10 TV Shows That Were Unrecognisable When They Finished
Never trust an Adult Swim show to leave you the same way it found you...
All creatives have a general idea for how they want their story to play out across its entire run before they get started. Even if that idea changes drastically as they actually sit down to write it, you should at least have some kind of roadmap, even if you have no idea what the destination looks like.
Creatives know this, and audiences know it as well. And yet there are still those shows that take us by surprise.
Some shows end exactly how they promised they would, or how audiences expected them to. Sometimes they end in a way that's different but not totally out of left field. We're not talking about either of those. Instead we're talking about the shows that went in the most insane directions with their story, tone, production, and characters that no one at the time saw coming.
Whether for good or for bad, and trust me there is some bad on its way, these shows went out on a very different note than when they started.
10. Buffy The Vampire Slayer Left High-School Drama Behind
One can hardly imagine the confusion folks must have felt back in the 90's when this show was announced. I mean, really? That forgettable high school/vampire action comedy getting its own T.V show? But sure enough, Joss Whedon and the team at Mutant Enemy made it work.
While the first two seasons would feature Buffy and friends dealing with supernatural forces that just so happen to also be good metaphors for average teenage problems, ain't that convenient, the show would take a hard right turn into something much more come season 3 and beyond.
Buffy ran for 7 seasons, and what made the show stand out at the time was that it took place in real time. In 3 seasons, Buffy graduates high school, and the rest of the show is her going through college, graduating from that, and then living as an adult.
So as you can imagine, the show looks and feels VERY different at the end compared to when it first started. The cast is older and much larger, the stories ran longer, over several episodes, and generally everything just kept getting ratcheted up all the way up until it ended.