Later Installment Weirdness / Live-Action TV

• Angel's fifth and final season involved the protagonists running the Big Bad organization Wolfram & Hart. Due to budget cuts, a much greater portion of the episodes took place during the daytime, and Cordelia was largely absent. Additionally, Spike was transplanted to the show for this season following the series finale of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (taking Cordelia's spot in the opening credits).
• Arrow:
  • The fifth season introduced several new main characters while all but two original ones (The Hero and the Creator's Pet) were made Out of Focus; a new title sequence was eventually ushered in with logos for all the new heroes, not just Green Arrow. Save for one, the newbies were received exactly like you were expecting. Most of them do get better however.
  • The first four seasons of Arrow, unlike the following shows in the universe it spawned, were relatively grounded, as the de-facto Batman of its canon, with the farthest reality-leaving touches involving the League of Assassins' Lazarus Pit being able to resurrect dead characters. However, as the other series (and crossover events) brought in elements such as the multiverse, time travel, and alternate timelines into canonical play, all of the above began to affect Arrow as well: characters from Earth-2 and metahumans, interaction with cosmic beings, and eventually, alternate timelines away from the show's prime history. The characters even lampshade regularly in later seasons how their world is much different from the days of fighting druglords from a bunker.
• The first three seasons of MTV's Awkward. were run by series creator Lauren Iungerich, who had a natural, realistic vision for the show. After her departure, the show received new showrunners who made the show a more dramatic, stereotypical high school soap opera. Most notably there was a plot about new girl Eva turning out to be a psychopathic Stalker with a Crush for Matty with a fake identity and Fake Pregnancy to pull The Baby Trap on him. This plot might have worked on a regular teen show where drama happens all the time, like Beverly Hills, 90210, but it was ludicrous on Awkward.
• Baywatch Nights: The series started as a Spin-Off of the original Baywatch with a Genre Shift towards detective stories, with Mitch and other characters opening a detective agency and solving mysteries. Soon afterwards it did a Retool following the then-leader that was The X-Files and had the characters (veteran lifeguards and police officers before becoming P.Is.) battling supernatural Monsters of the Week. It was cancelled shortly after.
• Blackadder Goes Forth is the only Blackadder season in which Edmund has no connection to royalty, or indeed any Historical Domain Characters at all except a brief encounter with the Red Baron, and the sudden reveal in the last episode that Field-Marshall Haig owes him a favour.
• Bonanza:
  • Season 12 adds the new kid, Jamie Hunter (added to round out the cast and give someone that actually could use Ben's advice), a totally new theme ("The Big Bonanza"), actual title shots introducing each actor, and the move of the set from the Paramount Studios to the Warner Bros. studios.
  • Season 14 adds new opening shots and a new arrangement of the original Livingston-Evans theme. Hoss Cartwright was written off, due to his actor Dan Blocker dying of a blood clot following an operation and nobody could ever succeed him in the role.
• Boston Public started off featuring things that regularly happen in inner city high schools. Later seasons had really weird things happen, like a student getting electrocuted and thinking he's Jesus.
• The final season of Bramwell is vastly different from the others — only two 2-hour episodes, which focus on her caring for new army recruits rather than her typical hospital work, her father and new stepmother vanish without explanation, while her behavior becomes foolish and irresponsible, culminating in her being fired from the Thrift, the hospital she started.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer's last two seasons had moved networks to the UPN, and are now more about Buffy trying to be an adult outside of school or college (especially with her mother's death towards the end of the fifth season). Spike properly underwent a Heel–Face Turn in these seasons, as opposed to the Token Evil Teammate he'd been previously, and actually became Buffy's love interest for real. Anthony Head likewise asked for time off, meaning Giles is no longer a regular, and Alyson Hannigan is given his And Starring in the credits. The seventh season also introduced the Potential slayers - with the arc being about training them for the final battle with the First Evil.
• Charmed Season 8 is the only season not to feature Daryl Morris, and Leo is absent for about ten episodes — both of which were due to budget cuts requiring them to be written out. The season also features a new protagonist, Billie, who gets a story arc of her own.
