed to play in China despite being too young at the time. The rules were retroactively changed to allow him in.
  • Changing how the hidden immunity idol clues were given due to fear that the game would turn into an idol-hunt. This worked in Nicaragua, but was undermined in Redemption Island when Kristina managed to break a Survivor record and found the idol before the first tribal council. Specifically, to keep it out of Rob's hands.
    • South Pacific has taken this a step further: Clues to the idol are now hidden in places where an idol would normally be, and any clue won in a challenge is going to be a lead to the hidden clues.
• CSI NY (or at least, one of its characters) was a victim when Angell was killed solely due to budget cuts.
• Apparently the people behind the low rated Joan of Arcadia were pressured to make the show "less talky" and stunt-cast in order to increase ratings. They were also forced to change the missions God gave to Joan from "For Want of a Nail" interventions that changed the course of people's lives to an endless stream of "life lessons" for her alone. And demanding Adam cheat on Joan, which his actor was not pleased about.
• CBS insisted that All in the Family be carried on past its obvious ending point (season eight) - which they informed Carroll O'Connor was strictly for ratings. Five seasons later, they would cancel the show, which had struggled in the face of numerous changes necessary after Mike and Gloria (and later Edith) departed. O'Connor insisted that they allow for one final episode to give Archie a proper exit; CBS refused.
• In The Amazing Race, they often step in with a sync point, Double-Length, or non-elimination leg if teams get too far ahead or behind. This is actually showing that this is not always a bad thing for several reasons. One was because they do like to save fan (or network) favourites, but another was because it's easier to film and edit when the other races aren't a couple legs behind. However; they don't always step in as there are a couple cases where a team got about a day behind or another team got extremely lucky and manage to walk right on to the checkpoint a day ahead of everyone. Normally they manipulate hours of operation or put in charter buses.
  • Jeff and Jordan were not originally wanted by the show's producers; it was CBS who wanted them in.
  • Season 11 had a very blatant sync point when one team managed to get 36 hours ahead of everyone, wherein one team was kept on an island and told a storm was making it too rough to depart (Despite no signs of it) and by the time they were allowed to leave, three other teams caught up with them.
  • Dustin and Kandice once got stuck waiting half a day for a charter bus.
  • An instance where this was considered for the better was in Season 17 - Nick and Vick arrived last on a non-elimination leg, but they did not face a speedbump on the next leg due to production errors. Word of God states that errors on their part (Judges making bad calls) altered the placement of several teams in the leg, thus they decided to waive the speed bump.
• Hilariously averted with The Good Wife, at least with season one. According to the producers, they were surprised that CBS requested them to streamline the legal plots so that the family oriented drama can be more front and center, in which they replied, "that's what we've been doing this entire time!" More specifically in this Entertainment Weekly cover story:
  While Margulies says she was originally worried that doing a procedural drama might get boring — "One of the reasons Murder, She Wrote was on for so long was that America loves an ending after each show, where you can solve it and it's done" — she and the rest of the cast have been pleasantly surprised to see CBS continue to ask the writers to keep the Florrick family drama front and center. "You'd expect a network to say, 'No, no, no! More cases! More cases!'" says Robert King, who created and executive-produces the series along with his wife, Michelle. "Our biggest challenge is figuring out how little we can tell about the courtroom case and get by."
• Forever Knight very nearly fell victim to it-the execs wanted to get rid of the focus on Nick's redemption and get rid of Natalie and Janette because they felt Debora Dunchenne and Catherine Disher weren't sexy enough for their demographic. Fortunately, Geraint Wyn Davies threatened to quit if all of the changes went through. Duchenne/Janette was still cut, but the rest of the change ideas were dropped. (although Lisa Ryder's Tracy character was probably an attempt to up the sexy factor a bit.)
• In the sixth season of Criminal Minds, the execs announced that they were going to fire A.J. Cook and limited Paget Brewster's screen time for "creative reasons" ^note It was to fund a spin-off. The fans were not happy. After many protests and letters, A.J. was able to come back for the first two episodes of the season, Paget's "goodbye" episode, and the season finale to announce she was returning next season. Paget was brought back as a regular for season seven as well. (The original plan for A.J.'s character was to treat her like she never existed.)
• An older, and baffling, example from The Incredible Hulk (1977): Bruce Banner was changed to David Bruce Banner because, according to Lou Ferrigno, somebody at the network thought the name Bruce "sounded gay".
  • On the DVDs, Kenneth Johnson, producer for the show's entirety and director of a few episodes, said it was because the name was too silly, too "comic book-y", where he was trying to tell a more serious tale.
• 60 Minutes had a shameful example of this when the tobacco industry managed to pressure the network executives to force the show's producers to expurgate a damaging anti-tobacco industry story on the threat of being sued for tortious interference. The journalists on staff managed to make the story public to embarrass CBS to run the story completely. This incident was dramatized in the 1999 film, The Insider.
• The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour was notorious for its continual battles with network executives over content like censoring jokes, making jokes about the network censoring jokes, taking jabs at politics and religion until the network had enough and abruptly pulled the show off its schedule in 1969.
• An In-Universe example in Mike & Molly. Molly submits a very raunchy book to a publisher, and the publisher refuses to publish it unless she completely changes the story to a woman traveling through time by having sex with famous figures of history. Molly eventually gets around the Executive by offering to make him a character in the book (playing to his ego) then manipulating him so he thinks that it's his own idea to axe the time-travel concept.
• The New Dick Van Dyke Show (yes, a Spiritual Successor to the "Old" Van Dyke show) didn't set the world on fire ratings-wise, but was modestly successful enough for CBS to give it a three-season run. (The only reason that the show was made in the first place was to fulfill Van Dyke's three-season contract with the network.) However, CBS and showrunner Carl Reiner clashed when the network refused to air an episode where Van Dyke's young TV daughter runs in to her parents having sex. So heated was this clash that Reiner quit the show in protest, and when that happened, Van Dyke let his contract expire, effectively ending the show. That particular episode was shown when TNT reran the series in the '90s.
• Whether or not Star Trek: Discovery is good or bad — which is down to the opinion of anyone who chooses to watch it — there was quite a lot of executive meddling behind the scenes both during production, and after the debut of the new show. Specifically, Bryan Fuller reportedly left due to having other projects with priority, and thus the meddling began. First, two new showrunners (Aaron Harberts and Gretchen Burg) were brought in, and under their watch, Discovery apparently ran over the budget several times, leading to cost cuts and extensions to the broadcast date. It didn't help that CBS CEO Les Moonves was consistently interfering in both the writing and production process, despite his lacking knowledge of writing or in fact the sci-fi genre (Moonves is said to not know the difference between Star Trek and Star Wars). Then both Harberts and Burg were fired, due to abusive leadership, and instead Alex Kurtzman was brought in to handle the rest of the production. Due to this, the show experienced its fair share of issues pre-release, and even post-release.
• The Twilight Zone (1985):
  • Harlan Ellison started off as story editor for the series, and wrote a number of the early episodes. However, his involvement with the show ended with a very nasty and public argument between Ellison and CBS executives who didn't want any part of "Nackles", a story about an old bigot who told neighborhood minority children they would be visited not by Santa during Christmas, but an evil creature known as Nackles.
  • George R. R. Martin complained that the execs got it into their heads that's the show's central premise was "something extraordinary happens to an ordinary person," and forced him to add an ordinary person character to one of his scripts who serves no purpose, namely Tom in "The Last Defender of Camelot".

Channel 10 (Australia)

• Australian Survivor is certainly not immune to this trope. The screen-time of contestants is very unequal, with some contestants receiving much more in terms of confessionals and the show itself. However, it is understandable given that the producers would want to give more interesting contestants the lion's share of screen-time to boost ratings.
  • A feature of the show that has become increasingly common from season to season is the occurrence of twists. This has been widely criticised by fans, who believe that the game should remain as pure as possible. More recent seasons have seen fans grow suspicious that certain twists are shoehorned into the game to favour certain contestants.
  • Brains v Brawn, the sixth season of the Channel 10 reboot, featured some quite blatant rigging, bordering on show-fixing. Brains member George was saved by an immunity idol in three of the Brains tribe's first four Tribal Councils, leading some viewers to outright claim that the producers told him and close ally Cara where the idols were hidden. Post-merge, George found a key, which could be used when he voted at the next Tribal Council to save anyone of his choice; he saved Cara, who received every vote bar her own. George reached the Final Tribal Council, but was defeated 7-2 by Hayley.

The CW

• Smallville's started to get more "sexier" after season 3 due to flagging ratings.
  • The producers had been interested in adding Bruce Wayne to the cast so they could establish the friendship between Batman and Superman that was an important aspect of the comic book. However they never got permission because Warner Bros. felt it would produce competition with the Christopher Nolan Batman movies that started coming out around that time. (Contrary to popular belief, Adam Knight was never intended to be Batman. The idea of adding Bruce Wayne to the series had been quashed long before they could write any scripts.) The producers ended up using Oliver Queen instead. This lead to the character of Green Arrow becoming more popular than he had ever been before, and he eventually got his own Darker and Edgier standalone show that eventually led to the "Arrowverse" shared universe.
• The "Arrowverse" has been subjected to various forms of executive meddling. For example, various characters have been Exiled from Continuity due to the shows being in an Alternate Continuity to the DC movies, and any characters who were introduced before executives decided they were no longer allowed to use them in the shows have either been killed off or won't ever be seen again (The Flash (2014) is the exception to this rule, as Flash hasn't had a DCAU solo movie).
• Dynasty (2017) had rumors of this dogging it throughout its early years, when it was being sent into prime slots on the network and given heavier advertising. It's thought to be the reason behind the heavy cast turnover in early years, especially after James Mackay insinuated he'd been fired on social media (his character, Steven Carrington, had been a critical player in the first season but was Put on a Bus as swiftly as they could manage to start season two. He was then then brought back at midseason, but just long enough to reveal the bus was headed to hell). The most visible evidence, however, was a shift in advertising and plotlines in season two to push Alexis to the forefront, at the expense of Fallon (despite the perception among viewers and critics alike that Elizabeth Gillies was the main draw of the reboot). This is thought to have been forced through by Mark Pedowitz as a make-good towards Nicollette Sheridan for basically allowing Desperate Housewives creator Marc Cherry to drive her off the set of that series a decade earlier.^note Pedowitz ran ABC around the time Cherry made the decision to kill off Edie Britt, which Sheridan later alleged was retaliation for her attempts to report Cherry's abusive on-set behavior to the network This part abated late in season two when her mother's declining health forced Sheridan's departure, forcing them to truncate Alexis' plotlines for the season while also casting a stand-in (Gillies, using heavy prosthetics to simulate plastic surgery scars) for the brief screentime required to wrap them up. When Alexis returned in season three, Elaine Hendrix was now in the role (possibly a make-good to Gillies for Fallon's sidelining, as Hendrix had worked with her on Sex&Drugs&Rock&Roll) and Fallon was back to her previous prominence. More broadly, the meddling seemed to settle down by this time, albeit perhaps because the series was in the Friday Night Death Slot and no longer a priority to the network. (The final two seasons would be used mostly as summer filler, still in the death slot except for a Christmas special that aired on a Monday in December, when most other CW shows were on holiday hiatus, thus denying it marketing support).

