Practice

After Alan Sepinwall posted this interview with Scrubs creator Bill Lawrence, there was some discussion of whether any show had done this before: make so many drastic changes — in cast, premise, and setting — that it’s essentially a spin-off show with the same title. There are very few, it turns out. Jason Mittell came up with The Practice, whose final season David E. Kelley basically turned into a season-long backdoor pilot for Boston Legal. Apart from that, nothin’. There have been other shows that re-vamped as drastically as Scrubs, but they always changed the title to indicate that this was not the same show. So when everybody had left All in the Family except Archie and it became the story of him running a bar with a bunch of new characters, it became Archie Bunker’s Place. Three’s Company married off Jack Tripper and dumped his two roommates; it became Three’s a Crowd. Even with three out of four Golden Girls running that hotel with Don Cheadle, it had to be retitled The Golden Palace. But though Lawrence says he wanted to do the same with Scrubs, calling the new season “Scrubs Med,” ABC said no. Stephen McPherson, head of ABC, said it had to remain under the same title because “he wants to keep the brand.”