• Community:
  • Season 4 is very different as a result of Dan Harmon the showrunner being fired and absent from that season. He returned for 5 & 6.
  • In the last two seasons, the former study group members returned to Greendale Community College to form the "Save Greendale Committee", an extremely loose Excuse Plot to keep the show going. Jeff Winger became a teacher, so the show had much less focus on classes and studying. Multiple main cast members left, including Donald Glover, thus breaking up the popular Troy and Abed duo, new regular cast members were introduced, Chang became a regular part of the group, and the overall tone of the show got even darker and weirder than before. Furthermore, since the final season was not made for broadcast TV, the episodes were longer and often slower-paced, Annie & Abed are involved in a lot more plots together once Troy leaves the show.
• By its final couple of seasons, the original run of Dallas had lost most of its classic era cast with the exception of JR Ewing himself, Bobby, Cliff and a few minor supporting characters, greatly eroding the Big, Screwed-Up Family nature of the show. The combination of a mostly new and younger cast, different locations, soapier storylines in general and in the finale an outright shift into the supernatural with an It's a Wonderful Plot ending made late Dallas a very different animal to the beast it had been in its prime.
• The sixth and final season of A Different World put the heavy focus on incoming students at Hillman (including one recurring character from then-recently ended The Cosby Show), after the main characters graduated, and Dwayne and Whitley married, in the previous season; Jalessa vanished from the series; the theme song was redone (again), and now sung by Boyz II Men, replacing Aretha Franklin.
• The Drew Carey Show saw a number of major differences in its last two seasons, especially the final season. Many of the show's major characters were written off for various different reasons; Drew, Mimi, and Mr. Wick are now working for an entirely different company (Mr. Wick in particular is now a janitor and tries working his way back up to the top of the corporate ladder); the show goes through three different new theme songs; the show switched from a multi-camera Studio Audience format to a single-camera Laugh Track format, which also resulted in Chaos Architecture with the sets; and plots became a tad absurd, such as Mimi's house being burned down to force her into moving in with Drew.
• ER began as a fairly realistic portrayal of a hospital emergency room, but later seasons included kidnappings, explosions, arms being chopped off, helicopter crashes, shoot-outs and many other things. Also the entire cast was different.
• Fantasy Island: In early seasons it was just about people fulfilling their fantasies, albeit with some Fridge Logic about how Mr. Rourke managed to pull some of it off. By the final season the show was dropping some pretty heavy hints that Rourke was an actual angel of the Lord.
• The Facts of Life:
  • Season 8 has Cloris Leachman replacing Charlotte Rae as the "housemother," Beverly Ann Stickle, and confidant to Blair, Jo, Natalie and Tootie. Also, Beverly Ann adopting Andy Moffett, a street orphan who had started working at Over Our Heads as an errand boy.
  • Season 9 h several new characters, most notably Sherrie Krenn (Austin, the future country singer) as Australian foreign exchange student Pippa McKenna. The series was still (amazingly) going strong, and it was finally several of the key cast members — most notably Mindy Cohn and Nancy McKeon — deciding to leave after the end of the season that put the kabosh on the most radical changes of them all for a planned Season 10: An Aftershow — based on the two-part Season 9 finale, wherein Blair learns that Eastland is in severe financial trouble and uses her wealth to purchase the assets of Eastland, then becomes the school's headmistress — with a bunch of all-new students (played by then-child stars Mayim Bialik, Seth Green and Juliette Lewis) that would have made the show essentially reminiscent of the first two seasons.
• Family Matters lampshades this in the eighth season when Steve Urkel shows Carl his time machine. In response, Carl lists off all of Steve's other major inventions and is unfazed at what he's been told. Considering that Urkel wasn't even present in the first season, the presence of out-and-out science fiction elements are a jarring contrast to the rather conventional Dom Com the show started as.
