Jeff Garlin’s character on The Goldbergs was killed off between seasons after Garlin was accused of unseemly on-set behavior. (This was apparently even more awkward for the writing staff because they’d just killed off another main character whose actor had died.)
From the OP I hadn’t heard Maclean Stevenson was difficult. He just thought he was destined for stardom on his own show and wanted to move on.
There has always been speculation that Glenn Quinn was killed off of Angel because of his drug use. I’ve mostly heard denials stating it was planned. It’s clear that everyone on the show loved him but his addiction made it hard for him to work. Because of their feelings for him I’ve never seen anyone involved in the show say anything bad about him.
Oh yeah, I can’t believe I didn’t think of him in my ‘off the top of my head’ examples in my OP. I seem to remember there a was wedding episode that they had very awkwardly CGI’ed Garlin’s character into after he was already kicked off the show.
Yep, here it is:
Yeah, “wanting to leave the show” isn’t necessarily being difficult, per se, but I’m allowing it, as in the Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje and Sasha Alexander examples above. If nothing else, they made things a bit more difficult for the showrunners. Maybe I should have said “actors whose characters were killed off because of real-life issues with the actors”.
Also, I thought I had heard that Maclean Stevenson had gotten a bit difficult toward the end of his run on M*A*S*H, having gotten a case of ‘too big for his britches’ syndrome. And that the writers killed his character off partly out of spite, so he could never do a sequel character, like “Trapper John, M.D.”. I could be wrong though.
Aside: that reminds me of a scene when Carla’s ex came back and Carla wanted a place where they could be intimate. She asked Diane if they could use her apartment. Diane was sitting at the bar reading a book. Without looking up from the book, Diane hands Carla the apartment keys and then says, “When you’re through, burn the place.”
Rizzoli and Isles was 7 years after she left NCIS her family situation could change a lot in 7 years. Also NCIS shot 23 episodes. R&I never had more than 18 in a season and the 1st season was 13. On an hour long drama that is a big difference in time.
He was an actor all along. He was a regular on Mork and Mindy in the 70s. I remember assuming he was black when he was on 92KTU. When the format changed his voice changed.
Getting fired from Cheers didn’t really hurt his career. He later won an Emmy on Murphy Brown. As a Christmas tradition Letterman had him come on every year and tell his Lone Ranger story,
OK, I didn’t realize she left NCIS after only season 2- I thought she had been on the show longer, and I thought I remembered her popping back up on R&I pretty quickly afterward. Faulty memory on my part.
Denise Crosby played Security Chief Tasha Yar on the first few seasons of Star Trek the Next Generation and was frustrated that her character wasn’t given much to do except occasionally fire a phaser or something. So she asked to leave the show and her character was killed by an alien slime creature.
She seems to have regretted the decision and asked to come back. Her character was used again in a time travel episode and she played her character’s daughter in a few other episodes.
Denise Crosby also hosted Trekkies and Trekkies 2; two very good documentaries on Star Trek fandom.
Isaiah Washington was written off of Grey’s Anatomy after using a homophobic slur about a castmate. Never watched the show, so I don’t know if he was killed off.
Valerie Hartman was killed off on the show Valerie after contract negotiations failed between season 2 and 3. The show was renamed The Hogan Family.
Apparently the other cast members were unaware of O’Hare’s mental problems at the time and thought he was just an asshole. You’re right that this was elegantly handled. O’Hare was concerned that his condition would put the series in jeopardy, risking the livelihoods of the cast and crew so he voluntarily left the show. Straczynski for his part was supportive and made a good faith effort to protect the dignity of O’Hare. They really took a bad situation and made the best of it.
She wasn’t difficult to work with though. From what I’ve read, she felt as though her character and the show wasn’t going anywhere. Given how bad the first season was, I don’t think she made an unreasonable decision.
