miscellaneous
(risky trope) A show changes genres mid way
The 100: the show starts as a somewhat grounded post apocalypse where humans who have taken refuge in a space station return to earth after it has become inhabitable again and resources on the space station run out. At first the show is about survival in a hostile environment. It slowly introduces more and more sci fi elements. At first, it's an Aİ that wants control over humanity. Towards the end of the show, the main characters have traveled throughout the galaxy, met humans from other planets, some of which have settled among ruins of ancient alien species, where they try to contact more advanced alien species in order to achieve "transcendence": rid humans of their physical bodies and become a more advanced lifeform.
AOT: this one is less gradual than the 100 and the change comes after a massive plot twist. The first 3 seasons of the show are about a relatively primitive society of humans who live inside humongous walls. Outside the walls are titans: giant monstrous creatures which hunt and devour humans. After a big plot twist and reveal, the society finds out that there is a whole bigger world out there, and the rest of the world is plotting to genocide them. They quickly industrialize after this discovery and wage war against other countries.
The original 1987 Predator movie switches from a by-the-numbers 80's muscle-and-guns action movie into classic horror movie around the first third.
It starts with cheesy one-liners, some CIA government conspiracy stuff, and a bunch of badasses with badass guns doing badass things, and then it all goes south and none of that stuff before means anything.
Edit to add: I stole this hot-take from Patrick (H) Willems :
Predator is interesting because the big beefy military guys think they're in an action movie when they're actually in a slasher movie, and the monster is coming for them.
Predator is a really well done deconstruction of the typical masculine action movies at the time. It starts off with these manly men shooting guns and blowing things up left, right, and center showing how masculine and tough these guys are. Then the predator slowly strips all of them of their bravado and reduces them to quivering, panicking wrecks before it kills them. Arnie ends up having to fight this technologically advanced alien with nothing but mud and a few traps instead of all the guns and toys he's used to having as a special ops soldier.
They even have the girl to rescue, who would typically end up romantically involved with the main character. But in Predator they just end up in a helicopter staring at each other, traumatised by everything they just experienced.
Hawkeye: "War isn't Hell. War is war, and Hell is Hell. And of the two, war is a lot worse."
Father Mulcahy: "How do you figure that, Hawkeye?"
Hawkeye: "Easy, Father. Tell me, who goes to Hell?"
Father Mulcahy: "Sinners, I believe."
Hawkeye: "Exactly. There are no innocent bystanders in Hell, but war is chock full of them - little kids, cripples, old ladies. In fact, except for a few of the brass, almost everybody involved is an innocent bystander."
My mom loves M.A.S.H. so I grew up watching it. I’ve seen most episodes more times than I care to admit. The evolution of this show over its life could be studied in writing classes as a teaching tool.
There are gag characters who completely steal the show, side characters with episodes so good they’re in the top 10, and speaking of cooking on both comedy and drama you could write an entire essay on Klinger or Margaret.
The early seasons were hilarious to me as a kid when it was first broadcasted and my favorites. After my rewatch as an adult I appreciated the later seasons more. Hot Lips transitioned into Major Houlihan and while I missed Radar, I m glad Klinger becomes more than a punchline. Some of the best character development even written on that show.
As a half Korean kid it hit different especially the abandoned baby episode and when BJ tired to help the Korean family and just got overwhelmed. Hawkeye’s breakthrough in the finale was devastating once I full understand what happened.
Klinger becoming more than a punchline was actually as a request from the actor due in part to his son being bullied because of his character on the show.
Twin Peaks - starts off as a (relatively) normal murder mystery, eventually evolves into full blown supernatural insanity involving evil spirits, other dimensions, and damn fine coffee.
Season 1 is a buddy dramedy, with unrealistic premises for legal storylines to set up jokes and hijinks. Seasons 2 and on abandon most/all of the comedy in favor of being a legal drama, which often gets really weird when they focus on the repercussions of the absurd actions of the characters that happened in season 1.
I wanted to like Suits, but it pretty quickly devolved into "and now the characters yell at everyone about their feelings for the millionth episode in a row."
My favorite legal show has been The Good Wife, which has plenty of dumbass drama, but they actually are in a court room pretty much every episode.
Not to mention the fact that they could’ve hired him as a “legal consultant” and the entire premise of the show falls apart. All the problems gone.. with a slight adjustment to HR paperwork.
Or he could have just legitimately taken the Bar exam. NY allows substituting two years of law school with a law apprenticeship at a law firm — exactly what Mike was doing. But I guess without Mike’s secret the show wouldn’t be as fun.