• The sixth season of Gimme a Break! saw the show go under a minor Retool, with the setting being changed from Glenlawn to New York City, the Kanisky daughters being written out, and the introduction of Joey's brother Matt.
• Glee: The show began relying less and less on having musical numbers only take place in the choir room or in someone's imagination, and had characters bursting into song whenever they feel like it. Not to mention all the crazy subplots involving Sue, such as hypnotizing Sam. Also, the tribute episodes became more frequent, as they would often let the songs write the stories, rather than vice versa.
• Happy Days:
  • Season 8 has Ron Howard and Don Most, having played original lead character Richie Cunningham and close friend Ralph Malph respectively, leave the series. Since the show was all about Fonzie already, that wasn't so much a late-installment weirdness, but especially with Season 9, the focus was now shifted over to Joanie (Richie's sister) and Chachi.
  • Season 11 has The rescored theme and change from the vintage-1950s style jukeboxes to the more modern late-1960s models.
• Haven in its later seasons became much more serialized than before. The earlier seasons tended to be more The X-Files-esque Monster of the Week with elements of a greater Myth Arc hinted at (mostly about Audrey's origins, as well as the origins of the Troubles). The later seasons moved the Myth Arc front and center and became more Lovecraft Lite. The second half of season 5 (the final season) bordered on full-on Cosmic Horror Story.
• Hee Haw: Began with the 1986-1987 season, the first in which co-host Roy Clark went solo, as Buck Owens had departed to go into self-imposed retirement. The show, however, carried on well as Clark's natural charisma and chemistry with his co-hosts continued to make the show a bonafide hit. It was in the late fall of 1991, however, when the show went into a different direction: A completely new set (a shopping mall and nightclub), new cast members — some of them left, others had passed away through the years — and an emphasis on pop-country singers alienated longtime viewers to a point where the show was now a disaster. The show redeemed itself somewhat in the final season when it began airing as Hee Haw Silver and focused on clips from the first 20 or so years (with most of those segments coming from the early to mid-1970s).
• House began two of the last three seasons with Two-Part Episodes dedicated to the title character escaping a mental institution and prison, respectively. He also ended up in a romantic relationship with Dr. Cuddy, who was completely absent for the final season.
• How I Met Your Mother: The final season, barring the last two episodes, takes place over the course of three days while all previous seasons took place over a year (usually from September to May). As the main cast stay at the the Farhampton Inn for the wedding of Barney and Robin, the familiar MacLaren's Pub only appears in a few flashbacks.
• Judge Judy: The final season replaced longtime narrator Jerry Bishop with Steve Kamer, as Bishop died in 2020. Additionally, the season was produced during the COVID-19 Pandemic, meaning the audience is missing. As a consequence, the usual crane shot of the audience as the narrator says, "And now, the next case..." between the post-case litigant interviews and Bailiff Hawkins-Byrd calling for the next case's litigants had to be dropped.
• Kaamelott: The show starts subtly including more serious elements and continuity in its short comedy format from as early as season 3 (during which the conflict between Arthur and Lancelot slowly builds up), but the series pulls such a strong Cerebus Syndrome in season 5 that it became the Trope Namer on the French side of the wiki. Season 6 is an almost season-long flashback to Arthur's youth in the Roman legion. Aditionally, the 5-minute episodes of seasons 1 to 4 stretch out to a full 45 minutes in seasons 5 and 6.
• Law & Order: The show was almost adamant about not focusing on the personal lives of its characters, feeding us information only through the various tidbits one might drop to a co-worker, but rarely, if ever showing it. Which is why the Season 6 episode "Aftershock" was such a shocking departure from the norm as it featured no case and for once actually did focus heavily on the main cast. For the next 2-3 seasons, there was a greater emphasis on the characters' personal lives (Lenny's daughter's legal troubles, Jamie's ex-husband suing her for custody, etc.).
