It's a fine art, deciding on a name for a TV show – it needs to be original and memorable, but not showy or pretentious. Tricky. (You can see why so many series take the easy way out and just make the title the name of the lead character.)
So it's not entirely surprising that first efforts aren't always the best. Sometimes, what might have seemed right at pitch time doesn't seem quite so fitting by the time the series is in front of the cameras.
Here are ten TV shows that, wisely in most cases, dumped their original working titles…
1. New Girl
Original title: Chicks and Dicks
Yes, really. Pre-Zooey Deschanel, this sitcom was pitched to the network as "a young ensemble comedy about the sexual politics of men and women" with a slightly bawdy title.
It was never likely, though, that New Girl's original title would stay put. Unless, that is, FOX were willing to employ some serious hyphen/asterix action, à la Don't Trust the B---- in Apartment 23 or The End of the F***ing World.
2. Married… With Children
Original title: Not The Cosby Show
With its cutesy message of family togetherness and its finger-wagging lessons in morality, The Cosby Show was a model example of the wholesome '80s sitcom (or so we thought). But the dysfunctional Bundys of Married… With Children weren't at all like the loving, thrustingly ambitious Huxtables.
So the one-time plan to title the series Not The Cosby Show seemed like a bold statement of intent. In the long run, though, it was probably wise to chicken out and go for the more prosaic Married… With Children.
3. Lost
Original title: Nowhere
The questions we were asking at the beginning of Lost were: is this island real, or are the survivors of Oceanic Airlines Flight 815 in some kind of purgatory?
In the end, we found out the island was real, but would we have had that kind of delicious ambiguity had the show been titled Nowhere? Happily, JJ Abrams and co lobbed that one out, going instead with the more satisfyingly plain Lost.
4. Friends
Original title: Insomnia Cafe
Friends creators David Crane and Marta Kauffman actually pitched their sitcom under the title Insomnia Cafe (which sounds more to us more like a chic, New York-set indie flick than a network sitcom). NBC didn't like that title, and so renamed it Six of One, eventually dumping that one too and opting for the simpler Friends.
5. Hannah Montana
Original title: Alexis Texas
The makers of Hannah Montana were obviously keen on 'generic first name – rhyming American state surname' for their show's title (and lead character's name), as it was, at one point, going to be called Alexis Texas. Which, though it's a real-life porn star's stage name, at least sounds better than Anna Louisiana or Jane Maine. Hennessy Tennessee? Mona Arizona? Lavinia West Virginia?
6. Monty Python's Flying Circus
Original title: Owl Stretching Time
Other monikers rejected by the Beeb included Ow! It's Colin Plint!, A Horse, a Spoon and a Basin, The Toad Elevating Moment, Bunn Wackett Buzzard Stubble And Boot and Gwen Dibley's Flying Circus.
Some of these, including Owl Stretching Time, would later be reused by the boys as episode titles.
7. The Inbetweeners
Original title: Baggy Trousers
There is, somewhere out there, buried deep in Channel 4's vaults, an unaired pilot for what would become The Inbetweeners.
Baggy Trousers, as it was called then, shares a fair bit of DNA with the series that followed, but with a few crucial differences – it was set in the 1980s and featured an almost entirely different cast as William, Simon, Neil and Jay (although Jay's not Jay in this one, but a character called Lee, while James Buckley, who played Jay in the series, plays Neil here).
8. The Big Bang Theory
Original title: Lenny, Penny and Kenny
In the original pitch for The Big Bang Theory, the characters of Leonard and Sheldon were named Lenny and Kenny, leading to this rhythmically satisfying alternative title.
Trouble is, say it once and it's fine, say it countless times, and you end up wanting to beat it to death. To paraphrase Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, they chose wisely...
9. Roseanne
Original title: Life and Stuff
As a title, Life and Stuff seems a fitting one for Roseanne Barr's proudly working-class sitcom.
It probably sums up the series better than its eventual title, seeing as the series was never just about Roseanne, but the entire Conner family. It was, in essence, about life and stuff.
But all the same, it's not the snappiest moniker, so we're not all that torn up about it getting ditched.
10. Grey's Anatomy
Original title: Surgeons
The title Grey's Anatomy, as any doctor will tell you, is a cunning play on the 1858 must-have medical textbook Gray's Anatomy (the show's lead character is called Meredith Grey, see). How clever.
But the original title of the show was a whole lot less pun-tastic. Yes, at one point Grey's Anatomy was to have been titled Surgeons, which rather makes it sound like a bad afternoon soap.
