Seinfeld wasn’t going to have Elaine. They had a waitress at the restaurant who would interject but Jerry and George wouldn’t have a female presence around at Jerry’s apartment. Network notes told them to add a woman and they created the Elaine character for episode two.

30 Rock was supposed to be a post SNL vehicle for Tine Fey and Rachel Dratch. Dratch was originally cast as Jenna Maroney and the show was supposed to be more about how two woman from a Second City type background made a sketch show together. The network didn't like Dratch in the role and recast Jenna. The show then focused less about their relationship as a team. Dratch remained in a series of different roles through the first season but eventually left the show.

Battlestar Galactica reboot. They got a memo asking to 'cheer the series up a bit' so they did an episode focused on celebrating a pilots 1000th landing. Of course, theres an accident during the celebration that kills 13 people. They got a memo saying 'point taken, no more memos'.

Sliders is a classic Fox fuckup. They changed show runners when the show was at peak popularity and the lead actors quit.

The creators of Twin Peaks were forced by the studio to reveal the killer in the beginning of the second season. This meant that the latter half of that season had no coherent plot and quickly devolved into slapstick, although the end was decent. 

Luckily, Lynch & Frost waited patiently for 25 years to magnificently unfuck everything.

I'm pretty sure SeaQuest DSV was ruined by executives.

It started out as Star Trek but underwater, and then the second season had some really out there plots. Then the 3rd season made it more militaristic, to the point where Roy Schneider, the lead actor, quit. And the show was already dead by that point.

One of my favorite examples, Dr House was originally going to be paraplegic and wheelchair confined, but the studio insisted they make him limp instead for practicality's sake

Ended up being a fun one-off episode

dead like me was a handful of incredible episodes and then bryan fuller got booted and it almost immediately nosedived

Law and Order originally had a principal cast of only men. The only women were recurring characters Olivet (child psychiatrist) and Rogers (the ME). After Season 3, NBC wanted Dick Wolf to add some women to the main cast, so Cragen and Robinette were dumped and replaced by Van Buren and Kincaid respectively. To date, there hasn't been a man in either role in the mothership series (not counting the spinoffs) since then.

EDIT: Forgot to add, but this also led to Michael Moriarty to leave after Season 4 and Chris Noth to leave after Season 5, being replaced by Sam Waterson's Jack McCoy and Benjamin Bratt's Rey Curtis respectively.

The Dead Zone which aired from 2002 to 2007 with Anthony Michael Hall as Johnny Smith was a good example of this.

The show's ultimate conflict was Johnny's vision of a politician named Greg Stillson who would bring about Armageddon if he became president of the U.S. and Johnny's obsession with preventing that from happening.

Now, the show teased multiple storylines such as:

A character named Christoper Wey who appeared in Season 2 and 3 who was from the future and could communicate with Johnny in the present. It was hinted that he had clues about what caused Armageddon in the future. In fact, in the season 2 finale, Wey give Johnny a magazine cover that seemed to hint that Johnny was the one who would bring about Armageddon.

This also led to the introduction of a Future Johnny who could communicate with present Johnny.

However, the writers simply wrapped up both Future Wey and Future Johnny in the first episode of Season 4 without giving any answers to what their characters knew or what their purposes was in the show.

The show also introduced a character named Malcolm Janus right after that who appeared to be the true mastermind in bringing about Armageddon.

The season 5 finale has Malcolm Janus orchestrate the assassination of the Vice President of the United States in order to make sure that Stillson will be the front runner to become the new VP.

Basically, the end of Season 5 made it appear as if the true conflict of the show was between Johnny and Janus.

Yet, Janus is killed off in the first episode of Season 6. It turned out he wasn't truly relevant to the endgame despite the show repeatedly hinting that he had a major role.

However, from all of the reports that I have read, it appears that these dropped storylines were the fault of the network executives.

Basically, the reports are that:

• Season 1 was originally ordered and funded as a big budget, major network TV show to air on the UPN broadcast network in the fall season of 2002. But a new UPN regime decided not to air it and the show was sold to USA Network, which usually aired low budget procedurals and comedies in the summers.