• Law & Order: Criminal Intent: After original showrunner Rene Balcer left the series about halfway into its run, his replacement Warren Leight began to retool the series into more of a Crime Time Soap akin to the Sex Crimes Division and begin to focus more of Goren's dysfunctional family and apparent diminishing sanity, Eames learning that her slain cop husband's killer was wrongfully convicted, Wheeler's fiancee was a dirty FBI agent and a completely out of nowhere attraction between the former two detectives that wasn't even hinted at in the earlier years.
• La Femme Nikita: (not to be confused with the CW drama simply named Nikita) The show got a short Post-Script Season after being Un-Canceled. Apparently a lot of the actors had gone their separate ways, because some major characters either vanished or died, and even with replacements the cast was smaller. Even one actor who remained played a different character (Birkoff's twin brother from a prior episode replaces him after his death.) Also, Michael's role is quite different than in seasons past. Even in scenes when most of the faces onscreen are ones you know, the world after the events of the intended Series Finale is not the one you know.
• MacGyver: A mild example is the last seasons: while it remained a show about a Science Hero (and the Trope Namer for MacGyvering), situations where he had to use his skills included defusing a "Scooby-Doo" Hoax regarding Bigfoot, a Time Travel Or Was It a Dream? episode where he went back to the Middle Ages and had to adventure alongside Merlin, an adventure that took place in the afterlife.
• M*A*S*H. Although the subject of Seasonal Rot has always been up for debate, it's often agreed that the show's ultimate turn for the worse began with Season Eight: by that time, Alan Alda and Burt Metcalfe had completely overhauled the production staff and replaced almost all of the writers, shifting the tone of the show from a sitcom with dramatic undertones to a drama with comedic undertones; with Cerebus Syndrome set in, as well the loss of Radar and an end to Klinger's Section 8 schemes - including running around in dresses (even Harry Morgan once remarked, "When we lost Radar, we essentially lost Klinger as well"), the last four seasons are much regarded as an almost entirely different show altogether.
• Miami Vice's final seasons also included an escalation in odd episodes, such as one of the characters being abducted by aliens (the leader of which was played by James Brown), a group of drug dealers doing a "Scooby-Doo" Hoax regarding ghosts to try to keep people away from their operation (and the ghost being probably Real After All), Sonny going through Easy Amnesia (and temporarily becoming a bad guy) in one episode, a couple of "comedy" episodes where the Vice detectives had to deal with borderline-murderous Gambit Pileups regarding the purchase of unusual items (a prize bull's semen in one, the Human Popsicle remains of a famous singer in another) from the same Butt-Monkey Con Man snitch...
• The Mindy Project's seasons after its Channel Hop to Hulu feature more experimental/wacky episodes, such as an It's a Wonderful Plot episode where Mindy never dated Danny (instead she's married to a TV producer played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a "Groundhog Day" Loop episode after Ben breaks up with her, and another episode where Mindy wakes up in the body of a white man.
• It might seem impossible, but Monty Python's Flying Circus managed to get weirder in its fourth and final season. Without the counterbalance of John Cleese, Michael Palin and Terry Jones were given free reign to write longer, more involved sketches with epic storylines. (The Michael Ellis episode, which ironically does feature material written by Cleese, straddles the line between Pythonesque and David Lynch) As well, the production values of the filmed segments were much higher, giving the season a slicker look than the earlier shows.
• Mystery Science Theater 3000, following its Channel Hop to the Sci-Fi Channel, had a lot of changes thanks to a wondrous amount of Executive Meddling. The biggest change was that it gained a plot - Season 8 had Mike and the Bots chased by Pearl Forrester and her two henchmen, Season 9 had everyone return to Earth and Pearl setting up shop in Castle Forrester and Season 10 had Pearl try to get her Mad Scientist's credentials (though 9 and 10 didn't have the same strict continuity of season 8 and the episodes were again self-contained). The movies in this era were heavily either science fiction or fantasy-based movies (as per Sci-Fi's wishes that the films be within the network's name genre) with Season 10 loosening up due to it being the final season (of the original run).
