The People in Your TVLook, you watch enough of a show, you get to know the characters. Maybe you even care about them. Maybe you even love them. Or hate them. Or want to read tons of lists about them.
Updated September 5, 2023 5.2K votes 1.6K voters 188.3K views
Over 1.6K Ranker voters have come together to rank this list of TV Characters Who Completely Changed Mid-Show
Voting Rules
Vote up the TV characters whose personalities changed way too abruptly.
Most of the time, when a character changes in a television show, it's the result of character development over the course of many episodes or seasons. But other times, characters completely change in an instant -- heroes become villains, characters who were slightly stupid become the dumbest people imaginable, or a character gets "Flanderized" and has one mildly distinct aspect of their personality blown up to the extreme. And sometimes, of course, the characters literally become a different actor overnight.
These changes aren't necessarily bad - often, they vastly improve the show, or take the show in a fresh new direction - but they're still pretty jarring, especially when you go back and watch old episodes. Here are some TV characters who changed a ton really quickly.
When we first meet Daryl Dixon on The Walking Dead, he’s with his racist brother Merle, who he eventually leaves behind. It’s implied that Daryl has the same prejudiced outlook as his brother throughout, even though he’s more of the silent type. But just episodes after Merle’s exit at the end of Season 3, Daryl starts to open up and it turns out... he’s actually a nice guy.
A lot of Daryl's development had to do with actor Norman Reedus pushing back on the writers. Reedus told CNET, “I mean he started out like, 'Don't look at me, don't look at me.' He had a chip on his shoulder, like he wasn't comfortable being him. There were always scripts that had him taking drugs and being racist, like his brother was. I fought to change those because I felt he should be more an Al-Anon member and not a full-blown Alcoholics Anonymous member."
Reedus's vision for the character obviously stuck, and Daryl ended up being a main character on the series all the way through its final season.
It takes a certain kind of weirdo to fall in love with Michael Scott, and that weirdo was Jan Levinson. At the beginning of her character’s arc on the series, she's a tough boss, often putting everyone in their place - or at least making them sit upright at their desks when she walks in.
But after getting fired from Dunder Mifflin, Jan sheds her Ann Taylor business casual and goes full-on bizarre. She uses Michael financially and sexually, releases the poor man’s private diaries to the entire company, takes up scented candle-making, and even appears in Michael's movie Threat Level Midnight as a jazz singer.
Stewie Griffin’s transformation on Family Guy is so drastic that fans who only watched Season 1 and stopped might not even recognize him later on. When the show began, Stewie was a 1-year-old baby hell-bent on taking out his family, most notably his doting mother Lois.
Later on, he turns into quite a softie, who eventually loses his taste for world domination and picks up a knack for old-school musicals when it feels right. In Season 10, Episode 5, Stewie takes a "Road to the Pilot” to regain some proclivity for total world destruction to no avail, though dedicated viewers must have enjoyed the Easter egg of an episode nodding to Stewie’s metamorphosis.
Will Friedle’s Eric Matthews on Boy Meets World was a typical teen (and a super cool heartthrob) when the series first started, but he became increasingly, well, stupid, as time went on. Fans have tried to explain this transformation as the result of a head injury Eric sustains when he takes his girlfriend camping in “Easy Street,” but it’s likely just a result of the show finding an audience and needing some comic relief as the rest of the characters actually grow up and evolve past a middle school reading level.
Ed Helms’s The Office character Andy “The Nard Dog” Bernard changed quite a bit from his first appearance on the series. When he first arrives at Dunder Mifflin, Andy is a tense, fleece vest-wearing bro who punches holes in the office walls. In Season 3, he goes to anger management and comes back as an awkward dork whose nipples bleed when he jogs, then remains that way for the bulk of the series.
Andy eventually becomes the regional branch manager and undergoes another change, taking Michael Scott's place as the inept, awkward, softie authority figure in the office. The Andy of the early-season-3 Stamford episodes is almost unrecognizable if you're doing a rewatch.
Viewers who have only ever watched Married...with Children in rerun form after its syndication won't remember, but Christina Applegate’s Kelly wasn’t always some dumb blonde who could barely read the Garfield comics. Actually, she started out in Season 1 as more of a typical, angsty teenager who was more likely to throw a house party when her parents were out of town than create something called the Bundy Bounce.
By Season 2, Kelly was full-on the "dumb character" in the show, and the persona stuck for 10 more seasons.