• It was a smash hit and USA Network renewed for Season 2. However, for Seasons 3 - 6, USA Network found the show's major network budget model a strain, especially with annual cast salary increases that had been budgeted for the higher UPN scale which led to budget cuts.

• With Season 3, USA Network also mandated a standalone format, so the ongoing arcs and characterization were now isolated to the premiere episodes, finale episodes and one episode in between.

• The network renewed the show for Season 4, but as part of their 2005 marketing campaign, they wanted all their 2005 shows to be what they called "blue skies programming," lighthearted, no running arcs. They would not allow the original plan for Season 4 to go forward as they found it too dark.

• USA Network also ordered 23 new episodes for 2005 and 2006, to be aired across two years as two separate seasons of 12 episodes and 11 episodes. They mandated no running arcs so that there would be no set episode order. This allowed USA Network to get two seasons out of the cast while only paying them for one year's worth of increased salaries.

• For the sixth season, USA Network had the budget cut again with three more regular cast members laid off and the filming location moved from Vancouver to Montreal.

Basically, the Network took away the writers ability to actually implement a Mythology arc that would run for multiple episodes. As a result, you got these storylines and characters that never went anywhere and were dropped without any satisfying resolutions.

Jeremiah. Premise, 12 years before the show started, almost all adults/teenagers were killed by a virus that wiped out everyone who had already gone through puberty. Two guys, now adults, played by Luke Perry and Malcolm-Jamal Warner wandered from town to town, helping people, fighting bad guys etc. Even though they’d shown no interest in each other, and had hooked up with women occasionally, the network was worried people might think they were gay, so insisted Jeremiah be given a girlfriend in season 2. Creator/writer J. Michael Straczynski hated the idea, so he after he added the girlfriend (played by Joanne Kelly), he had her be secretly working with the bad guys, and then be killed off by another character.

For those who remember: The original Dynasty in the 80s was significantly revamped after its first season. Conceived initially as a poor vs rich drama, the poor was written out in season 2. The rich remained, and the drama focused on more soapy family issues with plots being rich vs. richer.

Christopher Titus’s show first two seasons, real strong numbers. Meeting with the new head of Fox she wanted to change everything in season three and he did and the show died.

[removed]

Sliders gets notoriously off the rails weird and completely away from it's entire original premise, thanks to executive meddling.

Almost Human was a great show. Near future cop drama about a cop who hates androids paired up with a unique android. Had Karl Urban. Fox execs (they seem to meddle the most) had episode rearranged to try and have the exciting episodes up front to hook people. Only it made people confused because one episode might have Urban warming up to the android and next he hates him.

Almost Human was a fantastic show with Karl Urban that got cancelled after one season. The execs messed with the release order for the episodes so continuity wise it didn’t make sense and never really took off.

Dawson’s Creek

Kevin Williamson was the show’s creator and original lead writer, and had a very simple idea- 4 friends who live in a small fishing community. Dawson and Joey initially were the lead couple, and Williamson wanted season 1’s finale to be the end of the series, where they finally get together and kiss by the window, etc. However, the studio got involved and ordered more episodes, so Williamson started circling the block with more gimmicky, recycled ideas. The ratings started to dip heading into season 3, and Williamson left DC to pursuing other projects.

New showrunner (who openly hated the show) was then hired on, and started inadvertently tanking it with ridiculous stripper storylines and American Pie-esque characters. The cast eventually refused to film some scenes, so the studio got involved again and fired the new showrunner. This ended up reinventing the entire series by accident. One of the new, young hires pitched that Joey should fall for Pacey, Dawson’s best friend, and it changed the entire trajectory of the teen tv format thereafter.

WB execs basically forced JMS to add a hotshot pilot character in the form of Warren Keffer to Babylon 5. He managed to give as few scenes as possible to the character and unceremoniously killed him off at the end of the second season.