  • Season 13, the Gizmoplex season, had numerous changes to it compared to previous seasons. It was the first season to stream on a dedicated streaming service (the titular Gizmoplex), three different hosts (Jonah, newcomer Emily and a returning Joel), a second set of Bots (Emily got her own Crow, Tom and Gypsy with her Gypsy being a smaller model) and Gypsy being renamed "GPC" due to the fact "Gypsy" tends to be a slur.
• Newhart cranked the weirdness of its characters to the max in the last season, leading up to the finale where it waa revealed that the entire series was revealed to be All a Dream as dreamt by Bob Newhart's previous character. Doctor Bob Hartley.
• Once Upon a Time:
  • The first half of Season 6 introduced characters from 'The Land of Untold Stories'. As opposed to fairy tales, these featured characters like Dr Jekyll, Captain Nemo, Edmund Dantes - without a notable arc villain like the others. The second half of the season however went back to familiar roots, with the Black Fairy taking over as the villain.
  • The seventh season saw the departure of Emma, Snow, Charming, Belle and Henry as series regulars - and was instead centered around an adult Henry who believes his childhood adventures were just stories he made up. It also featured new versions of characters the show had already used - for example Henry's lover is Cinderella, but not the same one who had appeared in the previous seasons.
• The last couple of seasons of Oz were increasingly experimental and included a Musical Episode, Cyril O'Reilly developing Multiple Personality Disorder on top of brain damage, a drug that causes artificial aging, and an ever-increasing body count.
• The later episodes of Parks and Recreation are easily recognizable:
  • The frequent Friendship Moments between Leslie and Ann are completely absent, following the latter's departure.
  • On a lesser scale, Garry Gergich, who had been referred to as "Jerry" throughout the series' run, was renamed to "Larry Gengurch" by April, then to "Terry", and ultimately to "Garry", his actual name.
  • Most obviously, in the final season, there is a Time Skip to 3 years later. The show's setting has changed beyond belief, as basically the entire cast except Craig no longer works in the Parks Department. This meant that the iconic office goes unused for most of the season, only reappearing for any significant length once or twice.
  • The format itself changed in the final season, as episodes no longer had tags.
• Power Rangers:
  • Power Rangers RPM, originally envisioned as the Grand Finale, is much darker than every other series before it and utilizing new naming conventions that aren't used elsewhere. The events of the season were later retconned into being in an alternate universe, to provide for crossovers.
  • Power Rangers Samurai was the first series since the original Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers to have more than one season. Of course, this was less through popularity and more because of the Channel Hop leading to a change in how series were released.
  • Power Rangers Beast Morphers was produced during the transition from Saban Brands to Hasbro; unusually, Hasbro chose to go back and adapt a Sentai, Tokumei Sentai Go Busters, previously skipped over by Saban (mostly because of the show bombing in Japan). Between this and recently-revealed Executive Meddling on the part of Haim Saban (who was still creative consultant) the show feels somewhat odd at times, wanting to embrace continuity, but thanks to Saban's demands they couldn't develop much between episodes. There's also the brief appearance of Captain Chaku, which adapts the Space Sheriff Gavan crossover and therefore also feels out of place.
• The Practice became an entirely different show in its final season, a good deal of the cast, main lead Bobby Donaldson included, replaced. It was basically a season-long Poorly Disguised Pilot for Boston Legal.
• The concept of the show Promised Land (a Spin-Off of Touched by an Angel) had the Greene family traveling around the country to help people, but in the show's third and final season, they settled permanently into a community by the final season.
• The Prisoner (1967) spent the first twelve of its seventeen episodes (in production order) confined almost exclusively to The Village, where the lead character Number 6 was imprisoned. But the next four episodes to be produced all spent the majority of their runtimes (apparently) outside the Village, with increasingly bizarre in-universe reasons for doing so without having Number Six actually escape the Village:
  • The 13th produced episode, "Many Happy Returns", simply has Number 6 escape from the Village after finding it deserted, only to be brought back at the end of the episode.
