Flanderization

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?

Flanderization has the honor of being one of the few TvTropes that has leaked into Wikipedia proper [1] and it's even credited!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flanderization

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 hate that they did this to Runkle on Californication, who starts out as a quirky high-powered agent, and becomes a complete idio

Related:

Flanderization - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32775119 - Sept 2022 (131 comments)

Flanderization - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25450878 - Dec 2020 (234 comments)

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 wonder if this happens to characters in our real life?

Friends who you get to know, who gradually reveal things you only suspected as full fledged characteristics.

(sort of like, your neighbor who seems frustrated finally comes out and says that he does in fact hate it when people are on his lawn)

Lisa from the Simpsons also starts at a bit more similar to Bart, and quickly does to be a library mouse. Only the saxophone is retained.

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)

Wow, this is entertainment? No wonder people are becoming more stupid...

Hmm... perhaps we are all living in a sitcom then?