What Was the Silliest Career Switch for a TV Character?

4 thoughts on “What Was the Silliest Career Switch for a TV Character?”

1. Fred Sanford running a hotel

2. Maybe it is isn’t “silly,” but I always found it weird that Archie Bunker went from doing some very low paying blue collar jobs (janitor and cabbie) to owning a bar. The point of things was showing the devastation of America “getting out” of manufacturing by having Archie go from being a foreman at a loading dock (a good job) to lower paying stuff as the 70’s wore on to the 80’s. Making him a business owner took away from some of that. But what do I know? Between the end of “ALL IN THE FAMILY” and four seasons of “ARCHIE BUNKER’S PLACE,” audiences seemed fine with it at the time.

   Making Michael Kelso a security guard for the Playboy mansion in the last season of “THAT 70’S SHOW” always felt more like wish fulfillment and was the symptom of a show that is past its prime and getting desperate in the final season. Having him become a police officer worked in the sense that a moron like him could thrive as a cop in a small town in middle America. I know this was done to write Ashton Kutcher out, but it still seemed cartoony.

   And I don’t know if going from “blue collar working mother” to “newly wealthy lottery winner who pokes fun at elitists and action films” technically counts as a “silly career change,” but man, that 9th season shift for “ROSEANNE” made a show which was already diving into absurd, surrealist comedy (while still insisting on occasional drama, like Dan Conner having a heart attack or Darlene’s baby being nearly stillborn) into a flat out cartoon. And of course, they retconned it. Then retconned it again.

3. I just thought of a few examples. One from a show I watched faithfully, one from a show I never watched, and one from a show I’ve only watched sporadically.

   On HOMICIDE: LIFE ON THE STREET, Giancarlo Esposito’s character Mike Giardello was an F.B.I. agent who served as a liaison with the Baltimore City Homicide Unit. Fed up with the bureaucracy he encounters, he quits the Bureau in what turned out to be the next to last regular episode of the series, “Identity Crisis.” NBC then did a reunion movie, HOMICIDE: LIFE EVERLASTING, the year after the series was canceled. In the early scenes of the movie, we see that Mike Giardello has now become a uniformed officer for the Baltimore P.D. and he’s “working on my detective shield” to boot! I guess Tom Fontana was trying to cover his bases and set up Giardello as a Homicide detective in case the movie was a success and NBC wanted more.

   This next one I only know about from the ads that ran on NBC, but it was SO strange that it’s stuck with me ever since. On LAW AND ORDER: LA, Alfred Molina played Deputy District Attorney Morales. But in January 2011, just three months into the show’s run, they revamped the series and Molina’s character quit the DA’s office and “came back to” being a detective with the LAPD! I have no idea if it had ever been mentioned that Morales had been a cop before this. Here’s the 30-second promo on Molina’s character, which basically screams, “This show is troubled, and we’re desperately revamping it in an attempt to find SOMETHING that works!”

   https://youtu.be/s2bUCnXQovA?si=GizUrecVwnu70mT5

   And finally, on LAW AND ORDER: SVU, Peter Scanavino’s character Dominick “Sonny” Carisi went the opposite way, becoming an Assistant District Attorney in season 21 after being an SVU detective for five seasons! Baffling. Dick Wolf just doesn’t care about realistic career transitions if he finds an actor he likes working with, I guess.

4. I nominate the character of Amos Burke (portrayed by Gene Barry) going from a captain of homicide for the L.A.P.D. to a spy for the Federal government, when Burke’s Law changed formats (and title) in its last season.