  • The 14th produced episode, "Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling", cranks up the weirdness by having Number 6's mind be transplanted into the body of another person; he spends the majority of the episode outside the Village in his new body, before being brought back at the end and returned to his original body.
  • The 15th produced episode, "Living in Harmony", makes things weirder still by having Number Six be apparently become a sheriff in an American Western. Only in the final few minutes is it revealed that Number Six is still in the Village, under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs.
  • The 16th and penultimate produced episode, "The Girl Who Was Death", has Number Six apparently back in his old life as a superspy, pursuing a female assassin across England. Only at the very end is it revealed that he is simply reading a bedtime story about himself to the Village children.
  • The 17th and final episode, "Fall Out", returned to being set mainly in the Village, but was enough of a Bizarro Episode to count as "Later Installment Weirdness" in its own right.
• Quantum Leap's fifth season, in an effort to boost sagging ratings (with a dose of Executive Meddling), did away with some of the series' rules, particularly the one that stated that Sam couldn't Leap outside his own lifespan (he was born in 1953) and wouldn't Leap into anybody famous or interact with anyone famous other than possibly a brief cameo (a very young Michael Jackson^note a young actor portraying him, not the actual person and Buddy Holly, among others, appeared in earlier seasons). In the season opener, he Leaped into Lee Harvey Oswald, and later that season into Elvis Presley, Dr. Ruth Westheimer, Marilyn Monroe's limo driver, and a captain during the Civil War. There were also a lot more "stunt" episodes (such as a trilogy with "evil Leapers," more views of the future, a host who may or may not have been a vampire, etc.), to the point that very few episodes were the simple, standalone, Set Right What Once Went Wrong, quiet, personal episodes of seasons past, and the theme song was rewritten to be more bombastic. The series finale (which had been written long before), despite being a Mind Screw in its own right, fortunately returns to the tone of previous seasons.
• Quantico went in a different direction for its third and final season, completely removing the dual timelines and rather than a single plot, whose important figures were slowly given the spotlight to show how they were part of it, it features standalone episodes with little to no connection between them, until the second half of the season who gave the team a recurring antagonist in Conor Devlin and more connected missions.
• Radio Enfer: For the final season, the music for the opening credits sounds quite a bit different from how it did between Season 2 through 5. Also, every episode except for the second part of the Grand Finale starts with a Framing Device involving Jocelyne stuck in a freezer and telling to a camera the circumstances that led to her being stuck there.
• Raising Hope in the fourth (and final) season. The focus of the show shifts away from Jimmy and Sabrina and more towards Jimmy's parents, Burt and Virginia. Notably the titular child, Hope, despite being four years old at the time of the fourth season has next to no dialogue. This wasn't as big of a deal in previous seasons as she was a baby in the first two seasons and a toddler in the third, but this becomes especially jarring considering she gets maybe ten lines of dialogue by the time she's pre-school age.
• Riverdale: From the first to fifth season, the show was generally consistent with being a genre mixture of murder mysteries, soap opera, teen romance/drama, and a Coming of Age Story for Archie and his friends. And most supernatural elements during that time were eventually revealed to be a "Scooby-Doo" Hoax of some kind. However, by the sixth season, things really get changed up because supernatural elements and magic become very real for the town, Archie and many of his close friends get superpowers, and parallel worlds like Rivervale are dealt with for the first time.
• Roseanne was a show about a blue collar family trying to make ends meet. Having been told that the ninth season would be their last, the creators had the Conners win the lottery. Even aside from that Retool, there were a lot of odd episodes, set in a character's imagination or depicting Roseanne fighting terrorists. The Grand Finale also reveals that the events of the entire series were all a book that Roseanne was writing, making the last season fall under Mental Story as well. The 2017 renewal removed all these changes, except for the birth of Darlene and David's daughter, Harris^note though she's a teenager in the revival, which doesn't really fit the timeline. The ninth season also changed the theme song, which had been entirely instrumental before.
