Let’s see… we saw Denise Crosby killed off on*** Star Trek: TNG ***back in 1988.
Keep going!
I would think early soap operas would be rife with examples of all three situations.
For me, one of the most recent (and shocking) ones was Will on The Good Wife. I keep pretty up to date on entertainment news and hadn’t read anything about it!
“Chico” from Chico And The Man.
Not a “first” of any kind, but…
Freddie Prinze killed himself in 1977.
At the start of the 1977-78 season, ***Chico and the Man ***replaced him with a kid. Early in the season, it was revealed that Chico had died, though they never explained how.
Chicago Fire had a character die on its season premier on Tuesday.
The Simpsons will have a character die on its season premier on Sunday.
death it’s the new premier plot.
Bub went back to Ireland.
Not a death, but a stroke:
During the filming of *The Waltons, *Ellen Corby, who played the Grandmother, had a stroke. The writers wrote the stroke into the part, and after Corby’s partial recovery, they brought back her character as a stroke survivor. But they had to limit her recovery to the stage possible back in the 30s.
How do the two Darrens on Bewitched count?
They don’t. The character didn’t die, and the character wasn’t recast because of a death.
I believe the character was recast because the first guy left the show for health reasons. I don’t recall any other instances in television of them all pretending the next actor was the same character. If there are, I’d like to know.
This is a weird statement to me. Studios get insurance on actors for their shows? Considering the fleeting nature of most shows, lasting only a few years, and the rarity of actors dying suddenly while working on a show, why would any studio bother to do that? Is this a normal thing? And even if it is, it seems weird that if you can’t get insurance, they decided not to get the actor rather than just take the risk. Just replace him, its not like it hasn’t happened before.
Shows get canceled all the time. I doubt even half of the new fall schedule will make it to the end of the year, much less more than 3 years. There’s minimal risk. Who decided that life insurance for a couple of years was a good idea? If I were the studio, I’d balk at spending any money on this and if I were an insurance company, I wouldn’t take the risk of the (presumably) low premiums and pay out many more times what I got. But I guess that’s how insurance works
Vivian Banks on Fresh Prince.
Becky on Rosanne. Twice.
Not surprisingly, TVTropes has a page about this. Most of the examples they cite are recurring characters and so don’t really count. But among regulars, in addition to the already-mentioned Becky from *Rosanne *and Aunt Viv from Fresh Prince, there are also Justin Whalen replacing Michael Landes as Jimmy Olsen on Lois and Clark, and Sharon Gless replacing Meg Foster as Christine Cagney on Cagney and Lacey.
Dozens of characters on pretty much every daytime soap opera ever. Also, this is much more common in UK shows, such as May to December, All Creatures Great and Small and Inspector Lynley.
On preview I see that this has already been mentioned, but TV Tropes has an extensive list of “other Darrins”, including:
Chris, the youngest child on The Partridge Family
Jimmy Oleson on Lois & Clark
John Boy on The Waltons
I don’t know how it worked in the 50s, but probably much the same as now. In order to get liability and loss insurance a production will have to have all the cast and crew insured. The insurer and the producers don’t want to risk lawsuits over death or injury. I don’t know how prevalent insurance is for production losses due to the death of key personnel or Acts of God and the like, but nobody would ever get it without insuring those key personnel.
ETA: I’m sure you can’t get a series picked up without that kind of insurance also because the networks will want to insure against their own losses.
I think you’re right. Killing off characters must have happened. I found this British soap Coronation Street, and a list of character deaths starting in 1960.
Which soap opera character has been “killed” the most number of times?