My wife watched Suits for a while, every time I passed by and overheard something, it seemed like they were having the same argument, with the same rhythm and tone to their speech and yelling out each other’s names - over and over again.
Wacky personal drama and sexy doctors aside, trying to watch it for the medical stuff that was interesting in the first seasons is impossible now, and has been for a decade.
A cardio surgeon is yelled at for “stopping a patients heart!!!?!”
…When, yeah, you have to do that for open heart surgery?
An orthopedic surgeon is screamed at for “breaking a patients bone?!?!?!”
…Mhmm. You have to do that in order to re-set the bones sometimes, or avoid organ damage if you were in the shows 20th plane crash and your femur is about to stab you in the heart.
All of the “expert field” shows start out good, when they have actual experts in the field throwing out interesting dilemmas.
But once they get too popular, it seems like most shows ditch the experts and just run on vibes.
I remember cracking up at one of the medical dramas I watched with my husband during COVID.
The dilemma was that a patient had an aortic aneurism, and needed a heart valve replacement.
But she was Muslim, and the show decided that her ONLY option was a porcine (pig) heart valve, which was a conflict with her religion, where pigs are seen as unclean.
So the doctors had to decide to either violate her religious ideals, or let her DIE.
My husband, sitting next to me with his mechanical valve, who experienced the same exact aneurism, really enjoyed that episode.
Honestly Mike's memories are less useful than his ability to slam down a close envelope, yelling this is your guilty evidence and hope the other party doesn't check it. Insane how prevalent that move it in a god damn legal show.
Suits is unwatchable for me because I actually know all the legal jargon they’re spewing. And, uh, they do not seem to know all the legal jargon they’re spewing.
I like sits but every episode was the exact same story line of “oh easy with for Harvey, so Mike you do it. Oh no Mike fucked it up, Harvey try and fix it, wait Mike has a genius idea, it worked we kick ass. Also Megan Merkle is hot and Mike is/is not banging her right now.”
It’s a left turn that shouldn’t work but my god the way they’re able to wrap up the character arcs established in the more grounded first half during the bonkers second half is quite amazing. Incredibly underrated movie.
https://giphy.com/gifs/MxHkbVTsmkPTEebefb
Lucifer is kind of a weird one since it doesn’t really change genres, but the genre kind of changes in importance. The first three seasons by Fox are police procedurals with fantasy elements, but the last three seasons by Netflix kind of feel like they don’t want to be police procedurals anymore and focus more on the fantasy aspects.
Really does instantly go from "what the fuck was all that, how does this make sense" to "wow yeah, Lucifer would spend millions to fuck with Dan as revenge for being shot" lmaooo
For those who are unfamiliar with the show, Lucifer hires paid actors to get a character Dan entangled with an illegal scheme. It ends in a fake shootout where Lucifer’s best friend proceeds to pretend to take a bullet for Dan. Everyone dies in a convoluted mob/gang/civilian war and Dan is just wondering how the fuck he ended up in this situation before it’s revealed that Lucifer basically hired several people ala Truman Show.
This is because upon finding out Lucifer was the real devil, Dan decided to shoot Lucifer. It didn’t work very well.
It backfires though, as Dan finds the whole setup therapeutic and it helped him work through some of his issues. Dan thinks Lucifer was trying to help him, meanwhile Lucifer is fucking pissed and reveals he did this for revenge to torture him. They end up drinking together.
I was one of those people. I have very little patience for like, 45 minutes of the most overdone fakeout with people dying dramatically just to get back up and party.
But yeah, when he said that, it felt perfectly in character and I respect them committing to the bit. If Dan had to suffer, so can I
I'm not 100% sure it counts, but the Reboot TV show. The first full-length, completely-computer-animated TV show, aired in 1994. The first couple of seasons were solidly programming/computer puns, silly gags, with recurring villains Megabyte and Hexadecimal, with the day being mostly saved by Bob the Guardian.
Then Bob gets forcibly shot away into the internet ("The Web"), and leaves Megabyte to do whatever the hell he wants. The show ramps *hard* after this, going from singular goofy gimmicks to downright terrifying and brutal at times. The episodes turn from...er...episodic to season-arcs, and it only gets crazier from there. People die, Mainframe gets the shit bombed out of it, and the fanservice goes from negative to a slightly-positive value. Hexadecimal even gets BDSM gear.