• Sabrina the Teenage Witch's seventh season saw the sudden departure of both Sabrina's aunts, due to both actresses wanting off the show. As a result, Sabrina's two college friends Roxie and Morgan now live in the Spellman house. While Work Com elements had come in ever since Season 3, as Sabrina was now graduated from college, this has more emphasis on plots at her work.
• Sanford and Son's last couple of seasons are often regarded by many fans as being weaker and sillier compared to its earlier seasons, mainly due to the departure of the show's original black writers and producers, and replacing them with Jewish writers and producers, causing the show to lose its original authentic urban edge and ethnic vibe that made it such a stand-out and groundbreaking series (for its day) and instead relying on standard sitcom fluff and hijinks.
• The ninth season of Scrubs was a full-fledged retool that had a new cast of characters take priority while the previous cast was seen more sparingly or in leadership roles. In fact, series creator Bill Lawrence wanted to have the 9th season to have a new name (Scrubs: Med School) to separate it from the previous ones (as the difference was just that stark), but was prevented from doing so by ABC.
• Search Party started out as a Dark Comedy/satire about Millennial hipsters, but by the fourth season had an extended Silence of the Lambs-esque plot and the fifth and final season ends with a Zombie Apocalypse.
• The last two seasons of Seinfeld have often been panned by viewers and critics alike; with the departure of series co-creator and showrunner Larry David, many complained that the storylines became increasingly absurd, far-fetched, and unbelievable.
• Shadowhunters's first two seasons had Valentine as the main villain. The third and final season has Lilith in this role.
• Smallville had many actors' contracts expire, so the last two seasons show him growing into a more Superman-like role, leaving behind old characters, old settings, and increasingly, the town in the title. The last two seasons are a Superman series in all but name. The changes happen gradually enough that it feel organic—just as in real life, the "cast" of your childhood life is demoted to Recurring Character as new regulars appear.
• Spartacus: Blood and Sand's first and prequel season can be distinguished from the second and third by taking place in the ludus of Quintus Batiatus and having a divide of plots between the nobles upstairs and gladiators downstairs. The second season did have the characters now free and fighting as a rebel army, but still had numerous familiar faces, and continued Spartacus's quest to get revenge on Glaber. The final season War of the Damned picked up after eleven major characters had died in the previous season, and Marcus Crassus is the main antagonist. As Spartacus's sometimes love interest Mira died in the Season 2 finale, this season pairs him with an exiled Roman noblewoman Laeta. Part of what makes this season more different from the rest is that they were only given one more, when several had been planned, meaning it had to hurriedly wrap things up.
• Stargate SG-1, where the primary enemies the Goa'uld were diminished in threat by the end of the eighth season, and the ninth season opened establishing a new Big Bad in the Ori. In addition there were several cast changes as Richard Dean Anderson left the show and only came back in sporadic guest appearances. The show's last few seasons happened to follow the endings of several other beloved sci-fi shows, and the show imported actors from those shows, most notably Ben Browder and Claudia Black from Farscape.
• Star Trek:
  • The series began as a science fiction series with at least a pretense of hardness about a human-run elite paramilitary organization that sent out their best Starship to explore outer space. Many plots revolved around how the humans handled encountering the strangeness of the universe, while occasionally segueing into Space Opera. Since then, newer writers have incorporated many elements of contemporary and post-contemporary science-fiction, with the following installments sometimes resembling Star Wars outings.
  • The final season of the original series. Many critics and fans felt that the show was growing far cheesier and more far-fetched, and the show’s logo changed from yellow to blue and the theme tune was slightly remixed. Some of the cast and crew later admitted they knew season 3 was going to be the last season and stopped caring as much about the quality of the episodes.
• Star Trek: The Next Generation:
  • The logo was changed during the fifth season, to give it a swoosh similar to Superman: The Movie. It was removed the following season.
  • In the Season 6 episode "Chain of Command", Captain Jellico, as one of his initial orders as new captain of the Enterprise, has Deanna Troi get out of the goofy purple outfit she wore and into an actual uniform. She stays in uniform for the rest of the series and into the movie era, much to actress Marina Sirtis' relief and the joy of Troi's fans.