Discovery Channel

• Largely averted with Mythbusters. The executives give the MythBusters a lot of creative freedom and basically let them call the shots. The only times they step in to block a test is really when they feel that the test might offend their sponsors or provoke legal action. The channel's insurance agents have also squashed or put serious restrictions on a lot of tests due to safety concerns for the crew. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say concerns for the hosts. They once vetoed Adam doing a stunt, but they were fine with Tory doing it. However, there are still a few moments.
  • This includes one that actually jeopardized a myth they were trying to do. They were trying to see if a car could be turned over and flung into the air by the wind generated by a jet engine. The company that had loaned them the jet took it back due to them being worried that something might hit the plane and damage it, despite the fact that the car would be moving away from the plane.
    • They eventually found an airline who agreed to lend a plane to perform this very experiment (even after a test firing of the jet's engines tore up the runway they were testing on—the owner basically shrugged after seeing it, and let testing continue), which they tried on a car, a school bus and a small airplane. And it was awesome.
  • Early in the show's history, Discovery execs pushed for Jamie and Adam to have American Chopper-style Docu Soap arguments on camera. There's a couple episodes where this made it into the finished show (the Quicksand episode notably), but the two of them finally told the execs no, that behavior wasn't professional, and they weren't going to do it any more.
  • Played straight at least one time (though not shown on the show itself). Basically, they were going to do experiments on how easy it is to hack RFID chips, and per policy, called up the manufacturers (Texas Instruments) to schedule a conference call to talk about it. When they actually sat down to the scheduled call, lawyers from most of the larger credit card companies were involved, saying they were not to do the episode. Discovery could not afford to lose the advertising, and they had to cancel the episode. Adam explained the situation at The Last Hope hacker conference.
    • The Build Team would lampshade the situation while discussing the results of the "RFID in a MRI" myth in the Myth Revolution episode, with Tory commenting on how the chips should be put to the test, with Grant retorting that they're already on too many government watch lists for it to be worth the trouble.
  • When the MythBusters tested whether sugared cereal was less nutritious than the box it came in, their original approach was to use mice (one group was given the cereal and another cardboard pellets, with a third group given "regular" mice pellets as a control). They returned after a weekend away from M5 to find that one mouse in the cardboard group had decided to get nutrition from its brethren instead of the cardboard. The MythBusters thought this was hilarious, but the Discovery suits were not amused, and forced them to cut that particular test from the episode. Watch Adam discuss the situation here.
  • One instance that went horribly wrong involved a prank in which the Build Team tricked Adam into touching a mock-up Ark of the Covenant that was hooked up to a weak battery to give him a mild jolt. A producer forced them to instead use an electric fence battery left over from a previous myth, which produced a much more painful shock, with Adam being understandably pissed off. Needless to say, that producer wasn't with the show for much longer.

Disney Channel/XD/Plus

• In general, almost all Disney shows have suffered from this under the 65-episode limit that was imposed. No matter how popular, shows were canceled after their 65th episode to make room for new shows.
• The original ending of Hannah Montana was an All Just a Dream scenario. The show was revealed to be the dream of a young Miley Cyrus. Thanks to Executive Meddling it was thought to be too confusing for children and the ending was changed to Miley giving up the movie in Paris to attend college with Lilly... The original ending however was later added as an alternate ending in the Final Season DVD set.
• Power Rangers S.P.D. got hit especially hard; Executive Meddling caused a good chunk of the budget to go into the final episodes, meaning Disney didn't have enough money to hire an actual actor to play the Sixth Ranger. Their solution? Come up with some contrived plot about him being a time traveler who manifested as a ball of light when not morphed, and just get a voice actor to play him. Sam only ever appears as a stuntman in the ranger suit or as the CGI ball of light, making interaction between him and the other characters exceedingly awkward; the creative team was apparently so frustrated that they just wrote around him more often than not, and probably would have sent him back to the future, if not for Stock Footage constraints. Fans despised this move, even before the Grand Finale threw in the sucker punch of Sam appearing unmorphed for about two seconds before returning to the future. Sam rivals Cousin Oliver Justin as one of the most unpopular characters in the franchise's twenty-year history. It's been pointed out that at least Justin was a character, as Sam was treated like a weapon or a Zord.
• A case of it arguably being done right: Power Rangers RPM is the result of Disney telling the show runner to make it dark because it was going to be the last season anyways. Tropes Are Not Bad for the many fans who considered RPM to be the best season of all time.
• The Theme Weekend is a classic example of Executive Meddling across multiple shows simultaneously. Each show will be given a theme that must be worked into that weekend's episode in some fashion (such as a Whodunnit? mystery, a vacation theme or even a "Freaky Friday" Flip or time travel). Often results in All Just a Dream episodes or episode that only tangentially fit into the theme if it clashes too much with the show's usual style, or Lampshade Hanging Take That! shots by the writers. Lately having actors cross over into other shows has become a popular network-enforced Theme Weekend, though since these actors are playing guest roles and not their original roles from the original series the writers have much more flexibility with this.
  • Likewise, the numerous Crossover events between various shows.
• For She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, Marvel Studios reportedly ordered the CGI team to remove She-Hulk's musculature, reducing her from an Amazonian Beauty to Statuesque Stunner.
  • For the entirety of Marvel Television's ten year run, Marvel Studios' Kevin Feige had almost no communication with them. He only directly participated in Agent Carter. They were separate divisions within the company and neither answered to the other. The result was that, after the first season of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., there were no crossovers and no recognition of one another beyond vague references to "The Incident" to help establish the backstory and why Hell's Kitchen could be so corrupt in Daredevil (2015). This wasn't helped by Feige's poor relationship with Ike Perlmutter, who had last say on every project, and who was responsible for lots of projects (Black Panther, Captain Marvel) being delayed for so long. You can read more here if you like annoying, depressing reads.

E!

• The short-lived E! reality show Living Lohan, which centered around the lives of Lindsay Lohan's family (though Lindsay herself never appeared in the show ((she was heard on the phone in one episode)) supposedly because she thought it was exploitative and wanted no part of it) ended because the producers started demanding the family to do more "crazy" things for the sake of drama, like Dina faking being pregnant and Michael Jr cheating on his girlfriend, which did not go over well with Dina, she refused the demands and quickly ended the show.

First-run syndication

• When Star Trek: The Next Generation had its pilot, the meddling was a positive. "Encounter at Farpoint" was originally just the crew visiting a strange starbase, in a one-hour pilot show. When the Execs wanted a "Two Hour Event", Gene and DC were forced to add in a new alien threat to pad the show out. This would be Q, one of the most beloved and important "villains" in Star Trek history.
  • Roddenberry actually invoked Executive Meddling when he cast Picard. Initially he and Patrick Stewart were worried that the producers would not allow Stewart to take the role because he was bald, Gene then had Patrick do a reading for the producers in the silliest wig he could find. In the end, the producers approved Stewart on the condition that he not wear a wig.
  • Roddenberry became the meddler himself, to the detriment of the show, unfortunately. There are accounts now that some of the real reasons the first couple of seasons of TNG were so weak was because he had actually flanderized his own Federation from simply being a futuristic society where all human cultures got along, to a future where Earth literally had all of its problems solved and there were no conflicts of any kind. This extended to the crew, he didn't want there to be any drama between anyone, but then he had to have his writers come up with a drama in order for there to be anything on the screen. The writers called this being put in the "Roddenberry box" and it reared its head during the first draft of a script where a boy's mother gets killed by a land mine and Gene said that in the Federation, they don't grieve, they just accept death and move on. The writers had to pull a crafty Writer Revolt by showing off the kid not grieving as a weird coping mechanism that was totally unhealthy. Ultimately, Roddenberry got Kicked Upstairs.
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine suffered from mediocre ratings over the first four seasons of its run, with the studio executives and production team constantly butting heads over the direction of the show. It wasn't until season five that the suits threw up their hands and decided to focus on their new darling, Star Trek: Voyager. Their hands freed, the showrunners took DS9 in an even darker and more Machiavellian direction. It still didn't do much for the ratings, but it is generally agreed that, in hindsight, the show's final chapter regarding the Dominion War was its finest.
• Andromeda executive producer Robert Hewitt Wolfe was constantly fighting with the Tribune suits, and he was ultimately fired halfway through Season 2. The plot of the show changed drastically at this point; Dylan's attempts to create a new Commonwealth were rushed to completion so he could be at odds with them instead.
• Season 6 of Highlander was made of this. The producers got an offer to fund it if they could find a female spinoff lead other than Amanda. Most of the eps were attempts that didn't fly. The funders backed out eventually, but spinoff plans went ahead. They kicked around a concept based on one of the characters, Alex Raven, but ultimately went with Amanda after all. The show, incidentally, kept the name Highlander: The Raven despite the character shift.
  • This also appears to have caused Richie's demise at the end of Season 5. The execs thought killing a main character would boost ratings. Cue huge backlash among the fans. According to producers and cast on the DVD commentary, it was because they simply ran out of stories to tell with him. They had nowhere else to go with him, so they thought it better to use his death for the plot rather than putting him on a bus.
• On the game show Break the Bank (1985), host Gene Rayburn was told to host seriously, despite the show being laden with stunts, and despite Rayburn's knack for "wacky" hosting on his most famous role, Match Game. It's also been said that he was treated poorly by the show's production company Kline and Friends, who apparently only chose him as host for his name recognition. Rayburn left partway through the run and was replaced by Joe Farago, and supposedly declared an embargo on his episodes. Between this show, his disdain for The Match Game-Hollywood Squares Hour a year prior, and supposed age discrimination after an Entertainment Tonight reporter disclosed his real age (which was the likely impetus behind a failed attempt to revive Match in 1985), Rayburn clearly did not have a particularly enjoyable career in The '80s.

Food Network

• Food Network viewers, as shown on the network's Facebook page, went up in arms after the second episode of The Next Iron Chef: All Stars. There has been violent disagreement with the decision to eliminate Robert Irvine, whose hummus was "a little too thick," as opposed to Geoffrey Zakarian, who broke rules during the competition.

FX

• It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia proves that sometimes Executive Meddling, can work out wonderfully (if perhaps for different reasons than the network or creators intended) in the end. After the first season, FX tentatively agreed to renew the ratings-deprived but network-darling show for another season... with the mandate that a better-known actor joined the main cast. The cast, crew and creator Rob McElhenney initially refused, wanting to keep the more home-spun, No Budget, no-name weirdness of the show intact. But when told they wouldn't get another season without adding another actor, they visited with one of the names thrown about, Danny DeVito. After a positive first impression and even finding out his kids were fans of the show, they agreed to have him join the main cast as Dee and Dennis's hitherto unseen father. And he did indeed provide a welcome and extreme comedic contrast that another late-twenty-something actor wouldn't have brought, and definitely helped kickstart the show's Growing the Beard golden-age that followed for many successful seasons later.