Granted, this could be explained by the showrunners moving networks and being allowed to actually shine, instead of being smashed underneath far-too-restrictive and pointless censoring. But the tonal shift is so sharp that it almost cuts itself on the edge. But it never goes too far, and I thought the shift was well-worth it and continuously better with every episode....and then ends on a massive cliffhanger.
(Some of the original peoples managed to get ahold of the original master tapes, and they're currently re-releasing the episodes on YouTube, if you're interested. )
The reason for the tonal shift wasn't just a change in networks, it was the creators earnestly thinking the show wasn't even going to air in America anymore.
Being a Canadian production, the creators all came from a background where children's content was generally allowed to be substantially more mature. They had been airing in both Canada and the US at the start, but after the falling out with ABC they figured they just wouldn't have an American distribution anymore, and therefore may as well stop trying to fit that cultural mindset.
It turns out they did still get the final season aired in the US, which is how we arrived at my parents being deeply confused by how this series started with saturday morning cartoon shenanigans and had people's eyes getting ripped out by the end.
Crazy that early seasons they had to give Dot a uniboob to appease censors to the final season you have adult Andrea in what barely a crop top calling Enzo lover.
Edit: For anyone who hasn’t seen the series Andrea and Enzo are the two kid characters on the far left. They do a time jump and age them up making them the leads.
It was always a pretty funny joke that "The Net" was essentially the wider world, where Bob came from.
But "The Web" was a kind of shadow dimension full of monsters and demons. In an early episode a small Web creature gains access to Mainframe, possesses Hexadecimal and very nearly kills everybody for no reason other than being inherently chaotic and evil.
I mean, who hasn't almost gotten devoured by a horrific Eldritch monstrosity being hunted down by Fox Mulder and Dana Scully? Er, I mean Fax Modem and Data Nully....
The episode when he fights the little girl is so absurd yet so fantastic. It aired the same day as Game of Thrones episode The Long Night. I don't think anybody could have predicted not only a better episode, but a better fight scene, out of Barry, but it happened.
S3 starts showing heavier psychological drama / deep character study elements (though there were elements of that from the start), then S4 has genuine surreal horror moments. Such an excellent, one of a kind show.
The show begins as an episodic procedural crime show with a "villain of the week" format (the titular weekly "person of interest") and eventually morphs into a sci-fi thriller about saving the free world from a panopticon.
Starts as crime thriller about two thieves kidnapping a family to use as leverage while escaping to Mexico turns into a horror survival movie against the undead.
It's fun because you can see exactly which half was written by Tarantino and which half was written by Rodriguez. The transition happens shortly after Selma Hayek still her foot into Quinton's mouth, beciof course he had to slip that part in somewhere.
Westworld started basically as an expansion of the 70s film about a theme park with robot actors that allowed the upper middle class of the future basically LARP as cowboys with the show exploring the violent fantasies this would give rise to along with the growing self-awareness of the robots who inevitably rose up to kill their tormentors. By the 3rd season it had become a techno-noir thriller involving a bunch of hidden robots having to try to destroy the all powerful AI that had secretly taken over the outside world by manipulating the capitalist system and crushing the majority of the poverty striken population with Gig Economy jobs and pointless warfare.
Which, funnily enough, is also a series that switched themes. It started out as a solve-the-case-of-the-week "police" procedural and became an AI thing with season long plots.
DC’s Legends of Tomorrow opens as a pretty serious “superhero drama” show about little known heroes trying to save the world from a massive threat via time travel in the 1st season that quickly realizes it’s not interesting at that, and changes tones massively over the course of the the next couple seasons, ending up as one of the weirdest random time travel based episodic shows you will ever see, including having Gorilla Grodd trying to kill Barack Obama, a parody of a tickle me Elmo doll time traveling to the age of the Vikings and being worshipped as a god, and so so so much more craziness.
Heroes fuse into a giant teddy bear that wrestles an ancient demon to death in an old wild west town. Yes, that is an actual episode of Legends of Tomorrow.
Or when they realize that the Big Bad, who is voiced by John Noble, sounds a lot like the actor playing Denethor (who was played by John Noble) when one of them is watching Lord of the Rings.
So they go back in time to the filming of the Lord of the Rings and pretend that they have new lines for him to read so that they can use his voice to impersonate the Big Bad.
Man what a weird show. Kinda seemed like the writers felt they had no supervision or audience so they just did whatever for funsies until the clock ran out.
