https://screenrant.com/parks-recreation-season-2-abandoning-tone-saved-show/

While the first season really struggled to thrive, Parks and Recreation season 2 thrived by abandoning the comedy mockumentary's original tone.

Shows which clearly changed direction from their original plan? (https://www.reddit.com/r/television/comments/1b0i72p/comment/ks81ld7/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)

Parks and Recreation (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/EarlyInstallmentWeirdness/TVShowsPToZ) was envisioned as a tonal clone of The Office (and was originally an actual Office spinoff), focusing on a group of half-hearted employees who mostly disliked each other and an incompetent head of the office who would be the butt of most of the jokes.

After the first season, the showrunners realized that the show worked substantially better (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/GrowingTheBeard/LiveActionTV) if Leslie Knope was reconfigured as an aspirational figure rather than a boob, and the show began to morph into its much-loved later identity. This was further accelerated soon after when the dour “straight man” character was replaced by two new characters (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/IconicSequelCharacter/LiveActionTV) who were a far better fit (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MorePopularReplacement) for its new optimistic tone. (This latter change worked so well that, as far as I’m concerned, the whole trope of “new character joins that revitalizes a show” may as well be referred to as the Ben and Chris Effect.)