  • In Season 7, writers were apparently unable to resolve the Belligerent Sexual Tension between either Riker and Troi or Picard and Dr. Crusher, thus the writers decided the best thing to do was pair Troi with Worf! According to Word of God, they'd thought about pairing Troi and Worf since season 5. While Michael Dorn wished things continued, it didn't get anywhere and it would a end few years later when Riker and Troi were ultimately married in Star Trek: Nemesis.
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Jadzia Dax was killed off at the end of Season 6 and was replaced with a new host, Ezri Dax, for season seven. We then had several episodes focusing on Ezri getting to grips with being a host and managing several lifetimes of new memories, exploring her background, and meeting her family. We didn't have this much focus on Jadzia in six years; we never saw her sister (mentioned once) and her original pre-joining surname was never established. There was also focus on the fallout from Ezri and Worf, Jadzia's widower, being stationed together (which seems to have defied a Trill law earlier in the show about Trills not associating with the husbands/wives of past hosts).
• That '70s Show: For the first 4 seasons of the show, each episode had an original title. Starting with season 5, each season's episodes would share their titles with the songs of a '70s rock group (season 5: Led Zeppelin; season 6: The Who; season 7: The Rolling Stones; season 8: Queen).
• 'Til Death got downright surreal in its final season when nobody was watching, including Doug realizing he's a character in a sitcom and his girlfriend keeps getting recast, Mayim Bialik as a therapist who is really Mayim Bialik in a reality show, and other bizarre adventures.
• As 21 Jump Street reached the end of its run and lost more original cast members, the series still focused mainly on campus cases, but mixed in episodes strictly dealing with adult perps, such as "Shirts and Skins," which was about the murder of a neo-Nazi leader amid the conflict between his group's two factions, with a side plot featuring the anti-racism vigilantes (led by a middle-aged man, no less) who turned out to be not so different from the neo-Nazis.
• Not that Twin Peaks wasn't weird to begin with but its third season completely abandons all the wacky soap-opera elements and turns into a full-on Cosmic Horror Story full of Body Horror, Nightmare Fuel and a lot of swearing. Airing on adult-only Showtime instead of the original ABC helps.
• Two and a Half Men was almost intentional. After Charlie Harper is killed off off-camera (due to Charlie Sheen's meltdown resulting in his termination with the show), Alan and Jake end up befriending and living with the weirdly named Walden Schmidt, and Jake also lampshades the changes in his character and attributes his "awkward years" to puberty as he becomes more and more of a sociopathic horndog who suddenly joins the Army at one point, leaving Alan and Walden in an Odd Couple-esque setting.
• The final season of The Virginian was subtitled Men From Shiloh. The previous season's cast was overhauled (with only the Virginian and Trampas remaining), the series adopted a decidedly more Spaghetti Western atmosphere, and the episodes focused more on the individual characters on a rotating basis instead of on the cast as an ensemble.
• The teleroman Virginie had a weird case of Long-Runner Cast Turnover in 2007 when the Character Title passed the torch to a younger Virginie teaching at the same school. The show was running since September 1996 and already broke the longevity record for Quebec fictionalized television with its 1221'st episode in 2006 when the actress decided to quit.
• Walker, Texas Ranger: By its final seasons, it was still an action-adventure series based on Texas, but many odd episodes occurred, including several Very Special Episodes with faith-based special guests, rampaging evil spirits, an All Just a Dream episode occurring on the Old West, people stealing super-weapons to use to take on Walker, an episode where Walker and friends must find a missing kid that is being helped by a stereotypical Robot Buddy, and the final episode featuring as a foe a genetically-engineered Implacable Man Super-Soldier who's creation was funded by a Right-Wing Militia Fanatic group.
• The final season of Wind At My Back is usually regarded as an unusual point in the series' run, mostly due in part to addition of a new head writer who, apparently, wasn't even really familiar enough with the show, or its characters, to continue their stories in a direction that reflected the previous four seasons.

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