Beginning: Haha Misato really likes beer she always drinks during dinner
Ending: Misato is an alcoholic still recovering from major trauma about her father, men, and manipulating a teenage boy she is aware is love starved and will do anything for a pat on the back let alone a kiss
In her defense she's desperate to ensure Shinji Does The Thing, and increasingly desperate as the show goes on. And she just has flat out no idea how to motivate him. She doesn't have any idea what he wants, in part because neither does he beyond "my dad to like me" which she can't offer. So she falls back on "what do teen boys want?".
Totally agree. That kiss and tease was a desperate hail mary move to get Shinji to stop the world from ending. She wouldn't have followed through, and tbh I didn't think she expected they'd survive to get to that point either.
She can't give him the love of a mother, she didn't succeed as an older sister figure to save his spirit, so she tried her last option available.
For extra fun, it only fully switches genres in the back stretch, so if you watch it through in a few batches, you'll go from a rather dark mecha show to psychological horror to experimental film in a single sitting
The Yugioh manga run, the first 7 volumes are an episodic horror, slice of life series with Yugi’s evil alter ego taking revenge on bullies through challenging them to different games of the week then punishing them when they lose. At least 3 cases of someone getting set on fire. But after that, it switches to a battle shounen/sports series centered around the duel monsters card game (the power of friendship is still a major theme in both halves of the series). Duel Monsters had appeared before intending to be a one off MtG parody, but readers were sending letters asking to play, so they made it into an irl card game.
That one was always my favorite because the stakes was so low without yugi escalating it. Like, classes competing for locations in a school fair somehow escalated to gunpowder ice hockey.
I think my favorite is Bakura’s TTRPG. Seriously the amount of work Bakura put into his death game, including actual tabletop props and character pieces resembling the gang and the people whose souls he’d just stolen throughout the arc just makes me laugh
The beginning of the manga before the card game took over also has an anime adaptation, sometimes called “season 0”. It was made by a different studio than the main anime.
Honestly to me that’s a lot of the reason why the original is still by and far the best Yu-Gi-Oh series. Like the original series, even once it swaps over to the card game is very much a horror manga(I mean even after they swapped to the card game you still have PANIK being hanged, Keith losing a game of Russian Roulette with his own hand, the Dungeon Dice Monsters arc, Pandora/Arkana nearly getting his legs chopped off and Bakura straight up murdering the zombie kid for his locator cards) and the monster designs from around that time very much has that occult and eldritch feel to them.
It’s kinda been forgotten in the modern era, but Dragon Ball started off as a comedy adventure series with relatively limited action scenes. Even when it began to pivot into a more action-oriented series, it was still pretty goofy and light hearted overall, without too much in the way of dark storylines.
Nowadays, it’s firmly an action series. You’ll see it dip its toes into comedy, but Dragon Ball takes itself way more seriously, especially in the newer stuff where Toriyama didn’t get too involved.
The start of dbz changes a lot of things established in db with the addition of saiyans, specifically when Goku gets quickly murdered and now everyone we thought were so strong and unstoppable have to train like crazy to even stand a chance of surviving. Then a lot of them get straight up blasted to death in the fight.
Two movies that coincidentally both taking place during World War 2.
Life is Beautiful starts off as a comedic Italian film about a guy trying to impress a woman he loves. But then it gets into horror as he and his family are sent to a concentration camp and he is trying to save his wife and son.
He even sacrifices his life while pretending to do a funny walk to assure his son that nothing bad will happen. The camp gets liberated and the son gets to ride on a tank with his narration implying he remembers his father's sacrifice.
Jojo Rabbit at the start is about a kid who is training to be a Nazi and talks with his imaginary friend Adolf. But later it gets darker with his imaginary friend Adolf becoming less of a friendly guy and more like Hitler the evil bastard. Jojo and Elsa are saved by Captain K who found out Rosie was killed by the Gestapo for being part of the German Resistance, and it gets sadder from there.
Euphoria was about the repercussions in the life of a drug addicted high schooler and the drama behind their colleagues to a weird Tarantino and Breaking Bad rip-off pseudo-Western in S3
It wasn’t even so much a plot twist or genre change as it was the writer having not a fucking clue what to do
it's so obvious Sam Levinson hit a wall when half the cast either died or quit between seasons 2 and 3, dude had no idea what to do with the remaining characters. A finale movie would've been a much better idea imo
It starts as a spoof of Star Trek, mostly its TNG era, with the type of Family Guy-like jokes expected of Seth MacFarlane. But it ends up as a pretty good homage to Star Trek and a worthy addition to the genre. While it retains some of the humor, it is nowhere near as prevalent as in its first season.
