Today, for Labor Day, I’m looking for what you feel was the silliest career switch for a TV character.
Pop Culture Theme Time is a feature where I put a question to you to see what you think about a particular theme. I might later revisit the theme for a future Drawing Crazy Patterns or Top Five.
Since it’s Labor Day, I figure we could look at how TV shows often have characters make dramatic shifts in their career, as shows look to mix things up. Sometimes these job shifts make sense, but often they are just absurd. I’m looking for what you think was the silliest career switch for a TV character.
I’m going with Adam Arkin’s Aaron Shutt on Chicago Hope, who was one of the top neuro surgeons in the world, but in Season 4, he had a brain aneurysm, which temporarily left him unable to perform surgery, so he decided to…become a psychiatrist! It was so silly that the show even made a joke about it heading into the final season when he was forced to switch jobs back to neurosurgeon, while mocking the job switch (I’ll do a bit about the Season 5 finale in the future. It’s a funny episode).
That’s my pick. What’s yours?
And feel free to suggest future Pop Culture Theme Time topics to me at brian@popculturereferences.com!
Fred Sanford running a hotel
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.