Fox

• Dark Angel, to the sadness of its fans, was canceled after the cast were informed they got a third season. Jessica Alba was even in the airport to fly out to film the series when she got the call. And then, irony upon irony. Fox replaced it with a show that lasted only one season (Firefly, also sunk because of Executive Meddling), causing an outbreak of fan wars on the internet.
• Arrested Development had attempted Executive Meddling all over the place. After a first season in which it won Best Comedy at the Emmys, the ratings still weren't good so they asked the writers to dumb it down. David Cross angrily rants about this in the DVD commentary, saying that if the show is so critically acclaimed and won awards, and it still doesn't have enough viewers, maybe they should market it better.
• Fox insisted that Firefly have a "space hooker" and required Joss Whedon to write a second pilot because they wanted more action and less drama. They also threatened to pan-and-scan crop, no matter how it was shot, necessitating reshoots. Then they aired the episodes out of order and pre-empted a bunch of them for baseball. The series didn't even get to finish its first season.
• The first season of Dollhouse was heavily meddled with.
  • The pilot was reshot because Fox found it too confusing. Once the original pilot was released, some fans agreed with why it was redone.
  • They also saw it prudent to make the writers focus on a Monster of the Week format for the first five episodes.
  • They also decided not to air Episode 13, which is perhaps the most critically acclaimed of the series. Whedon's contract with Fox was worded in such a screwy way that the unaired pilot actually counted as a 13th episode, meaning that Whedon was only contracted to air 12. The DVD distributors, however, needed a thirteenth.
  • At one point Executive Meddling saved Dollhouse. When notice came of Dollhouse's second season renewal, the press release stated that Dollhouse wasn't axed because Fox didn't want "floods of emails".
• Tracy Torme was forced out of the Sliders staff by Fox executives, who wanted less political and philosophical exploration in the show, and more action and sex appeal.
• Titus:
  • Because of the general subject matter and dark sense of humor, Titus was eventually cancelled because of Executives who didn't want to worry about it any more. Christopher Titus was on the phone at least twice for every episode trying to convince an executive why the current episode works the way it is. "It's funny that we are having an intervention to convince my Dad to start drinking again."
  • On Sirius radio, Titus also said that executives wanted Titus and Erin to break up in the show, much like Dharma & Greg did at the time. Christopher had to say no because his real relationship was going strong, but he did it in a way that thoroughly insulted the executive who'd made the suggestion. The show suddenly found itself jumping all over the schedule and all promotion disappearing, leading to cancellation. The network continues to refuse to sell back the rights to Titus purely out of spite. Ironically, it turned out that the real Titus-Erin relationship was even more messed up than Titus ever realized.
• The Vogler arc on House. An article in the New York Times described how ratings for the initial episodes were low, which led to executives proposing a "bad guy" who would conflict with House. The writers acceded, but before any of those episodes made it onto the air, the show was moved next to American Idol. Ratings soared, giving the writers enough clout to do away with Vogler. Given that fans generally regard the arc as a low point in the season, it was a fortunate break. And for those keeping score, the show is on (what else) FOX.
• The X-Files:
  • The X-Files suffered from this terribly, especially in later seasons. On the whole, the show was not supposed to go 9 seasons; it was originally supposed to go five seasons and then be completed in a series of feature movies. When Fox extended the contract, it was agreed that seven seasons was long enough. "Requiem", the season seven finale, was written and designed to be the series finale, pulling in almost every major character from the series and setting it in the same place the pilot took place. But executive meddling wins again, and the Chris Carter and Co. ended up with the terrible task of writing two more seasons when most of the plotline had already been resolved. New, confusing plotlines were developed, new characters added, and it dissolved by season 9.
  • Ironically, a more positive example came right when the show first began. The network brass told the writers to include plotlines that had to do with earthly monsters, as opposed to just UFOs and aliens. Chris Carter agreed that the series couldn't have sustained itself that way, and the first Monster of the Week plot was the extremely memorable Squeeze, featuring cannibalistic monster Eugene Tooms.
• Practically the majority of reality TV shows, especially talent shows like American Idol. Some things that are staged are so blatant (such as shoving someone with almost zero skill in whatever the show wants onto the show) that it can feel like you're really just watching unpaid actors that are doing improv for a season. Most reality and talent shows seem to have scenes that are filled to the brim with drama on screen due to careful editing. This all works as people keep tuning in to watch.
  • They aren't even trying to hide it on American Idol anymore. The last two seasons, they've implemented a "Judge Veto" system. So if a fan-favorite performer gets voted off, the judges can veto the decision. To keep it somewhat fair, they can only use the veto once per season. Now Kara Dio Guardi has been fired and Ellen De Generes and Simon Cowell quit with Jennifer Lopez and Steven Tyler joining as the new judges.
  • American Idol always have extremely bad singers appearing in the start of the season just to grate the ears of the judges and the people watching at home. What isn't shown is everyone entering the show has to display their talent to the producers of the show off camera and those people determine who can go on to audition to the judges. More often than not, the people with horrible singing skills tend to pass through because their laughably embarrassing singing will attract viewers into watching just because the bad singers are hilariously horrible. It also doesn't help that the show also gets people that sing badly on purpose just to get attention on TV and that is what the producers usually look for.
• Glee:
  • In the original draft for the show, there was no Sue Sylvester. FOX decided the show needed a villain, so Sue was created. She quickly became one of the most, if not the most, popular characters on the show. It was a case of Executive Meddling working out for the better.
  • Just to show that this trope can go both ways on the same show, Sue Sylvester later became increasingly out of place and less popular on Glee, but Executive Meddling demanded that the writers keep her on instead of disposing of her.
  • It's also become a meme among many fans, supported by evidence of cut scenes and certain comments from producers, that Executive Meddling is behind the significant disparity in the number of kisses shown between the show's straight and widely disliked Alpha Couple (Rachel and Finn), and its gay and adored (arguable) Beta Couple Kurt and Blaine, as well as the Ensemble Dark Horse pairing of Santana and Brittany. The producers, cast members and FOX all deny it when asked directly if this happens, but when Finn and Rachel can kiss more often in one episode than both Kurt and Blaine and Santana and Brittany have kissed on-screen in the whole course of both their relationships, it's not hard to see why the fandom suspects something's up.
• Method Man and Redman's short-lived sitcom Method And Red suffered in part because FOX execs decided to among other things, add a laugh track to the show against the creators' wishes, Method Man and Redman were so disappointed with how the show show turned out that they told people to not even bother watching it; apparently they listened because the show got cancelled after a mere four episodes had aired.
• Subverted in the short-lived show Action, which itself was subject to meddling by executives at...you guessed it, Fox. In the series' primary story arc, the screenwriter for the movie Peter Dragon is producing is constantly being given notes to change his script from everybody involved in the film until he has a nervous breakdown under the pressure.
• Many fans of Gordon Ramsay's Hell's Kitchen accused Fox of this during the 2011 season, when Manipulative Bastard Elise managed to stay until the final three despite pulling all sorts of stunts, up to and including outright lying to Ramsay on two different occasions.
  • The show has a nasty history of keeping the worst chefs or the chefs with zero teamwork skills for as long as possible as if the executives aren't bothering to hide it anymore or are possibly hinting at the chefs to act in a certain way. Chefs that horribly suck at cooking can last several episodes but chefs that can't work with anyone and resort to cliched reality TV tactics, but are skilled in their cooking will usually last a lot longer, like with Elise.
  • The show always seems to have people who only have basic cooking skills outshining their veteran peers (one famous example is a waffle house cook that shined so brightly that when she was eliminated, Ramsay personally offered to send her to a culinary school on his behalf) and people that should do well all the time because they are an executive chef or specialize in certain foods but always fail in their field when it comes to put those skills to the test. It could be possible that the executives nudge the chefs into certain acts, even if it goes against their skills, for the sake of drama and higher ratings.
  • This trope was the reason surrounding Season 6's Jim's elimination. The reason why he "showed no passion" during his last dinner service was because he found out the producers wanted him to start a feud with Robert. The producers also apparently tried to get him to say things in confessionals that he wasn't comfortable saying. Tek Moore (who also competed in Season 6 and, believe it or not, ended up in a relationship with Jim) has echoed similar sentiments saying that the producers would come and swap out ingredients such as salt for sugar.
• This was attempted on Living Single. Kim Coles (Synclaire) was told that she needed to lose weight for her character, but her castmates said they would quit the show if the executives made her do that.
• Bones Season 5 had an episode with a rather silly subplot (even by the show's standards) devoted to Hodgins, Sweets, and Fisher going to see the movie Avatar — which not incidentally was made by FOX.
• The original intention with Tru Calling was to have Luc be the anti-Tru, working to ensure people would die; however, executives insisted they bring in a well-known actor to help ratings. This worked out for the better, since Jason Priestley's Jack was a much more entertaining character than Luc.
• As part of Warner Bros.'s rules for not allowing proper live action depictions of any person seen in the DC Extended Universe in most circumstances, Gotham could not depict the Joker or Batman in their TV series. The latter isn't much of an issue as it's an Origin Story to the whole Batman Mythos, and so Batman never appearing was expected. However, the Joker is much more of an issue, as the writers couldn't just leave out the biggest supervillain in DC Comics. They worked around this by having multiple expies of Joker and treated him as more of an idea passing from one person to the next until one individual is crazy enough to take the mantle. They never directly called their Joker as such (they clearly made allusions though via weapons and costume design). Batman was also able to show up in the Grand Finale, but was limited to being in the shadows and under dark lighting, and there is only one full frontal shot of the Batman himself; right at the end of the show.

G4 (TechTV)

• This was what killed Tech TV:
  • Upon their "merger" with G4, the executives demanded that all the TechTV staff either move to Los Angeles (where the G4 studios were already located) or simply get sacked. Less than a third of TechTV employees, only six of which were actual cast members, picked the former option.
  • To make things worse, all of two TechTV shows — Anime Unleashed and X-Play — survived the "merger" unscathed. The end result was massive Network Decay and a sharp decline in the network's ratings, both of which may be the fastest in the history of cable TV.
  • The Screen Savers was also subject to heavy meddling during the merger. Practically overnight, it went from a tech show to, well no one really knows how to describe it. Yoshi DeHerrera's went from doing computer and electronics mods on the show to demonstrating a messy homemade blender and doing a report on drift racing full of rap slang and bikini-clad women. Mere months after he moved to Los Angeles to stay with the network, they fired him to Retool the show. Some fans say it doesn't exist.
  • Over time, G4 turned into something which, aside from X-Play, bore no resemblance to either original G4 or Tech TV, having been Retooled into a Spike TV clone with WAAAYYYYY too much COPS. After cancelling X-Play, parent company Comcast planned to change it to the Esquire Network, but decided it would replace the Style Network instead, leaving G4 in such a living-dead state that Comcast pulled the channel from its cable systems in January 2014.

Hunan Television

• General and I had an especially weird example. The series was made when China's censors, for reasons known only to themselves, wouldn't allow series to be set in fictional dynasties. So the novel's fictional dynasty had to be changed to the Jin dynasty in the series.

