There are several examples of the producers of TV shows threatening to replace the star of the show unless he reduced his salary demands for the next year. In all the cases I can think of though, the show and the star came to an agreement about the salary and he didn’t get replaced.
Pernell Roberts, who played Adam in Bonanza, died only a couple of weeks ago. Bonanza has been off the air (except for reruns somewhere maybe) for decades.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/26/arts/television/26roberts.html?scp=1&sq=pernell%20roberts&st=cse
"My Three Sons " did quite a bit of cast swapping and editing out of characters. William Frawley played the maternal grandfather until he got ill, so they just brought in Uncle Charley (William Demarest) to replace him.
The actor who played the oldest son left the show to race cars after a contract dispute. So we don’t have three sons anymore, what to do? Adopt the neighbor kid and then never mention it again.
There were several other storyline changes, anything to keep the show going.
I’ve often wondered how long Fox could keep the Simpsons going without one or more the voice actors and just editing all the existing audio with new animation.
Sort of the opposite: When Mark Derwin left “One Life to Live” to play Bonnie Hunt’s husband on “Life With Bonnie”, his character in “One Life to Live” was put in a coma, with an option to return if the new show didn’t last.
On Law & Order SVU a few weeks ago, they introduced a character named Ashok Ramsey with a conspicuously huge backstory. I got the feeling he was intended to replace one of the regulars, maybe Munch.
[spoiler]Chris Meloni (Stabler) has said next year is his last year on SVU. Which will be conveniently after Naveen Andrews is done with Lost.
I for one am hoping he joins SVU.[/spoiler]
Yes, but Roberts left Bonanza before the end of its original run. He actually despised the series, what he considered banal scripts, and the implausibility of his character, a grown, college-educated man, deferring to his father and calling him “Pa.” He left the series at the end of his six-year contract, in 1965. Later episodes referred to Adam as being “at sea” or living in Europe.
“Alias Smith and Jones” was a series that had to weather the death of a lead actor. It premiered in 1971 and starred Pete Duel as Hannibal Heyes and Ben Murphy as Kid Curry, a pair of Western outlaws trying to reform. In December 1971 Duel died, reportedly from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Roger Davis replaced Duel as Hayes, but the show lasted for only 17 more episodes.
“Cover Up” was also a show that tried to go on after the death of a central cast member. Jon-Erik Hexum, who played Mac Harper, was fooling around with a prop gun on the set on October 12, 1984. Apparently not knowing the gun was loaded with a blank round, he put it to his head and pulled the trigger. The shot sent wadding into Hexum’s skull, resulting in a brain hemorrhage from which he died six days later.
Not surprised, given the bad blood over the last round of contract negotiations with NBC. He promised to really let loose on 'em when his contract is up; that oughta be a humdinger.
Laura Sadler who played a key character in the BBC’s long running Hospital Soap Holby city died in a tragic fall. She featured in a number of episodes that had already been recorded. In consultation with her family it was decided that these would be shown and the character then written as as having won the lottery and impulsively gone to Australia. She supposedly left money for her friends to have a drink and they were filmed toasting her.
Holby is an ensemble show with cast coming and going all the time so the sudden disappearance of a character doesn’t disrupt continuity particularly. Actors who want time off have their characters being suspended for shenanigans, taking long holidays or going to work elsewhere. However I felt that for some time after Laura’s death the mood of the show changed, becoming both darker and flatter and put this down to the effect of the tragedy on cast and crew.
In a rather horrible coincidence Laura Sadler’s character in another show had died in a fall and a picture of this character tumbling out of a window remained on a BBC website for half a day before it was pulled.
There’s a philosophy among the producers of all of the Law and Order shows that there can never be real stars among the cast. Once an actor becomes well-known enough that they demand major-league salaries, the producers simply tell them that there’s no way that they’re getting it. They can leave and try and find those high salaries elsewhere if somebody wants to give it to them, but they aren’t getting salaries that high on the Law and Order series. This is why those shows have become masters of automatically replacing actors and characters with replacement actors and characters.
On soaps, they will replace the actor if they are in the middle of a story line, kill them off or just phase them out if they are not.
When “Rat Patrol” was popular in the 1960s (it was a show about Allied soldiers, mostly Americans. who went around on jeeps with machine guns shooting up the Germans in the desert in World War II), the producers were worried some of the actors may walk off to try to get more money. So they showed them scripts they had written where one of the characters died to show them “we don’t need you, people will accept that soldiers die in war.”
I still think Eric Braeden should not have changed his name from Hans Gundergast.
i would love to watch an episode like tha… it would almost be like that garfield strip randomizer that makes new strips out of chunks of old ones…
When Robert Guillaume of Sports Night had a stroke, Aaron Sorkin and the other writers wrote an episode in which his character Isaac did not show up for work after returning from a business trip, and his staff found out that he’d had a stroke at the airport. Writing Guillaume’s stroke into the series led to a surprise appearance in the season finale (which I belive was Guillaume’s first actual return to the set) and his recovery provided material for subplots in several episodes of the second season.
And then there’s SORAS.
It’s the perfect example of a show that continued on without its major character, even though it didn’t make a bit of sense to do so.
I could have phrased the sentiment better, however.
I loved that one. I expected your comment but I figured they could pull a Colonel Potter move and bring him back as a separate main character like a well to do cousin or something.
Not so fast. Maybe you missed the 2.7 ep
The Fiance bailed on Charlie, looks like the marriage is kaput
They did an episode of South Park like that, voicing Chef from soundbites from earlier episodes.