I feel like this happened to every single character in friends. At the start, they all had fairly well-rounded characters. By the end of it
- Ross besomes insufferably pretentious
- Joey gets stupider and sluttier
- Monica gets more compulsivly clean
- Phoebe stops getting plotlines and just says bizarre things
The only character this doesn't seem to happen to is Rachel. She starts out as a naive barbie and she graduly matures into a career woman who makes her own decisions (she's also naive and barbie-ish but it no longer consumes all her lines). Reverse Flanders?
That's true, friends/Monica was the first that came to my mind. But then I started thinking about other friends-like shows and I'm surprised how much this does not affect HIMYM - there are some traits that become slightly more visible, but they're "real" and everyone seems actually aware of them. For example Joey gets stupid-slutty for cheap comedy, but Barney gets slightly more slutty and it's actually part of the story.
I read about an experiment where they had people draw a pencil. However, with each iteration, the next person to draw the pencil had to do it in a new way that was not done before.
The first drawings were regular drawing of a pencil, but as time went on, you'd get pencils with purple lead instead of black lead, then circular pencils, until it just devolved into Jackson Pollock and beyond.
The thing is that you have to try to try to change the character so it isn't a repeat of the week before, so over time, it all morphs out beyond all recognition.
This is exactly what is happening in politics. Each new right and left news person has to go further to the right and left in order to differentiate themselves from the other guys, and it keeps going farther to extremes.
I sorta wonder why they didn't call this Kramdenization. Ralph Kramden of The Honeymooners was the original character on television who started out as a somewhat normal guy and ended up a caricature of himself. He basically started the tradition of males being complete morons in relationships in popular media. At least Archie Bunker sorta started out in end-stage Kramden and they were able to make the character infuriating and endearing at the same time.
You could also make an argument for something called Urkelization, for when a bit character ends up taking over an entire show and it reforms itself around him.
I think “Urkelization” is covered by the Breakout Character trope[1]:
“What's a writer to do when a minor character that they created for a show suddenly becomes much more popular than the other members of the cast? Why, re-write them as a main character, of course! This is that character[…]other characters in the cast might be Demoted to Extra[2] due to their reduced roles and screentime[…]the popularity of the character has to have influenced the direction of the narrative and put them into a major role, or led to the creation of new content specifically for them.”
I’d say there’s also shades of Spotlight-Stealing Squad[3].
Often produces conflicting feelings. On one hand, these are fun characters and seeing more of them is great. On the other, they are often fun because the idea behind them is sort of straightforward, which makes them accessible and easy to drop into a scene, but also doesn’t give them a ton of natural depth to explore.
> You could also make an argument for something called Urkelization, for when a bit character ends up taking over an entire show and it reforms itself around him.
Yeah, forgot about The Fonz. Even so, Happy Days still revolved mainly around Richie Cunningham (Fonzie just happened to be around most of the time), whereas Family Matters was basically Urkel and the Winslows by the end.
I think this happens because show-writers are threading the personality of a character through successive generational sieves. A character who is known for traits X, Y, and Z may lose two of those traits as they go out of style with audiences, leaving the character one-dimensional.
I don't think it's the audience, it's the writers. The original show-writers usually don't last more than a couple seasons. This is why third seasons always suck. Each new generation of writers home in on specific traits to get scripts written, which naturally gets exaggerated every year as writers shuffle in and out. There are probably character summaries to get new writers up to speed which make this process even more explicit.
I feel this can sometimes happen even when the writers stay the same.
Highly subjective opinion incoming!
By season 3, the characters on the BBC show Sherlock had become caricatures of their season 1 selves. Though maybe it doesn't help that the characterisation was always a bit over the top anyway...
I don't think this fits the definition of a trope. Whatever the reason for Flanderization, lazy or unimaginative scriptwriting, lazy acting, pandering to the lowest common denominator, fan service, etc., those things aren't tropes either. (And relying on tropes in storytelling is not a trope either. It's a requirement, it's how we and chatGPT process stories, though it can be done well or poorly)
The only character this doesn't seem to happen to is Rachel. She starts out as a naive barbie and she graduly matures into a career woman who makes her own decisions (she's also naive and barbie-ish but it no longer consumes all her lines). Reverse Flanders?