Five Sitcoms That Changed Their Names But Still Got Canceled
When Friends debuted on NBC in 1994, ABC decided to change the name of its returning Ellen DeGeneres-led sitcom These Friends of Mine to simply Ellen. When Roseanne Barr went on a racist Twitter tirade in 2018, her newly rebooted show Roseanne killed off her character and became The Conners. For both shows, the name-change likely spared them from a swift and premature death.
While rare, sitcoms occasionally change their titles, and when they do, it’s usually an attempt to save the show from a looming cancellation. And yes, sometimes it works. But not always. The unfortunate losers in the name-changing game are below.
‘The Norm Show’ aka ‘Norm’
Norm Macdonald’s short-lived sitcom was built around a wildly half-baked idea: Macdonald is an ex-hockey player working as a social worker for community service. Despite the fact that that’s not remotely how the law works anywhere on Earth, the show lasted a whopping three seasons before getting the axe. For its first year, the show went by The Norm Show and then just Norm for Seasons Two and Three.
According to The New York Post, The Norm Show changed its name because the comic strip The Norm had copyright precedent. One would think that the “Norm” part of the title would be the main issue, but ABC dropped the “The” and the “Show” parts from the title, and that was apparently enough to satisfy the copyright overlords. Sadly, though, the name change didn’t seem to affect the never-great ratings.
‘8 Simple Rules... for Dating My Teenage Daughter’ aka ‘8 Simple Rules’
John Ritter made a name for himself as a TV icon by starring in several successful shows over the course of his career. Unfortunately, the last of his successes was brief as he died early in the show’s second season. 8 Simple Rules... for Dating My Teenage Daughter got its name from W. Bruce Campbell’s book of the same name, and it lasted until halfway through Season Two, which was several episodes after they dealt with the death of Ritter’s character.
ABC shortened the name to 8 Simple Rules — likely just to simplify things — and used the new title for the rest of Season Two and all of Season Three. Unfortunately, the change did little to help the flagging ratings after Ritter’s passing, and the show’s third season was its last.
‘Too Close for Comfort’ aka ‘The Ted Knight Show’
After finding success on The Mary Tyler Moore Show as Ted Baxter, Ted Knight was given his own show Too Close for Comfort. In it, he played work-from-home cartoonist Henry Rush who lived with his wife and two adult daughters in the downstairs apartment of their San Francisco duplex. Hence the title Too Close for Comfort. The show did well during its first two seasons on ABC, but tanked in Season Three and was subsequently canceled. That wasn’t the end, though.
A syndication company picked up the show for first-run syndication — meaning it aired in different markets across the country — for three more seasons.
Ahead of Season Six, however, the show was retooled so that Knight’s character retired from cartooning and moved to the country where he became an editor at a local newspaper. No longer crammed in a house with his adult children (the daughters were dropped as characters), the title no longer applied, so the series was renamed The Ted Knight Show. This worked for a season and potentially could have gone longer, but Knight died after Season Six, thus ending the show.
‘Parker Lewis Can’t Lewis’ aka ‘Parker Lewis’
The 1990 sitcom Parker Lewis Can’t Lose was essentially a TV adaptation of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. It followed a clever, fourth-wall-breaking teenager who enacts various plots to cause mayhem at his high school. The premise was reworked a bit for its third season, toning down the title character’s scheming to make the series less cartoonish and more dramatic. With that honing came a shorter title: Parker Lewis.
But once the show declared that Parker no longer “couldn’t lose,” he did. The reformatting of the show alienated its moderately-sized yet loyal audience, and it was canceled after Season Three.
‘Two Guys, A Girl and A Pizza Place’ aka ‘Two Guys and A Girl’
Two Guys, A Girl and A Pizza Place is one of many shows from the 1990s that’s accused of being a clone of Seinfeld or Friends. It followed some good-looking, do-nothing young adults who just sit around and talk all day. The radical element this show introduced was that the characters hung around a pizza place instead of a coffee shop.
The pizzeria served as the regular hangout for the characters until Season Three, when they began focusing more on their careers, and less on pizza. Since they stopped hanging around the pizzeria, the title was changed accordingly. Viewers stuck with the show for Season Three despite the new direction, but after receiving a new time slot for Season Four, the series tanked.
Sure, it’s probably the time-slot change that killed the show, but I still firmly believe that the real lesson here is that less pizza is never a good thing.