HBO

• A positive example in Generation Kill: the first episode had major issues running over-time, partly because HBO kept re-inserting a lengthy scene that the director and producers were perfectly willing to live without and kept taking out of the cut. In the end, HBO simply allowed the episode to run over the original limit.
• The Lisa Kudrow vehicle The Comeback featured fictional examples of this, before it was canceled by executives who couldn't see the humor.
• The usual manifestation of this trope was inverted with HBO's famous note to the Six Feet Under writing staff after reviewing the first few scripts: "Can we make these people even more fucked up?"
• Shockingly, The Sopranos nearly underwent this in its first season when David Chase had to fight for the network to let him have Tony murder someone because the execs were unsure that the audience would still sympathize with Tony after such an act. Chase prevailed and the execs never messed with the show again.
• Game of Thrones:
  • Benioff and Weiss estimated that they needed 9 ships to recreate the Battle of Blackwater properly. HBO replied that they had money to build one. So the massive naval battle involving catapults and a fantasy version of Greek Fire from the novels was changed to a surprise explosion that destroys most of the enemy fleet in one hit.
  • Neil Marshall, who directed "Blackwater", also told of his surprise when an unnamed producer who claimed to represent "the perverted side of the audience" demanded the inclusion of a scene featuring full female frontal nudity... in an episode entirely about a battle.
• Detective Kima Greggs was originally supposed to have died of her gunshot wounds at the end of Season 1 of The Wire. An HBO executive persuaded David Simon and the other writers to let her live; this has been seen as benefiting the show in the long run.
• The Last of Us (2023) Season One originally ran for 10 episodes, until HBO ended up combining the first two. To offset the bleakness of the first episode killing off two children, the completed version continues the story past the script's ending shot of Ellie in chains, up through Joel, Ellie, and Tess escaping the quarantine zone. Both showrunners, Craig Mazin and Neal Druckmann, acknowledge this as being a good decision on HBO's part. It ended up becoming HBO's second highest-rated premiere of the decade thus far (behind only House of the Dragon), followed by a continuous increase in ratings over the next few weeks.

ITV

• Police, Camera, Action! had this happen three times:
  • "Don't Look Back In Anger", which aired on 23 November 1997 was intended as a Christmas Episode, but executives wanted it as a straight-up Clip Show Recap Episode of 1994-1995 episodes with the Framing Device of policing through the years including important developments such as the Highway Code and breathalyser, and the history of police helicopters with footage shot at Epsom Downs using a 1920s biplane.
  • "Learning the Hard Way" which aired 19 January 1999, met the same fate; it was meant to be a special episode about dangerous driving with new footage, not a clip show, but a Recap Episode with highlights from 1996 episodes was what it ended up becoming; no footage from 1997-1998 episodes were reused as Stock Footage.
  • "Fair Cop" would have been a 60-minute special in May 2001, but was limited to a 30-minute episode (23 minutes without commercial break) and while the episode was praised for its content and tone, and dramatic footage of rescues in South America alongside police pursuits, the episode never got to be a special episode as planned.
• In this 1977 interview, The Prisoner (1967) series creator and star Patrick McGoohan said, "I thought the concept of the thing would sustain for only seven episodes." However, meddling executives wanted the episode count raised to 26.^note The magic number for sales to America, the Holy Grail of producer Lew Grade - who made British shows with one eye on the American market. 26 is the minimum run for an American series on TV. In the end, 17 episodes were filmed, but McGoohan claimed that only seven ("Arrival", "Dance of the Dead", "Check Mate", "Free For All", "The Chimes of Big Ben" and "Once Upon A Time"/"Fall Out") "really count".
• Ultimate Force can be used as a case study in how executives can end up screwing not just a show but the entire network itself through bungled meddling.
  • The show was originally meant to focus on Jamie Dow and how the rookie would grow into becoming a seasoned SAS trooper. The focus quickly shifted to Henno Garvie because ITV had lured Ross Kemp away from the BBC with a record 800,000 pound contract and needed to put him in something to justify the cost.
  • The third series premiere killed off most of the cast and a more politically correct one was brought in (including a woman), with plots now focusing more on over the top action rather than the tension and suspense that can occur during high stakes operations.
  • The fourth series switched to a feature-length episode format because someone at ITV thought that they could release them in cinemas in Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia to increase profits. That didn't happen and the series itself never got properly broadcast in the UK.

MTV

• Viva La Bam:
  • Bam Margera became incredibly fed up with MTV during the run of Viva La Bam - for example, an elaborate first episode that involved Bam turning his parents' entire property into a skate park went mostly unused, ending up as ten minutes' worth of filler when another episode resulted in scanty material. (To ensure that the amount of work put into the skate park was seen and appreciated, two lengthy compilations of unused footage from this episode appeared on the Season One boxed set and Viva La Bands Vol. 2 DVD.)
  • Another example of wasted footage was the "CKY Challenge" episode, rendered almost unintelligible by MTV's editing. On the DVD commentary, Tim Glomb is watching the finished episode for the first time, and becomes angry at how terrible it turned out.
  • The constant on-screen graphics proved to be another major annoyance to the cast.
    • In an episode where Bam and friends plan an elaborate European vacation for Phil and April, Ryan Dunn tiredly comments that time is running out, and tells MTV to superimpose a clock in his outstretched hand. (They did.)
    • The biggest issue concerned "Bam on the Bayou," in which the cast's numerous antics prompt an ever-increasing "Fun-o-Meter" to appear on the screen. Bam spends much of the commentary complaining about how stupid the Fun-o-Meter is, noting that it doesn't actually match how they felt.
    • Bam gripes about a superimposed spedometer that appears on-screen during his race with Ryan in the fifth season.
• On Finding Carter the character of Max was only meant to be in the pilot episode. After the "crouton scene" the MTV execs insisted that the character become a regular. Max went on to become the Ensemble Dark Horse of the cast. invoked