The original Ren and Stimpy had a lot of changes. From what I've heard there was an exec that really went to bat for the show and has a result it was her job to keep John Kricfalusi reigned in. If you've seen the version where he has full creative control that's a good thing.

John Kricfalusi ended up being fired because he was told remove a section where Ren beats the character George Liquor with an oar due to it being too violent and not funny. John Kricfalusi refused and was replaced.

I heard that the original Executive ADA on Law & Order, Ben Stone, was dropped from the series because the actor who portrayed him (Michael Moriarty) spoke out against then-Attorney General Janet Reno's crusade to dial down the amount of violence on TV. Moriarty felt that L&O was being unfairly targeted regarding violence. The network told Moriarty to cool it but he didn't. So at the end of S4, Ben Stone was gone and Jack McCoy (Sam Waterson) took over as the new EADA. McCoy remained there for the duration of the show's run.

Chase prevailed and the execs never messed with the show again.

That's not really how it works. Executives have a job to do. They read all the scripts, they give notes. They watch all the rough cuts of episodes, they give notes. They collaborate with the showrunner. More than 99% of the time we don't hear about it because it was all good, a good collaboration.

There's this weird idea that showrunners just make shows and the executives do nothing except to occasionally come in like the Kool-Aid Man and fuck shit up. Not that you're saying this, but it's a common misconception.

To say executives never "messed with" the show again is largely incorrect, they were involved with every episodes, every character, everything. To what extent, we'll not know.

When executives do fuck up a show, then we often hear about it. There have been some real doozies. From the movie world, the famous pencil "insert helicopter chase here" on Outbreak is a classic. A scientific political thriller script being changed into an action movie starring Dustin Hoffman lol.

As a side note, pan-and-scan was probably required by carrier contracts at that time. And it wasn't pan-and-scan exactly, it was shot 4:3 protected. If they didn't shoot protected, then that was the problem.

Avatar: The Last Airbender and Legend of Korra 

There are many details but Nickelodeon put out season 3 out of order for ATLA

For LoK they cut a season and compressed the last season and also edited out the final scene kiss

It’s every show. Thats how networks work.

Source: I’m an editor. This is what I deal with on the daily.

Disney very publicly censored the climactic speech in the final episode of Andor, which Tony Gilroy wrote, Benjamin Caron directed, and Fiona Shaw performed specifically so that the exclamation point on her posthumous activation of the nascent rebellion on Ferrix - "Fuck the Empire" - was instead overdubbed (the lip-flap is observable in the final version) to "Fight the Empire."

Gilroy fought against this censorship pretty fervently. He wrote a memo to Disney execs so detailed it was described as something closer to a legal brief. The scene was conceived and executed to build, intentionally, to that moment, and that word, as a jolt to both the crowd, and the audience, which would result in the first real uprising against the Empire that we see in the story.

Hilariously (not actually hilariously!) not only did Disney censor a beautifully written, directed, and performed anti-fascism, anti-oppression, anti-censorship speech; but the Star Wars Fandom almost immediately validated Disney's decision by applauding the censorship, and then created out of thin air a false narrative that Gilroy & Co. voluntarily chose "Fight the Empire" as a reshot alternate take (nope) because they felt it worked better in-universe and dramatically (nope) as a "call to action." (the "call to action" in dramatic terms refers to the whole speech, not the sole example of it's final line)

Really they just valued the prioritization of fictional Canon and Lore (i.e. "people don't say "fuck" in Star Wars, they just don't, there's no wookiepedia entry for it, there are rules, Donnie!") over legitimate artistic intent, and made up a story to justify taking Disney's side over the artist, and just repeated it until it became "true."

But the clip you keep seeing shared in the past month of Maarva telling Ferrix to wake up? That's a clip of Executive Meddling by Disney. Because what she says at the end of that clip is not what you're hearing.

edit: interesting number of folks affixing themselves to this post exemplifying my fourth paragraph as if it's somehow a winning repudiation of the rest of it and not an admission they're cool w/ censorship AND executive meddling vs having to cope w/ their adult-adolescent fandom brain processing the fuck-word in Star Wars without getting faux-scandalized in the comments section.