I'm a firm believer that if you parody a genre, you must also be an interesting entry in that genre, in addition to being a parody. You can't just be "haha we're sci-fi and funny" and then not come up with interesting sci-fi plotlines yourself, otherwise you'll end up miserable and just worse than the original.
Bone is probably the greatest example of this. It went from being a newspaper comic strip to being multiple epic fantasy comics, some of those stories actually getting pretty dark. This is pretty much intentional, the creator loved epic fantasy AND gag comics, so when he created a successful gag comic he decided to stress test his existing characters by giving them higher stakes and more mature settings. Despite this, the comics all remain family-friendly and the protagonist Fone Bone maintains his comic-strip design, which becomes funny as the world around him gets more detailed and anatomical.
Seriously, it’s one of the best comic franchises in history I genuinely think any fan of the medium should check it out.
It starts out as a weird science cop procedural, then becomes a serialized weird science/psychonaut conspiracy thriller, and in the final season it swings HARD and becomes a full on sci fi dystopia action/revolution show.
honestly the only show ive ever seen nail 3 consecutive "big game changing" plot twists. right around the alt. dimension stage i realized even if it jumps the shark, im watching it thru. the frozen lake? come on, literary candy.
I’m surprised no one has mentioned… whatever the fuck was going on with Riverdale.
Season 1 was a relatively straightforward murder mystery. And then it somehow became cults and magic powers and falling back in time and there was polyamory?? Idk I gave up pretty early on. https://giphy.com/gifs/3oKIPrc2ngFZ6BTyww
Riverdale is perfect because it’s the only show that accurately captures the exact feeling of reading a fanfiction written by a 16 year old girl. Including the part where she watches a new movie and writes it into her fanfic or how the fanfic goes on for so long that it becomes incredibly divorced from any part of its original premise or narrative.
A war, gang violence, a boxing subplot, a 1920s speakeasy, man I don’t even know if half the stuff I was watching was even happening or just my sleep deprived imagination because I was moving
My favorite was when they did a time jump in a late season to address the fact that the cast was clearly not teenagers - which yeah that makes sense.
Except in an EVEN LATER season they do a reverse time skip and place the cast BACK in high school making the casts age even more hilarious than before.
The reason I love Godzilla Minus One so much is because it's a beautiful story on ita own.
Period piece about a surviving kamikaze pilot, living in a post WW-2 Japan, trying to figure out where he fits in while dealing with the culture shame of failing to win the war.
For anyone who likes talking about this dumbass franchise, I totally recommend the “How did this get made?” Podcast.
It’s usually a show that trashes on bad movies in a comedic way.
But any time they cover one of the “Fast” movies, they get Adam Scott (Parks and Rec, Severance) to cohost, and he so fucking earnestly enjoys those movies and geeks out that it’s pure joy to listen to.
Everyone knows it’s shit, but they truly enjoy it and have fun and talk about the mess with giddy reverence.
I honestly did NOT enjoy the first 5-6 movies when my husband made me watch them. But after listening to that podcast on a long drive, I appreciated every stupid minute of it when I watched again.
Arby 'n' the Chief begins as a mindless, comedic parody of Halo and Toy Story, following the absurd antics of Master Chief (the worst person alive) and Arbiter as plastic action figures navigating life in their owner's bedroom and on Xbox Live during the 360 era.
However, as the toys literally and metaphorically deteriorate over time and as the creator becomes increasingly depressed the show evolves into a surprisingly poignant and deeply dark psychological drama about severe depression, addiction, loneliness, and the painful process of facing one's mortality when forgotten by the world.
Season 7 is one of the most heartbreaking pieces of media I have ever watched..
Katekyo Hitman Reborn! runs almost entirely on this trope. For the first 100 chapters or so, it's a vaguely-supernatural romantic comedy with strong slice of life undertones.
From that point on, it becomes a standard battle shonen.
iZombie goes from a police procedural with zombies to a political dramedy by the end and the last episode ends with a virtual reality zoom call interview 😭
Stargate SG1 does this pretty gradually. It starts out pretty mystery/'planet of the week' and slowly morphs into a space opera, and one of the better ones. I like that the change is kind of necessitated by the plot of the show. SG1's primary mission is to acquire advanced alien technology to aid in the defense of Earth. It would have been odd if things didn’t shift.
I'd say Agents of Shield counts. It starts as a macguffin of the week show, but after the first season Hydra twist, it shifts pretty dramatically and never really goes back
Moral Orel is a bad taste, absurdist satire of Christian fundamentalism for the first couple of seasons. Then Season 3 is straight-up a depressing drama and it kind of works.