NBC

• Though denied by the showrunners, Friday Night Lights infamous second season reeks of meddling. While the first season Focused on a small town's obsession with high school football, the second season started throwing in multiple sensationalist storylines unconnected to football. Saracen had an affair with his mom's nurse, Riggins moved in with a meth dealer, Coach's sister in law moved in for little reason, and most famously, Landry killing a rapist. None of these storylines ever came up again after they concluded.
• The John Larroquette Show started off as a quirky off-beat comedy focusing on the main character's 12 Step recovery from alcoholism.
  • Network executives forced the producers to eliminate the 12 Step material after the first season, which took much of the original unique and edgy flavor away from the show. From there it turned into another "single people with relationship problems" type of show, the exact sitcom stereotype the series was trying to stray from. John Hemingway also lost his cool, brooding, intellectual demeanor in the process.
  • Larroquette himself despaired when they moved his character, who worked as a night-shift bus station manager, out of his rat-trap boarding house to a nice apartment that he obviously couldn't afford with a couch facing the cameras. The Hooker with a Heart of Gold character had to find another career, too.
• Star Trek: The Original Series:
  • Spock's pointed ears were almost the victim of panicky NBC executives, who were afraid that superstitious hordes of TV viewers would think he was Satanic. They went so far as to airbrush the points out of a number of promotional photographs. Gene Roddenberry managed to save Spock's ears by promising plastic surgery for the character if audience response was poor. As we know, it was anything but bad. After Spock's popularity was established, no one at NBC would ever admit to being anything but for pointed ears.
  • Similarly, Roddenberry's original plan for perfect 50-50 gender equity among the crew of the Enterprise was scuttled by nervous suits who said, "Don't you see? It makes it look like there's a lot of fooling around going on up there!" It was only with great effort that he was able to retain a 30% female crew.
  • Uhura, the most visible female character, was denied a chance to command the Enterprise in one episode because an executive flat out told Roddenberry "we don't believe her in charge of anything". Nichelle Nichols got a lot of crap thrown her way by the executives for reasons that today are obviously both racist and sexist; for the first season, she wasn't a regular member of the cast, and her fan mail was kept from her. She almost left the show, until she met Martin Luther King Jr. at a party, who convinced her to stay on and serve as a black role model.^note He was right; Whoopi Goldberg cites Uhura as a role model to her. Though ironically enough, the part about not making her a regular meant she actually made more money than her co-stars by getting a guest star's salary for every episode.
  • The original pilot episode for the original series, "The Cage", was considered "too intellectual" by the executives, so a new one was made. Gene Roddenberry then created the two-parter "The Menagerie" as a Framing Device in order to utilize footage from "The Cage". "The Menagerie" won a Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation. And in a wonderful bit of serendipity, the story also established the concept of a "Star Trek universe" spanning decades which later became one spanning centuries with later revival series and spinoffs (with the exception of soap operas, TV series of the era rarely established any sort of long-standing history of their fictional universes).
  • David Gerrold suggested a subplot for "The Trouble with Tribbles" which would have involved two companies engaging in mutual corporate espionage, even each sabotaging the other's efforts to colonize Sherman's Planet (the tribbles would have been an element of this sabotage). This was rejected with a scrawl of "Big Business angle out" in the margin; in 1967 it was, at least in the eyes of the show's sponsors, utterly unacceptable to suggest that any corporation — even centuries in the future — might ever engage in behavior less than completely and shiningly ethical.
  • The episode "The Cloud Minders" was based on an outline by Gerrold, "Castles in the Sky". In his original outline, the planet's mine workers were rebelling, caught between two different leaders: a violent militant and a revolutionary pacifist. The story would have culminated with Kirk literally sitting the three leaders — the militant, the pacifist, and the overlords' leader — down at phaserpoint and commanding them to talk to each other; the end would have had Kirk congratulating himself that at least they were now talking to each other, so given enough time they'd work things out, and McCoy answering, "Yes, but how many children will die in the meantime?" Gerrold was profoundly disappointed when the final script established that the mine-workers were only acting the way they were because of the pernicious effects of "zeenite gas" in the mines. Or as he put it, "If we can just get them troglytes to wear gas masks, then they'll be happy little darkies and they'll pick all the cotton we need."
    • It should be noted that some social commentary did show up in the finished episode. Vanna, the miners' rep, says that now that the workers' heads will clear of the effects of the gas and they can think straight, things will change. They'll still work, but they want some equal rights...and they'll want them soon.
• The series Homicide: Life on the Street was a repeated victim of Executive Meddling, with NBC pulling the series off the schedule so frequently that only thirteen episodes were aired in the show's first two years, and several episodes in the first season aired out of order. Critical acclaim and a vocal cult audience kept the show on the air. Later, NBC pressured the show to cut loose veteran actors Ned Beatty and Daniel Baldwin and add younger, more photogenic cast members, including two unrealistically glamorous female detectives in seasons six and seven. Similarly, the show's original gritty, idiosyncratic camera style became much more polished and traditional as the series went on. Even the original squad room set was repainted and modernized. Finally, NBC agreed to renew the show for an eighth season... if the show moved to Miami Beach rather than Baltimore, became about a private detective agency rather than a homicide unit, and fired the entire cast save Richard Belzer and the two aforementioned glamorous female detectives. Luckily for all concerned, the creators of the show refused to play ball.
• A positive example with Law & Order, when the show was forced — in the name of expanding the demographic reach — to replace Lt. Cragen and Paul Robinette with Lt. Van Buren and Claire Kincaid, respectively. Kincaid quickly became one of the show's most popular characters (as well as one of the most well-beloved female characters on the show, to the point that the show repeatedly tried to recreate the character after the actress left the show) while Van Buren's actress, S. Epatha Merkerson, remained until the end, having stayed for 17 of the show's 20 years (Lt. Van Buren and ADA Jack McCoy would both return for the 2022 reboot). Not only were the execs right, they were actually ahead of their time. (Cragen, of course, returned to the franchise with the spinoff Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, so it was a win for everyone except Robinette.)
• In 1935, Sinclair Lewis published a novel called It Can't Happen Here, about the election of a fascist government in the United States. In 1982, Kenneth Johnson adapted it as a possible TV miniseries called Storm Warnings, but it was rejected as "too cerebral". Eventually it was modified such that the American fascists became extraterrestrial invaders who ate people. The result was V (1983).
• NBC's Green/Earth Weeks; weeks in November and April respectively where every NBC show has to contain environmental themes. Not coincidentally, their former parent company General Electric is trying to make a ton of "green" products. Comcast now owns NBC Universal, but they've still carried on doing it. It is a great way for the suits to show off how "green" they are without actually doing anything.
  • My Name Is Earl lampshaded this one when Earl is required to organize a "Scared Straight" Program and Executive Meddling forces him to include environmental themes. He protests, because it wouldn't have anything to do with the story and would just be awkwardly shoehorned in.
  • 30 Rock lampshaded this one as well, when David Schwimmer's character who is initially a "Corporate-Friendly Enviromentalist" starts to assume his eco-hero personality even when off the set.
    • Lampshaded again for Season 4. When Jack explains that NBC probably won't do anything for Earth Day besides turn the logo green, Kenneth briefly glances at the lower-left corner of the screen.
  • Meanwhile, The Office simply relegated its "green" moment to a deleted scene, available only on DVD. One wonders if that editing decision was made deliberately late into the process...
  • Knight Rider kills two birds with one stone (Product Placement and lampshading): Dr. Graiman and KITT show off a 2010 Mustang concept to the visiting Eco-Friendly inspector as a ruse of it being KITT's next shell. It's made obvious to the viewers that the green statistics KITT gives are either a full blown Ass Pull, or, at best, a theoretical guess by Dr. Graiman.
  • This also extends to syndicated shows distributed by NBC Universal. For example, The Jerry Springer Show had a week of "green" final thoughts, and Access Hollywood featured stories about celebrities helping the environment.
  • As for the other NBC networks (USA, Bravo, CNBC, The Weather Channel, etc.)... all it means is their corner logo turns green for a week and we get some PSAs about how it's easy being green, and maybe a lettuce quickfire challenge on Top Chef.
  • In late May 2011, NBC decided to force their networks to do another theme week called "Healthy Week", which didn't go so well as it was the last week of sweeps (when NBC didn't have any programming at all except The Biggest Loser to tie in a healthy theme), which only the Today Show and some MSNBC shows took seriously, while for every other NBCU network, it was just 'throw on inane health tips on the screen and PSA's during commercial breaks to satisfy the brutes upstairs'.
• You know that infamous episode of 3rd Rock from the Sun where a race of super-hot Venusians, all played by supermodels, attempt to take over Earth during the Super Bowl? Well, it's revealed on a DVD Commentary that that episode was the result of Executive Meddling. Yeah, we're not surprised either.
• Seinfeld:
  • Portrayed over season 4 of Seinfeld, which features a story arc of Jerry and George trying to pitch a show much like Seinfeld itself to NBC, which is slowly ground down into another lame cookie cutter sitcom. Unusually, no one seems to notice and they seem pretty proud of the final product. The most notable is Jerry pitching an idea to spend an episode simply on the characters waiting for a table in a restaurant (the setup of one of the show's most popular and iconic episodes) which the execs don't get. A flustered Jerry then gives an alternate idea for a ridiculous story where a man is sentenced to be Jerry's butler after hitting his car, which cracks all the execs up and becomes the story of the pilot episode.
  • In the last episode, where Jerry's sitcom is finally greenlighted, an exec forces him to make his character and the character based on Elaine a couple. This may be in reference to an actual bit of Executive Meddling; when Seinfeld was in development, the character of Elaine was created because of an executive mandate that there needed to be a female lead. Seinfeld would later admit that this actually improved the show dramatically.
• The first season of Last Comic Standing nearly had this backfire on the producers. After the last round of auditions, the final cut for who was going to be in the house and actually contestants was supposedly going to be decided by a panel of celebrity judges including Drew Carey. When the final cast was announced, the judges stormed out because their picks for who were the best comedians had been overruled by the producers' picks for who would generate the most in-house drama. The producers managed to turn this around for themselves by turning the judges' anger into a drama spot.
• Another example that ultimately worked: Mel Brooks and Buck Henry originally wanted Tom Poston for the lead role in their spy comedy Get Smart. NBC insisted on Don Adams because he was already under contract.
• Heroes:
  • In one of the more controversial aspects of Heroes, Claire Bennet was given a lesbian relationship, despite previous seasons heavily implying that she was straight. According to some sources, the issue was Hayden Panettiere's idea, although the E! preview before the first episode of the fourth season indicated that Hayden and Madeline Zima were not too happy with what happened. The change, among other factors, needless to say, not only got the show cancelled, but also killed the franchise. It later turned out it was Hayden's idea according to Hayden. She said the storyline was "exciting" and "it's almost silly to have a show about people being different and feeling like they don't fit in and not have all lifestyles represented." And Madeline said she wouldn't mind repeating the kiss. (She didn't, but Hayden did - on another network.)
  • On the flip side of the coin, way back in season 1, Claire's friend Zach was originally supposed to come out as gay. This was scrapped due to pressure from Thomas Dekker's agent who believed him playing a gay character would jeopardize Fox's interest in hiring him for the role of John Connor.
• Another positive example: Hill Street Blues, which was famous for stretching multiple intertwining plotlines over several episodes. (For example, the shooting of Officers Hill and Renko in the pilot wasn't resolved until the end of the first season.) One of NBC's conditions for renewing the show for a second season was a requirement that at least one storyline had to be wrapped up in each episode. Ironically, this wasn't just a rare example of positive executive meddling at NBC, it was a rare example of executive meddling at NBC overall, as it occurred during Grant Tinker's tenure as chairman and CEO. With rare exceptions, Tinker generally hated executive meddling as he felt that it stifles creativity and that TV writers and producers do their best work without interference.
• SCTV faced this numerous times, mainly from NBC, who gave them almost No Budget, and tried to influence the show's content.
  • One instance of meddling in particular resulted in the creation of one of the show's most famous sketches. When the CBC picked up SCTV, they requested that an extra segment with "identifiably Canadian content" be added to pad it out (as the commercial time was two minutes shorter than those distributed for U.S. syndication). Cast members Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas thought this was a bizarre request, since it was already a Canadian production to begin with; they responded with "The Great White North" — a purposely crappy, ad-libbed filler sketch featuring the overly stereotypical Bob and Doug McKenzie. To their shock, Bob and Doug became breakout characters, and were eventually included in the U.S. airings as well.
• While Roy Huggins experienced bad Executive Meddling on Maverick (see the ABC folder) it was a different case on Run For Your Life: NBC (and the American Medical Association) asked Huggins not to name the terminal disease which Ben Gazzara's adventure-seeking lawyer was suffering from (he was told it would kill him within two years - the show lasted for three) so viewers wouldn't start thinking they had it. Which is certainly possible.
• An extremely unusual, and possibly unique, case is found in Land of the Lost (1974). The executive in charge of the show directly ordered the Krofft brothers to hire a properly trained linguist to create the language of the proto-human Pakuni. Victoria Fromkin, Ph.D., is listed in the show credits, and the DVD set of the first includes the entire 200 word Pakuni vocabulary, which makes it clear Pakuni isn't just English with other words.
• Saturday Night Live:
  • Norm MacDonald's firing from Saturday Night Live. Don Ohlmeyer, NBC's West Coast Executive, stated that he thought Norm simply wasn't funny and demanded his removal. Interestingly, Don had two justifiable reasons to get rid of Norm that both parties agree had nothing to do with this. Don forgave Norm for accidentally launching a Precision F-Strike live on air (and then calling attention to it), and Norm denies that his removal had anything to do with his attacks on O.J. Simpson, who was a close friend of Don's.
  • It should be noted that Saturday Night Live doesn't get this treatment as much as other shows — unless the season is doing so poorly that NBC is forced to intervene. Cases in point:
    • Season six (1980-1981): The first season without Lorne Michaels. Jean Doumanian was hired as the new showrunner (it would have been Al Franken, but he pissed off Fred Silverman with his "Limo for the Lame-O" segment on Weekend Update, and Harry Shearer even expressed an interest in being showrunner, as he felt the show's current sensibility didn't mesh with his brand of humor), and, with every agonizingly unfunny episode, it became clear that Doumanian was in over her head (though Doumanian claims that she was doing the best she could with a limited budget and NBC staff treating her like crap because she's a woman). Add to the fact that she rejected a lot of potential cast members (Jim Carrey being one of them), relegated Eddie Murphy to background roles (which would be her undoing, as Eddie Murphy's stand-up piece on the Ray Sharkey episode would be the guarantee that he'd be the show's next big star), and was accused for setting up Charles Rocket saying "fuck" at the end of the Charlene Tilton episode (though Rocket himself has stated that it wasn't a set-up and he didn't know he said anything wrong until the backlash), and NBC had to be rushed in to save the show with new blood, knowing full well that they would probably have to give it a mercy kill (they didn't, but back then, they were thinking it and jokes were made about how Saturday Night Live should be called Saturday Night Dead due to its drop in quality).
    • Season 11 (1985-1986): Another bad season, only this time, it was Lorne Michaels' fault. After his sketch show The New Show got canned and learning that NBC was going to cancel SNL after its 10th season due to low ratings and Dick Ebersol deciding to quit after NBC nixed all the ideas he had planned for his vision of SNL, Michaels swooped in to rebuild his show, with a new cast and new writers. With the exception of Dennis Miller, Jon Lovitz, and Nora Dunn, no one cared much for the new cast (which included such now-famous faces as Joan Cusack, Robert Downey Jr.., Damon Wayans, and Randy Quaid, along with the first time the show hired homosexual cast members^note Terry Sweeney, an openly gay white man, who was on the show before as one of Jean Doumanian's writers, and Danitra Vance, a black lesbian and the only time the show hired a teenager^note Anthony Michael Hall was 17 and already famous as a star of The Breakfast Club when he joined the cast, making him the youngest ever cast member.), and, after the bizarre debacle that was the March 1986 episode hosted by George Wendt with Francis Ford Coppola and musical guest Phillip Glass, NBC rushed in again and decided to shut the show down for good. While the season 11 finale did end with everyone locked in a room with Lorne setting it on fire and saving Jon Lovitz, Lorne begged NBC to give his show another chance, which they did, but only for 13 episodes of season 12 (they later rescinded this after season 12 brought SNL back from its early 1980s slump). Lorne fired everyone (except for the three aforementioned newcomers who were actually good, along with Al Franken and A. Whitney Brown), brought in people like Dana Carvey, Phil Hartman, Jan Hooks, Victoria Jackson, and Kevin Nealon, and everything about season 11 was written off as a bad dream.
    • Season 20 (1994-1995): Unlike seasons 6 and 11, which were bad because of new cast members who were barely experienced with working in sketch comedy and/or as an ensemble and writing that wasn't top shelf, this season was plagued with an overcrowded cast that hated each other, Phil Hartman leaving for other projects (mostly The Simpsons and News Radio), and overexposure of Adam Sandler and Chris Farley. Once again, NBC confronted Lorne Michaels about it and told him that the show was ending due to low ratings and bad reviews — and Lorne Michaels, once again, dodged cancellation by weeding out the bad cast members and writers^note though most of them left on their own accord because they were tired of the show, in the cases of Kevin Nealon and Ellen Cleghorne, or found out how daunting working at SNL is, in the cases of Morwenna Banks and Chris Elliott, keeping the good ones, and hiring newer, better talent. Lorne Michaels has cited season 20 as the closest he's been to being fired and having his show canceled.
• NBC Entertainment Chairman Robert Greenblatt admitted to burning off part of the final, half-length season of Chuck by airing episodes during the low-viewership year-end holidays so that the season and the series would be finished with as quickly as possible. His reason? The rabid online fan community that had pushed NBC into renewing the show wasn't actually watching the show in its Friday night timeslot (where several cult favorites were competing for the already smaller Friday audience). His frustration over this dissonance between popularity and Nielsen audience decided him to get the show off the air as soon as he could.
  Greenblatt: Unfortunately, that rabid fan base that was going crazy on the net didn't come to the show. And maybe they didn't come to the show because it was Friday, but you would think that audience would find the show. The show was getting a 1 rating. So I think Chuck's time had come. ... Chuck is over, let's alert the masses.
• Community - oh sweet God, Community. After getting okay ratings the first season (this is NBC we're talking about), it was moved to Thursday nights, 8 pm EST. The problem was that this put it up against The Big Bang Theory, and the ratings suffered. It also didn't help matters that creator Dan Harmon was utilizing whatever Protection from Editors he had to introduce more and more weirdness into the show. While this was appreciated by the cult fanbase, NBC did not take it well. After a forced move to mid-season during Season 3 (which was widely protested by fans), Community was finally renewed for a fourth season... and then NBC (possibly pushed by Sony) ejected Dan Harmon from showrunner position, replacing him with the consulting producers from Aliens In America and Happy Endings. The following exodus of executive producers, directors, and writers, coupled with circulated letters suggesting the actors only speak positively of the new show direction and the explosion of fan outrage, suggested the executive meddling here wouldn't be taken well if Community did not perform to expectations. However, Dan Harmon was eventually re-hired for Season 5... for a half-season of 13 episodes that was canceled due to low ratings. The much-maligned Season 4 was also hurt due to the executives having similarly cut the season's episode count down to 13.
  • However, years after the series ended, it was revealed that Harmon was actually fired for Season 4 because he was sexually harassing Megan Ganz, a female member of his own show's writing staff, meaning that the executives' decision to remove Harmon was more justifiable than previously thought. Though on a nicer note, after this was brought to light in 2018, Harmon later issued an apology for his behavior, which Ganz accepted.
  • The series' budget was also slashed more and more with each following season. Hence why the show stopped shooting at outside locations after the first and second seasons.
  • invoked There's also a positive example, surprisingly enough; Originally, NBC execs demanded half of Harmon's writing staff be women. This turned out for the better as Harmon ended up appreciating their skill and kept hiring a large number of female writers even after the corporate rule was dropped.
• The casting of the female lead for the first season of JAG is a case of this. Creator and Executive Producer Donald P. Bellisario wanted Andrea Parker who'd starred in the pilot episode, but NBC wanted Tracey Needham instead. Needham got the part.
• 30 Rock:
  • Jenna Maroney was originally intended to be played by Rachel Dratch (and named "Jenna DeCarl"), a personal friend of the show's creator Tina Fey, but NBC ultimately recast her with Jane Krakowski after test audience reception. This was ultimately agreed to be a decision for the better, though Tina Fey did make it up to her by including her in a variety of recurring roles through the first few seasons.
  • In universe example when Dot Com pitched a show called Let's Stay Together about a family growing up in early 70s' Detroit. NBC agreed to show it if numerous changes were made, including the addition of a talking dog.
• Up All Night is one of those examples of a show being meddled into suicide. The show had a history of meddling - Maya Rudolph's Ava character got a more inflated role in the wake of Bridesmaids, turning the show into a blend of subdued Dom Com and wacky Work Com, then had her show cancelled at the start of Season 2, turning the show into pretty much pure Dom Com - but nothing compared to the planned changes in the middle of Season 2. First came the idea of turning the single-cam, laugh-track-lacking sitcom into a multi-cam show with a studio audience. Attempts to cope with the change included a portal between the "single cam" and 'multi-cam" universes that only baby Amy could see, or the revelation that the main characters were all actors playing their own characters on a show called Up All Night. At this point, Christina Applegate left, and while there was talk of recasting her, Will Arnett and Maya Rudolph jumped ship soon after.
• Friends:
  • The Season 6 episode "The One With The Proposal" was subjected to this. Originally, the episode was supposed to depict a Big Showdown between Chandler and Richard, ultimately ending in a cliffhanger with Monica deciding who to marry. However, there was last-minute speculation that Season Six would be the final season of Friends. Thus, the writers were forced to retool the episode to end with Monica and Chandler proposing, so that if the series was cancelled, there would be no cliffhanger left dangling. The writers also changed the 'showdown' ending because they realized it would be obvious that Monica was going to pick Chandler. They didn't like playing the proposal for cheap laughs and drama, so changed it to the more private, romantic proposal we see. They explain it all on the episodes commentary.
  • NBC execs forced Marcel on the show, because apparently Friends needed a monkey for comic relief. Both cast and crew found it to be a pain in the ass and even gave it a Take That! in Season 6. They also attempted numerous spin-offs and crossovers with the show to try to piggyback off the show's success.
• NBC's short-lived family drama James at 15 featured an interesting instance of Executive Meddling with a script. The episode that changed the show's title to James at 16 focused in part on James and his girlfriend preparing to celebrate his birthday by a mutual abandoning of their virginity. The network refused to allow even the most tangential or euphemistic discussion of contraception, to the point where the show's head writer quit over the censorship of a single word: the teenaged characters could discuss having sex, but could not use the word "responsible" (in the context of having responsible sex, or behaving in a responsible manner).
• invoked A positive example can be seen with The Good Place; after the massive Wham Line in "Michael's Gambit," the episode originally continued on and showed Michael pushing a potted plant off a table out of annoyance at being found out. However, the NBC executives asked for a commercial break to be placed immediately after the big reveal so that the plot twist could sit with the viewers for longer, and the audience would have more time to mull over what the twist would mean and represent for the series going forward. In the episode's DVD Commentary, Michael Schur admitted that it was a brilliant move and in retrospect, he was embarrassed that he hadn't thought of it in the first place.