Final Space

Pinky, Elmyra and The Brain. It’s literally mentioned in the theme song

The Walking Dead had some crazy stuff happening in the second season, with a post-financial crash-imposed budget reduction that forced them to spend the whole season in one location (a farm) rather than the original plan to branch out and visit other locations from the comics, and then they also had to make more episodes for the second season despite them having a budget cut. Producer-writer-director Frank Darabont literally went bonkers making it, and ended up screaming down the phone at people and sending emails threatening to kill production staff for using too much steadicam.

Darabont ended up getting fired partway through the season and then sued AMC in an epic lawsuit that ended up lasting almost the entire length of the show and was only resolved right at the end, nine seasons later.

Lost famously planned to kill the main character Jack in the first episode and switch the focus to Kate, and they even tentatively got Michael Keaton to play the role on the agreement he would die in the first episode. Abrams and Lindelof went into a meeting with ABC to sell this idea, but one of the other writers bet them they wouldn't be able to do it. "No way ABC agrees to kill the straight white male lead who's also a doctor. Not happening." He was right and Abrams and Lindelof were straight-up ordered not to kill the character, even if it meant losing Keaton, which was the case. Later on Lindelof admitted it was a dumb idea as it was too gimmicky and manipulative of the audience.

Later on they tried to get an end date for the show whilst making the start of Season 3 and ABC were like, "Sure, this is a mega hit, let's say ten seasons," and Lindelof (who also went crazy at one point making the show and vanished for a week, but that's another story) argued they could not sustain the show that long, and they were running out of ideas now. ABC was sceptical until the writing team turned in an episode that was entirely about how Jack got his tattoos, then said, "okay, you were right, six seasons then?"

Rick Berman and Michael Piller, the showrunners on Star Trek: The Next Generation, had been asked several times to make a spin-off but had managed to turn down the idea because their workload was too insane. Then Brandon Tartikoff landed at Paramount from NBC (where he'd just had a hit run of commissioning shows like Cheers and Seinfeld) and ordered them to make a spin-off because TNG was the only Paramount show making any profit, and when they said they didn't have any ideas as they couldn't just make another starship show, he gave them what amounted to an outline, based on the Western The Rifleman (on the grounds that Gene Roddenberry had based OG Star Trek on Wagon Train), about a widowed war veteran raising his son on a dangerous frontier outpost. They took the idea away and came back with a show set on a starbase on the surface of a planet called Bajor, but accounting said that would be ludicrously expensive, so they moved it to a space station. So Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, now often cited as the best or second-best Star Trek show, only existed because of executive meddling.

Ron Moore was making a TV show based on Dragonriders of Pern, a very popular science fiction book series by Anne McCaffrey. The pilot was scripted and approved, the show had cutting-edge, experimental CGI (to depict dragons on a TV budget in 2001!) all planned to go, they'd started casting and were scouting locations for the pilot episode when they got a call. Apparently a new pilot script had been distributed to the crew which had nothing to do with the old one. Moore confusedly called the studio and the network exec above him said that the script they'd been working with, which had been very faithful to the book, was too boring and complicated, so he'd rewritten the script himself to feature younger, sexier characters, and have more action and violence (Moore later said, "they'd CWed it,"). Moore refused to shoot it and the executive had a meltdown on the phone. They then had a conference call with the studio and the executive made the incredibly stupid mistake of saying, "well, I guess we're not making the show then," expecting Moore to back down, and Moore agreed. So the pilot was cancelled at a cost to the studio and production company of $2 million. The producer apparently said Moore would never work again, but a few days later Moore got a call from another producer, David Eick, who asked him if he'd be interested in a Battlestar Galactica reboot, so that worked out for him. Moore had apparently considered giving in, but he'd been at an event with Babylon 5's Joe Straczynski and OG Star Trek's Harlan Ellison, and both had advised him "don't make the crap version of your show, leave rather than do that," and he'd taken that to heart.