I remember hearing the creators were encouraged to get "as raunchy as possible", with the execs expecting more stuff like the turkey baster episode, but the creative team took that challenge in a much more emotionally devastating direction.
Z Nation. It flipflops pretty hard and couldn't seem to decide if it wanted to be taken seriously as an action drama or just exist whimsically as a live-action cartoon.
Dusk Till Dawn, starts as a sleazy and gritty crime drama before finding out that we're in a Vampire movie. The twist is well known now but at the time it was a rather jarring shift.
Altered Carbon changed massively in Season 2. First season it was a murder mystery noir with sci fi elements and second season onwards it become a straight sci-fi action show. The entire art direction (lighting, camera angles, costuming, sound) changed with it.
Still enjoyable but it was a shocking change of genre.
First two thirds are “conflict of the week” style. There is continuity but the show tone changes wildly from episode to episode. There are character backstory episodes but only some small hints about what the show is really about.
The back third contains pretty much all the plot, and is a subtle, beautiful character exploration. The ragtag found family episodic just suddenly decides to start asking if a man is truly alive if he only lives in the past.
Adventure Time. Starts off as a cute yet trippy kids show then gradually revealed as a post-apocolyptic show with themes of exisentialism, the morality of power, mental illness, sacrifice, and grief among many other things.
Battlestar Galactica was less about space battles and action and became more about religion, and interpersonal drama in the later seasons. Not necessarily a bad thing, since I still enjoyed it all the way to the end. Hoping for a reboot or a sequel one day. https://giphy.com/gifs/MEq0MsL4sNG3fbNaUZ
Red Dwarf may always stay as Sci Fi but the early seasons are way more focused on a character driven story about the last human alive and how Lister copes with that.
Once Kryten joins the ship it becomes far more of a gang goes on adventures style show. By the end of its original run the crew of the Red Dwarf have been regenerated and Lister is dealing with being back to where he was 3 million years ago while after having over a decade of a different life
The Good Place kind of belongs in this category, the first season seems very sitcom like comedy, then the second season starts. Afterwards it's much more of a continued story but still comedy of course
Bojack Horseman went from a fun, standard animated adult comedy to dealing with very real, dark themes very quickly in its first season. I believe its one of the reasons IGN reviews are based off entire seasons now and not just the first handful of episodes.
It didn't even take until midway of the show, it happened in the very first season. The show starts out really strong with this realistic political thriller with some great characters and a really intriguing plot, but then suddenly it's a regular political drama about taxes and civil rights laws and stuff, while a cheesy Hollywood action plot with Maggie Q as an over-the-top spy action hero plays out in the background.
Cougar Town. Originally it was about a recently divorced late 30’s mom who was dating college age guys. About half way through the first season she stopped dating college guys.
I still enjoyed the show. It later becomes mostly about a bunch of friends having out and getting into hijinks.
Search Party felt like a different genre every season. I guess you can label the entire show as a dark comedy, but still--season one was a mystery and season five ended with a cult and a zombie apocalypse!
https://giphy.com/gifs/pRZSYsMuGEuoXYMPud
Kamen Rider Gaim - starting out as your usual Tokusatsu show with toy sales fruit gimmicks and dancing groups but progressing into near apocalyptic battles with monster invasions
I want a basic-ass cop show that goes on for like three seasons normally, and then becomes a zombie apocalypse story out of nowhere. Imagine the shock of your stupid cop show suddenly becoming walking dead, after you’ve had a chance to get close to the characters and don’t know it’s coming.
The show would almost certainly suck absolute ass but god it would be so fun to see the reaction.
Person of Interest starts as a criminal-investigation-of-the-week show with a near-future scifi gimmick and a dash of government conspiracy/corruption. The conspiracy aspect becomes dominant in the second and third seasons, and the scifi aspects rise to join it in the third and fourth, until the show fully transforms into a scifi-masquerade/competing-espionage-factions thriller.
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u/capt_pantsless 16h ago edited 4h ago
The original 1987 Predator movie switches from a by-the-numbers 80's muscle-and-guns action movie into classic horror movie around the first third.
It starts with cheesy one-liners, some CIA government conspiracy stuff, and a bunch of badasses with badass guns doing badass things, and then it all goes south and none of that stuff before means anything.
Edit to add: I stole this hot-take from Patrick (H) Willems :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InyKZ0F-fVU&t=130
He's got some good film-school analysis on the whole movie, and 80's slasher flics as well.