Nickelodeon/The N (TeenNick)

• The Nickelodeon sci-fi series Space Cases had two examples of Executive Meddling in the Season 1 finale.
  • First off, Catalina was meant to be killed off. However, Nickelodeon decided that was too dark for kids and had the writers add a new ending at the last minute that showed that she had survived by being shoved into another dimension. It's an understandable change, but it completely ruins the scene before it and death had already been brought up on the show before, so the logic behind the decision is a bit questionable.
  • The second change was the removal of the character Elmira. You see, following Catalina's Disney Death the creative team was going to bring Elmira to the show as a full-time cast member. This made perfect sense as she was already introduced in the past season, had a connection to the crew and the central story line and was liked by fans. However, Nickelodeon felt she was too alien and would keep kids away from the show. So, instead they brought in Suzee, a character previously only seen by Catalina and was utterly unlikable. Fans hated these alterations and season 2 is widely viewed as inferior to the first because of them.
• Degrassi: The Next Generation:
  • As they have co-funded Degrassi: The Next Generation, the "N" Channel has exerted more and more influence over the writers and producers of the show. Their meddling can be seen most notably in the opening credits for the sixth and seventh seasons, which have moved away from showing the ensemble cast during an average school day and towards emphasizing the individual characters, much in the style of Beverly Hills, 90210.
  • In-universe Executive Meddling by the school board has to take a lot of the blame for Degrassi's slide from "high-tech magnet school" to "rough school with metal detectors, standing police presence and a bad reputation".
• iCarly:
  • Parodied in iCarly Saves TV. iCarly was given a TV contract, but proceeded to be meddled with by a director fixated with a traditional sitcom and not the original idea of expanding iCarly into something of a variety show. This included replacing Sam, making Freddie an errand boy for the director, and eventually adding a talking Barneyesque dinosaur.
  • Eventually happened to the actual show. After the writers spent an entire double length episode telling people not to watch the show for the Shipping that had taken over the fandom, Nick pushed to have the exact same Shipping fandom stoked into a Shipping War by hooking up one of the two main couples on the show. With the official network twitter accounts, the writers and creator of the show all expecting mega ratings over the 11.2 million of the previous highest rated episode (ironically featuring the opposite couple getting together), it could only pull 5.0, which on the surface was good. The problem manifested itself as the arc went on, with the final episode of the arc getting some of the lowest ratings in the history of the show. Once the arc was over the viewers were already gone, and the show tanked severely.
• Victorious also suffered from some executive meddling, although in this case, it was executive meddling in its favour. As mentioned above, the second main cause for the ratings issues on iCarly was a lack of promotion for the show after that romantic storyline. Because iCarly looked to be coming to a close, Nick needed to push their promotional focus onto Victorious, which was slated to 'take over' as the flagship show of the network. The problem was that Victorious wasn't especially popular outside of its lead-in from iCarly. Even with iCarly getting renewed a couple more times, the poor advertising for iCarly hurt Victorious, as did the splitting of the show from a pairing where one led into the other, to airing almost at random without being together. The ratings were so bad that it pulled the network as a whole down, Victorious was cancelled at the same time as iCarly ended, along with numerous other shows on the roster, as the Nick execs wanted clear space to try and revive the network with a series of new pilots. To come full circle, the new pilot is Sam & Cat, which is a spin-off between two characters, one from iCarly, and one from Victorious.
• Sam & Cat originally had a sane 20 episode first season ordered...until it turned out to be the only thing on the network's Saturday night lineup with a pulse. Forgetting that Jennette McCurdy and Ariana Grande aren't Charlie Sheen with the insane 100 episode deal his show Anger Management had, the network ordered twenty more episodes... onto the first season (the most a kid's sitcom usually gets in a year is 26, but since both stars are over 20, the show isn't tied down by the traditional California child labor laws which would never allow this). This meant no breaks for McCurdy, who then had to deal with her mother's death from cancer and a built-up rebellion period, or Grande, as her musical career was built up and the long process of becoming Cat Valentine had to be cut down to being fit with a wig so she could keep her natural hair color for her musical performances. Neither actress was even able to get a contract re-negotiation for the extra twenty episodes either. Tensions seemed to have built on the set due to the arduous and grinding shooting schedule due to the physical comedy and special effects the show employs, and after the network over-reacted to McCurdy's ex-boyfriend releasing racy pictures of her and a circuit of podcast interviews where she admitted some pretty questionable things such as the network driving her to become a country singer, something she never wanted to pursue at all, behind the scenes rancor built up to the point where McCurdy refused to attend the Kids' Choice Awards because of how the network treated her at the expense of her well-being. The network put the show on hiatus with a passive-aggressive statement that the season had been 'tiring' and promised the show would return, but the show limped towards the end, finishing with 36 episodes and its unexpected finale disappointingly leading into the network's Follow the Leader attempt at a sports awards show the night after the ESPY's, along with Grande and McCurdy remaining silent on social media about the last episodes. Coincidentally the show had an episode with a homage to Laverne & Shirley featuring the stars of that show in a cameo, the first time Penny Marshall and Cindy Williams shared a soundstage in years (and the last time with Marshall's 2018 death).
• Power Rangers:
  • Power Rangers and Nickelodeon have a very odd relationship and the oddness of Power Rangers Megaforce showed how it is. Under contract with Nickelodeon, Saban only did 20 episodes per season. Not so bad - Megaforce happened to air during the 20th anniversary of Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, so let's use Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger! Unfortunately, Saban was contractually obliged not to skip over Super Sentai series, so they have to use Tensou Sentai Goseiger. End result? Two 20 episode seasons that decided to hit the fast forward button on two different series because of two stupid contracts.
  • Fans were caught off guard, though, when Power Rangers Dino Charge skipped Tokumei Sentai Go Busters and went for Zyuden Sentai Kyoryuger. Rumor has it, though, that Bandai persuaded both Toei and Saban to skip it due to the fact that Go-Busters did so poorly sales and rating wise. The same happened with the next series, with Saban skipping Ressha Sentai ToQger and adapting Shuriken Sentai Ninninger as Power Rangers Ninja Steel.
  • Because of these, once Hasbro bought the franchise away from Saban, they went back and adapted Go-Busters as Power Rangers Beast Morphers and by the second season of Power Rangers Dino Fury, they finally pulled the series out of Nickelodeon and moved it to Netflix. Time will tell if Hasbro's actions will undo Nickelodeon's meddling.