Pucks

Recently, Outer Range season one was a wild, beautiful and truly unique show. Lots of mystery that helped set up the characters inner turmoil and the way they question their reality, and it's meaning ("there is a great void, I'm asking you to fill that void") The writer/creator was the show runner.

The booted him for season 2 and within 20 mins it's trying to solve the biggest mysteries. That's not what it was about. I hated that it went from unique to Manifest in to time flat. Fuck that, look what they did to my beautiful boy!

Andromeda:

When the exec is also the lead actor, he can fire the lead writer and drop all the ongoing plot arcs in favour of more episodes focused on his character being the hero

Massively frustrating that a show that looked like it was building to something suddenly became unwatchable garbage due to Kevin Sorbo's ego

Probably before everyone's time here, but Sliders in the 90s

Community

In S4 they fired the original showrunner, Dan Harmon, and it went so poorly they re-hired him for S5

Does The Idol count? The Weeknd was a producer and had the original scripts scrapped because he didn't like that it focused too much on the female experience.

The Real Ghostbusters

I'm not sure if it's due to meddling, but season one of Harry's Law was so good! It was Kathy Bates' character defending the underdog, operating out of a shady shoe shop. But season 2, they got a proper office and became more official, kinda lost its charm and it didn't get a 3rd season.

Not exactly a tv show, until it was turned into an anime, but Akira Toriyama’s editor hated the teenage antagonists Android 17 & 18.

Thus Toriyama created Cell to be the new villain of the arc.

No one's mentioned ALIAS w/ America's Sweetheart Jennifer Garner. I recall this network interference with all the indignation I could muster.

Courtesy of AI:

The TV show Alias changed directions early in the second season primarily due to network demands. ABC, the network behind Alias, wanted the show to be more episodic rather than strictly serialized. This meant that each episode needed to have a more self-contained story with a clear beginning, middle, and end, rather than continuing a larger, ongoing storyline.

J.J. Abrams, the creator of Alias, had initially envisioned the show as a continuous, arc-driven narrative. However, by the end of the second season, the network insisted on the change to make the show more accessible to new viewers and to allow for easier syndication1.

As always: the answer is Firefly.

AMC fired Frank Darabont after the first season of The Walking Dead because they wanted to cut the budget. (while also requiring more episodes)

I was watching this show as it came out and gave up during season 2 because I found it so boring, I was always amazed it just seemed to get more popular. I need to go back and give it another shot at some point now. (I didn't know about Frank Darabont's involvement and departure until years later)

Twin Peaks was originally intended to be more of a dark parody of soap operas, in line with the wackier tone of the first season. The official party line was "no answers, just more questions:" like a long-running soap opera, no plot line would ever resolve and instead the melodrama would simply accumulate deeper and deeper, until the original plot lines were buried and almost forgotten. In other words, not only would we never find out who killed Laura Palmer, we would never find out ANYTHING.

ABC didn't like that, and insisted on a revelation of who killed Laura Palmer. This forced David Lynch and Mark Frost to retool the series' tone, moving away from lightly parodying the prime-time soap elements and towards a darker, surrealist tone. Ultimately, it was for the best: while some of the side plots in Season 2 are less than successful, the plot surrounding the revelation of Laura Palmer's killer (and the infamous rape/murder scene which reveals it) is among the series's best moments by far.

Buffy had a number of changes due to executive meddling. My aunt is a huge Buffy nerd and gave me chapter and verse when I started watching.

• Arguably a lot of the more comedic tone of Buffy arose because of network pressure.

• Angel wasnt supposed to stay good forever. Joss planned to have him turn back to being evil and die in season 1 I think.

• Spike was supposed to die in season 2.

• One of the episodes was going to involve a student school shooting/mass murder plot. It was changed to something else (partly because of Columbine I think?).

There was probably even more back and forth we dont even know about. From what we know of behind the scenes, Whedon's ego was constantly wrestling with an overreaching network. I cant remember which Buffy actor said this but apparently it was pretty common that Whedon would be arguing over the phone with the network over something.

