What happens when Smallville leaves small-town life behind for the bright lights of Metropolis? Or when the boy of Boy Meets World grows up to be an adult man who’s walking down aisle? These are the curious cases of television shows that outgrow their titles, and TV buffs are citing examples of the phenomenon on Reddit.
“Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. was about, well, agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. But then S.H.I.E.L.D. is disbanded, so the characters aren’t actually agents of anything,” user AporiaParadox said, recalling one of the first Marvel TV shows.
User jrm1693, meanwhile, named New Girl as an example, explaining that by that sitcom’s second season, Zooey Deschanel’s character “isn’t really the new girl but an integral part of the friendship group in the loft.”
Aardvarkyardwork said The Rookie fits the bill, adding, “Can’t be a rookie for seven seasons.”
And Paddijaddi observed that “it doesn’t take long for The 100 to fill that [criterion],” given that show’s many deaths.
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Rnilf suggested Veep, writing that Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ character wasn’t vice president in the later seasons but “certainly had the hilariously desperate vibe of a veep the entire time.”
Efficient_Paper brought up the case of Cougar Town, a title the show’s creator and cast lived to regret. “[It] stopped being about Courteney Cox’s character dating younger men about six or seven episodes into the show’s six-seasons run,” that Reddit user wrote. “At some point they thought about changing the name of the show, but they chose to have jokes about it in the intro instead.”
And other Reddit users cited Extras, in which Ricky Gervais’ character graduates from extra to top-billed TV star, and Jane the Virgin, in which Gina Rodriguez’s protagonist eventually has sex.
The website TV Tropes has many more examples of what it calls the “Artifact Title.” For example, several of Desperate Housewives’ characters become divorcées with jobs outside of the house, Homeland’s plot ventures overseas, and The Nanny ends up leaving her nanny work behind.
As both AporiaParadox and TV Tropes note, however, the 1980s British sitcom Yes Minister averted the “Artifact Title” phenomenon by rebranding as Yes, Prime Minister after Jim Hacker (Paul Eddington) gets a promotion from minister of the Department of Administrative Affairs to prime minister of the United Kingdom.
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