Sci Fi Channel/SyFy

• The Sci Fi Channel has apparently implemented a policy that any series that has only middling ratings instead of stellar ratings will be canceled, despite whatever vocal, devoted following it has. Three examples that jump out include Mystery Science Theater 3000, Farscape, and at the end of its 10th season, after being the longest running U.S. hour-long science fiction show ever, Stargate SG-1, which annoyed the two main factions of the fanbase for different reasons — half wanted it to continue, and half wanted it to have ended two seasons before it did. Each of these series replaced the last. They have more generally replaced cancelled shows with such things as Monster movies, Professional Wrestling, and whatever syndicated series they could get on the cheap.
  • When MST3K came over from the abusive Comedy Central, the execs decided that it needed more sci-fi movies (which is partially justified, this was before their Network Decay started to kick in), and eventually feature wacky subplots during the host segments such as Pearl Forrester wanting to become a licensed mad scientist, because that's what the audience will care about. Proof that you can run a network with no clue about why people watch your programs. Luckily, none of this hurt the ratings and they made that stuff funny.
  • Another bone of contention was Sci-Fi's initial restriction on Best Brains' movie choices, allowing only Universal movies (at least, movies Universal owned the rights for) for Seasons Eight and Nine. This led to some questionable riffing selections: Gorgo and Revenge of the Creature aren't masterpieces, but equal to Manos: The Hands of Fate or Space Mutiny? Fortunately, by Season Nine the network became lax in enforcing this stipulation.
  • Season 4 of Farscape is a soft reboot, which is why the characters are re-introduced in an odd way (along with some new characters who felt tacked on and unnecessary). The Nebari mind control virus never went anywhere; half the galaxy probably has it in their system due to Nebari STDs, but it was never brought up again. That's because the network forced a bunch of new writers on them in exchange for renewal for two more seasons and they only got one, the bastards.
  • Stargate Atlantis and Stargate Universe got this treatment as well. The former was cancelled after five seasons while the latter was cancelled after only two.
  • SG-1 also got meddled by Showtime. The pilot featured a minute-long shot of full-frontal female nudity that the writers said they were forced to add to mark the series as "adult". The shot remains on the DVDs of season 1, but was cut from all syndicated airings and from the pilot's '09 recut as a DVD movie.
• Battlestar Galactica:
  • The Sci Fi Channel was unhappy with Battlestar Galactica's plot-heavy story arc-based episodes, since it required a lot of background and internal knowledge to understand and made it difficult to pick up new viewers. When the first two seasons didn't pull in the ratings Sci-Fi desired, the executives pressured Moore into creating more standalone episodes that weren't as plot-heavy. This plan backfired and the third season took heavy criticism from both fans and critics, particularly the infamous episode "The Woman King". Fortunately, the executives decided to let Moore call the shots in the 4th season.
  • Executives at the network balked at hiring Tricia Helfer in such a prominent role as she had no acting experience at that point, mainly being known as a model. They changed their minds very quickly as her character became the focus of their marketing campaigns.
  • In one of the weirdest examples of Executive Meddling ever, a higher-up at Sci-Fi insisted that the show's intro tune be changed. This is why, on Sci-Fi's airings, season one has a different intro theme, for apparently no reason. The intro theme you hear on the Sci-Fi Channel in later seasons already existed for season one everywhere else it was broadcast. The reason for the insisted change? The original music was deemed too depressing. Yes, for a show about the end of the world via nuclear holocaust, an ominous Sanskrit chant is just going to drive the audience over the edge for how much angst they can take. The original was changed back because of a negative fan reaction that surprised Sci-Fi by how disproportionally large it was compared to the actual issue at hand. Anyone who hadn't seen the first season of BSG via Bittorrent before it finished airing in the United States, but after it finished airing everywhere else, probably heard the original theme on Youtube.
• That pro-wrestling mentioned above didn't even escape the meddling: when WWE revived the "ECW brand", their contract with parent company USA got the show put up on the then-still-named Sci Fi Channel. An odd choice to be sure, but not fully without logic, thinking they'd pull in some of the historic ratings spikes the WWE could muster. Then the executives stated "Well you're on SFC, so you need sci-fi elements." This led to such memorable characters as "The Zombie", who were already in the ring by the time the commercial break was over so you didn't even see their intro, and then old-school ECW Original "The Sandman" would come out and smear them across the ring. SFC backed off after the first few weeks. ^note  Oddly, the Zombie apparently proved to be quite popular (perhaps due to his So Bad, It's Good gimmick) and the wrestler who played him (Tim Arnson) actually wrestled as the character for several indy promotions
• All seven original main characters of Dark Matter (2015) were supposed to survive throughout the series. However, the execs wanted to create a shakeup and really liked the Anyone Can Die trope, so they forced it on the showrunners at the start of Season 2 and consequently One was killed off at the end of the season premiere. The cast and crew didn't like it, and still don't. There were plans to reveal it had been a longer-lasting clone that died if the series had been picked up for a fourth season, but it was Screwed by the Network.

Showtime

• The Showtime executives objected to an episode of the Genre Anthology series Masters of Horror called "Imprint", directed by Takashi Miike, for its extremely graphic and disturbing content. Executive producer and creator Mick Garris made cuts to the episode, but it was shelved anyway, and is now only available on DVD. Another episode, "Jenifer", had several cuts made for violence, with the deleted scenes being available on DVD.
• Dexter was meant to end with the title character's death, but the execs wouldn't allow it for...some reason. Well, allegedly. They claimed as much in a few interviews after the (widely reviled) finale, but in the run up to the last episode they claimed many times that what they had written was the only logical, organic conclusion and that nothing else would make sense. Hmm.
• Dead Like Me was a pretty popular TV series for Showtime, but the then-director of Showtime (in 2005) cancelled the series because he didn't like it and replaced it with the Kirsty Alley show, Fat Actress that flew like a lead balloon.

Slice

• One example that was actually for the better was in Big Brother Canada. In the Head of Household competition, Emmett was found to have cheated. Rather than simply let it happen, they shut down the feeds for all of Friday, wherein they redid the competition and did not let Emmett compete.

Telecinco

• As a final nail on the Troubled Production of the Alatriste TV series, the network executives made the illumination greater, the music louder and put tags with the character's names when they were first introduced, all against the show's creators and mere days before the premiere, because they feared that the moronic viewers would not watch a somber period show filmed in chiaroscuro. This decision backfired enormously and earned the show terrible critics. A recurrent complaint was that with the lights ramped up, the interior scenes now were brighter than the exteriors, and all the sets and vestuary looked fake.

Thames Television

• Heavily subverted by Kenny Everett; when he devised for his show a new character called Mary Hinge, he was ordered by Thames TV executives to change the name because the Spoonerism was "too blatant". So change it he did — to Cupid Stunt, which is far more blatant.

Three (New Zealand)

• Jono & Ben (previously Jono and Ben at Ten) originally aired at 10pm on Friday nights with raw humour and swearing. But then in 2015, the show was moved to 7:30pm (aiming at more family audiences minus the swearing except those PG friendly ones like “shit” and replacing with pop culture nonsense, thanks to Laura Daniels). As of 2018, the show has finally been axed after 7 years
• Three's news and current affairs division has been revamped in 2016 by replacing the long-running flagship programme 3 News with NewsHub.

TNT

• In the second season of Babylon 5, The WB execs insisted on the creation of a hotshot fighter pilot character that they actually called "the Han Solo of Babylon 5", a phrase series creator J. Michael Straczynski hated due to its implication that the viewer would be unfamiliar with any kind of science fiction besides Star Wars. Since it was the only way the show would survive past its first season, he went along and created Lt. Warren Keffer. However, he got his revenge by giving Keffer as little to do as possible, and at the end of the season, killed him off in a very painful manner. By this point, the executives had completely forgotten that they insisted upon the character in the first place.
• Crusade :
  • J. Michael Straczynski's experience creating the Babylon 5 sequel series Crusade for TNT was full of meddling; Turner execs reportedly asked him to add more sex and violence, and write a second pilot directly under their oversight. They even forced changes in the color scheme of the sets and uniforms after filming had begun. A lampshade was hung on this in one episode, with a sarcastic comment about interfering higher-ups back on Earth. The series was canceled before it even aired, and to add insult to injury, the episodes were aired out of their intended order.
  • After the intended first episode was thought to be too cerebral and therefore uninteresting, the execs actually insisted on a new pilot that would open with a fist fight.