My first thought when seeing this thread was Heidi Swedberg, George’s fiancee Susan on Seinfeld:
Gavan O’Herlihy was the original Chuck Cunningham on Happy Days (not the pilot from Love, American Style) and played the role for 2 seasons. He asked out when it was clear that the character was never going to amount to much. They recast the role for a few sporadic appearances, and then in one of TV’s great mysteries, Chuck just disappeared, never to be spoken of again.
It was just the first series (the character was killed off in S1e23 “Skin of Evil”), and although part of her complaint was that the writers didn’t seem to know what to do with the character, the writing as generally just awful for the first couple of seasons. Crosby was actually the center of what is generally regarded as the worst (or at least, most explicitly racist) episode of The Next Generation), “Code of Honor”:
Michael Dorn refused to appear in the episode, and several cast members have expressed regret about the story.
At least Crosby chose to leave the show; before production began on Season 2, Gates McFadden was informed that her character would not be returning, apparently because the producers thought she was an uppity bitch for objecting to some of the terrible writing that made her both a terrible mother and an incompetent physician. Her replacement, Diana Muldaur, was never made a main cast member and apparently clashed with the other cast, so they brought McFadden back for the rest of the run and even gave her character a significant role in a few (if generally terrible) episodes, as well as briefly appearing in Generations only to immediately be shoved off the deck of a holographic schooner, and then disappear for most of the rest of the film. So, not literally “killed off” but sent to a kind of actors’ purgatory where her character basically functioned as an exposition dump, even in cases where it really didn’t make sense for her to do so.
Stranger
I was trying to be funny, mostly because of the persistent rumors that part of his contract for any role he takes is that his character has to be killed off. That probably doesn’t count as his being difficult, but if those rumors are true, it is in some sense due to the actor’s behavior rather than strictly because of a plot point.
Meaningless sidebar, but I met Denise Crosby at a comicon a bit over a year ago, and of the dozens and dozens of con guests I’ve met over the years, she’s in my top five for being friendly, inquisitive, talkative and just a delight to chat with. And we didn’t even talk about Trek (we started with Miracle Mile and touched on NYPD Blue and Suits). I’d always heard the official explanation, namely that she wasn’t given much of import to do, and after meeting her, I’d be really surprised if she’d been anything like a diva about it.
Back to the OP…Adric (Matthew Waterhouse) was written out of Doctor Who with a noble death, but the actor had rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. It was Waterhouse’s first major acting job, yet he took it upon himself to critique the acting of guest stars like "the Academy Award-nominated) Richard Todd. He seems to have made peace with the BBC over it though, as he’s happily appeared in audio dramas and DVD bonus features since then.
Not a TV show, but it’s a tradition that goes back a long way:
William Kempe, one of the original actors in Shakespeare’s company, was regarded as a great stage clown and was noted for his semi-improvised productions… He was (almost certainly) the original Falstaff, who was a big part of Henry IV Pt 1 and 2 but was completely and rather clumsily written out of Henry V. And indeed Kempe left the company at this time. It’s not clear why, but the instruction in Hamlet about the clowns not saying more than is written for them is generally understood to be a big hint about why the famous improviser parted ways with the famous playwright.
It’s televisual harmony. As Lt Richard Sharpe, he survived the thick of the action in every major battle of the Peninsular War, plus a number of informal operations all of which generally involved enough musketry, riflery, artillery and sabre-ery to wipe out a battalion. Every subsequent character death simply redresses the scales.
Interesting, I hadn’t heard that scuttlebutt about the actor. I just thought her character was killed off as part of the show’s dark humor.
I see from her IMDB listing she’s had a lot of various work, but only one or two episode appearances on TV shows or small roles in movies for the most part. Seinfeld looks like by far her biggest and longest-running role.
Well, I was appreciative of your post in any case, since it made me realize that my original thread title was a bit too generic.
As for Bean, that’s interesting that he’s rumored to have a contract stipulation that his character always gets killed off, I hadn’t heard that. I did know that his characters always seem to get killed off, but I thought that was just a weird quirky coincidence. Maybe it is, who knows.