I'm kind of a Johnny-Come-Lately when it comes to watching "Wings"....but I DO enjoy it!
I have a problem with the series and its characters though, and I was wondering if some of you resident "Wings" experts could help me out on this....

Something that I've noticed is that the characters don't really seem to have any kind of consistent personality traits. They seem to change on an "as needed" basis from episode to episode.
For instance, Fay may be a kindly, grandmotherly type in one episode and a nasty, two-faced, back-biting witch in another episode.
Brian may be a completely selfish, immature jerk in one show and a noble, sacrificing hero in another.
Joe may be a conservative-acting, straight-laced, somewhat dull guy in one episode and an oversexed "Sam Malone"-type stud-wannabe in another.

These drastic changes in the characters' personalities are very confusing and, quite frankly, are putting a damper on my enjoyment of the series.

Any insight into this would be greatly appreciated...Thanks!

I know what you mean. Antonio also went from being a well-adjusted, sensitive, naive nice guy to being a whiny, miserable, self-loathing wretch. I've noticed most of the character changes seemed to take place during the final two seasons of the show, which IMHO, were mostly horrible.

A lot of long-running shows have one or more characters who seem to go through personality changes for no real reason. I think it's just new writers or the writers running out of ideas or something. Don't let that ruin your enjoyment of Wings, one of the best shows ever :D

Unfortunately, you can never get a true feel for the characters if you didn't see it from the very beginning and get to watch the characters make the normal progression from each episode from the very beginning.

One of the negatives with syndication is you see episodes 5 one day, and episode 143 the next and its impossible to get a true sense of character growth.

With that being said, I felt all the characters stayed true to themselves throughout the 7 year run and I consider Wings one of the best written sit-coms, period! In many cases, after working with actors for a few episodes, writers try to write to their strength and what they feel the actors does best and what fits with the character they are playing. I felt Lowell and Antonio were two examples of characters that were very one dimentional in the beginning but grew into much more intersting characters with much more depth as the series progressed. I also feel WINGS was one of the few series that remained strong from season 1 to season 7. I think they could have gone on for at least one or two more seasons, but I think NBC wanted to move in a new direction and bring in some new shows and maybe if the series had gone on for another year or two it would have started to get stale.