TV Asahi

• Kamen Rider Hibiki
  • One name in Toku is synonymous with Executive Meddling: Kamen Rider Hibiki, as best described by this article. To summarize: Intended to reverse the ratings and toy sales slump the Kamen Rider franchise was facing — to the point of appointing Shigenori Takatera, the man responsible for reviving Kamen Rider with Kamen Rider Kuuga, as lead producer once more — the unusually introspective and character-driven Hibiki quickly gained popularity and achieved a higher ratings average than its predecessor Kamen Rider Blade — but even lower toy sales than Blade as fewer toys were planned for it than even Kuuga originally as it was not intended to be a merch-heavy series.^note As of 2019, Hibiki still retains the dubious honor of having the lowest toy sales record of any Kamen Rider series, though paradoxically still sold more units-per-item than the later Zi-O's massive merch-line did Additionally, the filming went over-budget and over-schedule due to Toei's many demands that frequently changed their plans and exceeded their expenses ^note The series contained location shoots in and complex CGI monsters of the week on a regular basis, two oddities for the franchise of the time that have since become more frequent features with no claims of it exceeded expenses, likely due to larger budgets and cheaper CGI., further compounding the revenue problem, and Moral Guardians complained about the high density of Nightmare Fuel.
  • So around episode 30, Takatera and lead writers Shinji Oiishi and Tsuyoshi Kida were sacked and replaced with Shinichiro Shirakura as producer ^note  who was responsible for the ratings and sales problems in the first place and Toshiki Inoue as lead writer (though Inoue would later reveal in post-series interviews he was treated as little more than a yes-man to write out Shirakura's demands, a complaint that has been shared among almost every writer Shirakura has ever worked with), and the series was Retooled to be more action-centric, and less scary while actually costing them MORE in the long-run. This also included planned incoming characters Eiki and Shoki being Demoted to Extra, as well as the introduction of The Scrappy Kyosuke Kiriya which the series bends over backwards to excuse said character's wrongdoing to the point of character derailment for the rest of the cast.
  • Shigeki Hosokawa, Hibiki's actor, reported that the new writing staff was "fraudulent" and impossible to work with due to the Demands Shirakura would shove on them, to the point where they were forced to re-write the final episode while the final battle was being filmed. Just to cap it all off, the ending was changed at the last minute, denying the story's protagonist Asumu the chance to become an Oni, the staff forced to scrap his costume in order to enhance Kiriya's; fans were livid at this revelation, but even before then the content after Shirakura took over put the series once more back into the same ratings and sales freefall Takatera had been called back to fix...and despite the expenses from Executive meddling Takatera actually had been succeeding in doing before he got booted; the show made less AFTER the staff-change than it had before such had taken place. Later several Toei executives were upbraided for letting things go so far again. Hosokawa has said that he'd gladly reprise his role, provided Shirakura were not involved, as he has continued to perform voicework as Hibiki for both Bandai and Toei.
  • As for the cast and original crew: Takadera became another creator that thanks to Shirakura (yes, there IS a list) completely burned bridges with Toei, and later reunited with Oiishi to create the Spiritual Successor Daimajin Kanon for Kadokawa, Kida was given a second chance on the franchise with lead writing duties on Kamen Rider Wizard (fan consensus is he isn't quite so good on solo duties, though that is a mixed opinion, as Wizard was meant as a 'back-to-basics' show that was only less engaging after a trio of VERY strong story and arc-heavy series and was then followed by the powerhouse that was Gaim).
  • Kiriya's actor Yuichi Nakamura redeemed himself with his performance as the breakout character Yuto Sakurai in Kamen Rider Den-O...however the Hibiki arc of Kamen Rider Zi-O once more compounded the error from producer Shirakura for the character of Kiriya. While the character is forced to realizes the hard way that he was an in-universe Scrappy to his fellow Oni and takes the first steps to mature into a better person more than a decade too late to repair the relationship with his peers, the tribute episode shoots itself in the foot by then making it so he once more, without any effort, gains abilities he is still undeserving of by taking Hibiki's powers as his own. Made worse by the Zi-O series-ending reset button making it so any attempt at correcting the character is retconned out of existence.
  • While Asumu remains screwed with his actor retired from showbiz since, his Kamen Rider Decade Alternate Universe counterpart (played by a different actor) receives the justice the original universe incarnation should have got, as he himself becomes Hibiki after his mentor passes on his powers to the boy.
  • An unintentional side effect of the meddling: Joe Odagiri, lead of Kamen Rider Kuuga, has stated that he'd be willing to reprise his role only if Takadera was at the helm once more, as he'd do anything for him. Considering Takadera's bridge burning AND how nostalgia-happy Toei have been with their Toku IPs ever since Decade... Whoops.
  • In a 2018 interview, Odagiri revealed he had been approached by Shirakura about reprising his role again for Kamen Rider Zi-O and had been handed a script for the film Kamen Rider Heisei Generations Forever. He read it and soon after rejected the proposal, openly calling the film's story "stupid". Considering the version of the film which excluded him was a Real-World Episode with a meta-commentary plot where the show producer complained about how the fandom for the franchise hates him while explicitly bashing the shows that did better than his and insulting older fans who still appreciated it as being nothing but Manchildren...Odagiri wasn't necessarily wrong.
• Kamen Rider has a lesser version as well, with Toei's executives usually pressuring the shows' staffs to make the protagonist Rider's primary form be red since Japan sees red as a heroic color. The producers of Kamen Rider W revealed that they had to fight an uphill battle to make Double black and green, and managed to get Toei on board by pointing out that those were the colors of the original Rider (Double still has a red alternate form, but since they're a fire-elemental that's a bit more understandable).

UPN

• This began to creep into Star Trek: Voyager, a production which seems to have been hexed from the start. A full overview can be found on the Troubled Production article.
  • According to interviews with various cast members and writers, the decision to introduce a female Captain was handled poorly. Characterization was wildly inconsistent, with Janeway being lionized by the female writers and painted as an unstable autocrat by the males. The writer's room was deluged with chauvinistic hate mail. The original actress quit when the producer told her to act as buttoned-down and robotic as possible. (This was actually Rick Berman's decree to the whole cast, believing their emoting would detract from the believability of aliens they encounter.)
  • UPN wanted Voyager to have TNG ratings and figured that the easiest way to do that would be to make Voyager like TNG, meaning no character conflict (which having the mixed Starfleet/Maquis crew was meant to allow), no story arcs (the one attempt at it was given a greatly disliked ending that neatly avoids any consequences), and the enforcement of Status Quo Is God. Garret Wang famously explained that the reason his character, Harry Kim, remained an ensign for seven years was because the show needed a Wesley.
  • Ironically, this is also what saved Harry Kim's life. His character was scheduled to die from an alien infection at the end of the third season. Then the actor made the list of "The 50 Most Beautiful People" in People magazine that year and Harry was kept and Kes was booted off instead to make way for Seven of Nine.^note At least, that was the story at the time. In the years since it has been strongly implied that Jennifer Lien had to be let go because her mental health issues were negatively affecting production, and after several attempts at intervention, she was written off as a lost cause. Everyone involved — including Wang, which is to his credit, as the "official" story reflects quite poorly on him personally — kept the secret to protect Lien's reputation.
  • And that was because ratings were falling, and the network execs said sex sells, and the one attempt to make Kes sexy (complete with much longer, wavy hair for only a single episode) apparently failed miserably, and thus Seven of Nine and her oxygen-depriving catsuit were invented. (A TV Guide interview with Jennifer Lien, who played Kes, indicated that she was hired because she had had a baby and her breasts were therefore larger than normal. There were apparently complaints when her figure went back to normal.)
  • It was so bad that when Ron Moore joined the staff after Deep Space Nine ended, he wrote one episode, was there three weeks, and left in disgust. When he asked about how to write a character, the response was essentially "We don't know, do what you want."
  • Robert Beltran slammed his employers at a Star Trek convention for ignoring him and the rest of the cast (especially Tim Russ, who played Tuvok, and Garrett Wang, who played Harry Kim), over Seven of Nine and the Doctor. He then threatened to leave. As a compromise, the producers introduced a relationship between his character and Seven of Nine, who was at that time the most popular character on the show. Not a good compromise. The relationship was not hinted at until past the half-way point of the last season, and was actually a simulation. Their actual relationship was not shown until the last episode.
• The common narrative is that, if Star Trek: Enterprise did anything to please the fans, odds are good the producers went fishing that week. Executive Producers Brannon Braga and Rick Berman are thus often assumed to have penned the lowest-rated and most derided episodes of ENT's four-year run—despite all the times when their episodes were...well, good. ("Cogenitor", anyone?) In reality, many of the creative choices seen as negative by viewers were imposed upon Berman and Braga by UPN.
  • UPN forced the show to use a power ballad, being the much-loathed “Where My Heart Will Take Me” pop-song for its theme tune instead of the purpose-written classical piece "Archer's Theme", which ended up being used for the closing credits.
  • This is what it would have looked like had "Archer's Theme," been used the closing credits music, originally intended for the credits sequence and written by the same person responsible for Deep Space Nine's theme.
  • Executives were also responsible for the Temporal Cold War arc. The original idea for the series was to have the first season based on Earth before going into space the very next season, but higher-ups disliked that idea and insisted that it be similar in tone to Voyager; weirder yet, to have a Time Travel element to make it "more futuristic," despite it being a prequel to Star Trek: The Original Series. The execs later realized the TCW was going nowhere and demand that it be removed, which is why it was abruptly finished in "Storm Front."
  • "E Squared" is often remembered for ripping off half a dozen episodes. What isn't too well-known is that the writer was specifically asked to make a number of edits for it to mimic previous ideas.
  • The most egregious example from Enterprise is the episode "Dear Doctor", in which Doctor Phlox discovers that an apparent pandemic among the Valakian species is actually a widespread genetic disorder. Phlox is able to create a cure, but wants to withhold it because the disorder came about naturally, and the fall of the Valakians will make way for the ascendency of a second intelligent species which are currenly oppressed by the Valakians. In the original version of the script, Phlox refuses a direct order from Captain Archer to give them the cure, ending the episode with tension between the characters. UPN execs, however, were unhappy with the characters holding so strong a disagreement, so the script had to be changed for Archer to agree with Phlox instead. There is still significant argument over whether or not this counts as genocide.
  • As part of an "HIV awareness week" the network asked all series to do an AIDS-themed episode, even the one set 150 years in the future ("Stigma"). This turned out as bad as you'd think, and while HIV did not make an appearance, the series did contract a major Plot Tumor.
  • The inconsistent behavior of the Captain was par for the course by that point.

USA Network

• The 4400's pilot miniseries was originally supposed to keep the mystery as to who abducted and returned the 4400, to be resolved later in the series proper. In a rare case of positive, farsighted Meddling, higher-ups insisted the source be revealed by the end of the miniseries to give viewers some more substantial bait to get hooked on, and to avoid the inevitable disappointment when The Reveal failed - as so many others had in so many other stories - to measure up to years' worth of mystery and hype.

VH1

• This happened when they changed "Best Week Ever" to "Best Week Ever with Paul F. Tompkins".

The WB

• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • In the pilot, Willow wears drab clothing that her mother picked out for her. Network execs told creator Joss Whedon that they wanted Willow to "look more like Buffy" who wore brighter, preppier, and more stylish clothing. This had a positive result, however, as Whedon decided to give Willow colorful, if geeky clothing, leading to the famous fuzzy sweaters and silly clothes.
  • The most famous example of Buffy meddling involves The WB's notoriety for jumping to ridiculous conclusions about what would upset the audience. Remember when the "Graduation" season finale of Buffy the Vampire Slayer almost didn't air in the wake of the Columbine tragedy? True, it involved the image of a class full of students coming to school armed to the teeth... to fight a giant demon-thing in a showdown between good and evil that had been set-up as the climax for the entire season. This was apparently considered too close. Yeah...
  • The WB also postponed the episode "Earshot", as it involved a plot to mass-murder students (with a Red Herring that it would be by shooting). It was supposed to be the next episode to air following Columbine, so the network aired a rerun instead. Because Buffy keeps the character Jonathan from killing himself in "Earshot", this unfortunately meant that the significance of him giving her the Class Protector Award in "The Prom", the episode that was originally to air after "Earshot", was lost in the original airing. Joss Whedon's comments regarding the decision to postpone "Earshot" indicate that he agreed, but was very angry about the delaying of the season finale, to the point of advising fans to "pirate the damned thing," a rare instance of a producer encouraging fans to pirate his own show. A key difference was that while "Earshot" was not significant in the seasonal arc, making viewers wait months to see the payoff of the season-long Story Arc was just cruel.
  • Whedon has confirmed that the "Buffy Working At A Fast Food Place" plotline would have been taken further in Season 6, if not for network worries that it would alienate advertisers.
• Angel, in order to get a season 5, changed location, Mind Wiped the characters, changed their jobs from detectives to clueless employees of the same evil corporation that they had been laboring for years to dismantle, shifted from a Arc based format to a Monster of the Week setup (for the first 1/3 of the season; after that they had at least somewhat of a Story Arc), and transplanted Breakout Character Spike from Buffy into the show. It worked to some extent, as season 5 was better received than the previous one, though not enough so to bring about season 6. (Joss Whedon tried to leverage the property to obtain an early renewal, but overestimated his own clout and was canceled instead.)

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