3. Dukes Of Hazzard
Main Character Missing: Bo And Luke Duke (18 Episodes).
Which Episode?: Season 5 Up To "Welcome Back, Bo 'n' Luke" (Season 5, Episode 19).
Is It Still Good?: No. The Dukes of Hazzard is a hell of a lot of fun to watch. It's got cars, family friendly violence, family unfriendly moonshine, and them crazy ol' Duke boys. However, the show did not always have them crazy Duke boys. Well, they did, but they had to settle for some other ones, who weren't as crazy or fun. Allow me to elaborate; just before Season 5 of DoH's 7 Season run was ready to begin filming, it's two main stars, Bo and Luke Duke (played by Smallville's John Schneider and Tom Wopat, respectively), walked off the set due to disputes over salaries and merchandising royalties. Catherine Bach, who played Daisy Duke (a character so popular that the short shorts she wore are now named after her) almost walked out too, but if she had, she was told that there would be no show to return to once the issues were resolved. This entry in the list is very amusing to me purely because the implication is that without Catherine Bach's legs, there would be no show. Two replacements were immediately hired, and the script's were altered in this way, and only this way: Find: "Bo"/"Luke" Replace With: "Coy"/"Vance" Whoever made this decision was clearly a literary marvel. Obviously, the poor carbon copies of our ever-loved Good Ol' Boys were poorly received, with ratings sharply declining. Warner Brothers saw this and thought "crapcrapcrapcrapcrap WHAT DO WE DO?!" and firmly renegotiated with Schneider and Wopat, presumably giving in to all of their demands. By this point, Bo and Luke had been doing the NASCAR circuit (despite their probation rules not allowing this) for 18 episodes, and with episode 19, they came back. Since Bo, Bo, Luke and Luke Duke wouldn't work, they simply got rid of them as soon as the real Bo and Luke stepped foot back in Boar's Nest. They continued their part for the last four episodes of the season (which seems pretty pointless to me, you could've made a whole four episode story arc for Coy and Vance before they left, giving the viewers some time to appreciate them). Did the quality continue through the Coy/Vance era (if you can call 18 and a half episodes an era)? Well, if it were still Bo and Luke reading the lines, these episodes may well have been fine, but since it is just two poor imitations, then it feels like, well, just that, a poor imitation. This brief casting change was bad enough that it pretty much killed the show, with the Dukes never quite garnering their prior ratings and eventually being cancelled, never to return until the 90's with some reunion movies. Let us not speak of the remakes. Besides this, Schneider and Wopat correctly argued for some better storylines, as they had of late become formulaic. As it turns out, formulaic worked better than what they got next, which was miniature car stunts (as they had to compete with Knight Rider now), and science fiction elements in some episodes. The pair also missed Hazzard County's 100th episode and the first season of that terrible Hanna-Barbera spin-off cartoon, so no good seems to have come from this and viewers even today question whether or not it would've been better for the show to just end before the Coy and Vance incident.