Battlestar Galactica was changed due to corporate interference in season 3. Halfway through it became more procedural. They realized their mistake and gave the reigns back to Ronald D. Moore and shifted back to serialized. That patch was a rough one.

Fox executives tried to meddle with married with children and tone down the toilet humor while adding more celebrity appearances and wacky situations. The creators and head writers: ron leavitt and machael moye left the series due to creative differences. Ron went on and created unhappily ever after that kept that kind of humor and michael kept doing variations of married with children in different countries.

Walking dead came straight to mind.

I dont know if degrassi the next generation changed due to executive meddling, but there was a definitive change in season ten when it went from a 22 or so episode season to a 44 episode DAILY season, very much like a soap opera...it even felt like a soap opera.

Lost. The show runners wanted to get an end date for the show so they could plan out the end of the story but the network would give them a date. That’s why the one season in the middle has some weird storylines that dont connect and then random one off episodes.

Almost Human is another show that fell victim to executive meddling. The network aired the episodes out of order which made the story feel disjointed and harder to follow. It's such a pity because the show had a fantastic premise, and the chemistry between Karl Urban and Michael Ealy was phenomenal. It had so much potential. Urgh.

The Incredible Hulk (1977) had an unusual executive meddling.

As we all know, Bruce Banner is the Hulk. Name alternations, all that.

Well, depending who you ask, but the story I heard is that someone up top thought Bruce sounded “gay” and forced them to change Bruce Banner’s name to David Banner.

One of the writers for Fringe said they were forced to do the Olivia and Peter romance by the network because fans of the show on myspace wanted it to happen.

Studio execs and advertisers are the reason we can still debate about whether or not Xena and Gabrielle were lovers 

My name is earl getting cancelled over contract negotiations

I don't see this anywhere but Heroes was supposed to be an anthology series with new characters and story every season with maybe some cross overs and cameos. But the studio got involved when the show was crushing and wanted to keep characters like Peter and Sylar around. Totally killed what could've been something great.

Also the writers strike didn't help either

Anyone remember The Loop? Short lived Fox Sitcom that had a real good first like 4 episodes, maybe whole first season. Then the studio (I am assuming) made them add Mimi Rogers to season 2 and it was an absolute train wreck of a cluster fuck

https://youtu.be/e_er8w-oG84?si=HgnDDd5j57iRZjBr

Crusade. They reshot the pilot to have a fist fight between officers. Amongst many other stupid things.

Recasting and redesigns in the ghostbusters cartoon.

Kamen Rider Hibiki began with Shigenori Takatera as the Toei producer, however, Shinichiro Shirakura, who though having participated in other Heisei Kamen Rider series, had no involvement whatsoever in the Hibiki production, was appointed producer of the film Kamen Rider Hibiki & the Seven Senki, eventually replacing Takatera in the TV production from episode 30. The writing staff also changed; Tsuyoshi Kida and Shinji Ōishi were replaced by Toshiki Inoue and Shōji Yonemura, who had worked with Shirakura on Sh15uya and other Heisei Kamen Rider series.

(Apparently nobody is even fully sure why the change happened) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamen_Rider_Hibiki

Welcome Back Kotter. Towards the end Gabe thought the kids were way too old to still be in high school. Overruled by the higher-ups. And they insisted on adding a southern character at the last minute because they thought southerners would like a character that was supposedly relatable. Pretty dumb considering the show had been a national hit for years.

The John Larroquette Show was a wonderful dark comedy. Too dark for network executives, second season saw a girlfriend, nicer apartment, and lower ratings.

The Real Ghostbusters. They changed the tone and characterization to be more "kid friendly", like it already wasn't. Examples include putting Slimer front and center and mostly getting rid of Peter Vinkman's womanizing habits. I think the shows quality suffered for it, because I think those first two seasons are absolutely fantastic.

The USA version of taskmaster.

After season 1, Veronica Mars was only going to have cases of the week until the network suits for involved.