Typically when you watch the pilot episode of a TV series, you can guess what the rest of the series will bring you, at least in tone if not in plot. Occasionally, though, a great TV show will throw a twist into the middle of its run that completely changes the game. All your prior notions of where the show was going are wiped away, the status quo is changed fundamentally, and what you’re left with is a familiar series that suddenly has become unfamiliar as it leaps into the unknown. Here’s a look at seven TV shows that made just such a leap. Beware of spoilers for the listed series. And no, Fonzie jumping the shark doesn’t count.
1. Lost - “Through The Looking Glass”: Jack and Kate get off the island
Lost began with the crash of Oceanic flight 815 onto a mysterious deserted island, presumably somewhere between Australia and California. The focus of the series shifted during the first three seasons between a monster made of black smoke, a shadowy group of malicious “Others”, and a network of hatches built by the Dharma Initiative. The overriding goal above all of those, though, was to get off the island. These survivors were stranded somewhere foreign and dangerous, and it seemed as though the series was designed to lead us through the castaways’ adventures on the island, dragging the story along until we learned whether and how they would be rescued at the end of the series’ run.
The writers ended the third season, however, with what they happily referred to as a “rattlesnake in the mailbox.” After three seasons of showing us flashbacks to the survivors’ pre-crash lives, we suddenly realized we were watching a flashforward that had Jack sporting an alarmingly Fidelesque beard after he and Kate somehow made their way home. How far in the future was this? How did they get off the island? Who else made it home? Why was Jack wanting to return to the island after everything they’d been through? These were the new questions that became more important than the simple question of whether rescue would come. By changing the course of the series midway, the producers pumped new life into the then-sluggish Lost and revitalized a hit series.
2. Battlestar Galactica - “Lay Down Your Burdens, Part 2″: One year later
The conceit of Battlestar Galactica is a simple one: After wiping out nearly the entire human race, the robotic Cylons are pursuing the last survivors through space while the humans seek refuge on the lost, mythical planet Earth. The show was set up to be about the war on the run against the Cylons, and it presumably would progress in intensity until the humans eventually found Earth and made a final stand against the robots.
All that took a left turn at the end of season two, though, when Gaius Baltar was elected President and decided the humans would colonize a new Earth-like planet they’d found along the way. Having the humans planetside was a big change on its own, but then the series leaped one year forward. After a year of having Baltar as President and living in squalid conditions on New Caprica, the humans were becoming complacent. That’s when the long-absent Cylon fleet arrived and forced the humans to capitulate the war, at the risk of being annihilated. The year jump changed the whole dynamic of the series. When the show came back in the third season, characters and relationships had changed drastically from what we’d known prior to New Caprica, the human / Cylon balance had shifted, and nothing would ever be quite the same again.
