Especially because Morgan Smith is not a real redhead. She died her hair when she began doing the Wendy’s commercials.
Why are we talking about Wendy’s? Even the original Dave Thomas post was sorta off-topic being a spokesperson and not an actor in a television series.
Yeah, let’s get back to the real topic: how Maytag is killing off our old white guys.
He didn’t die, but Two and a Half Men is limping along as best it can without Charlie Sheen. After Sheen had a falling-out with the network, they killed off his character (he was hit by a train between seasons, after marrying his psycho neighbor), and they had Walton buy the house to keep things going. At this point, it seems to be following the pattern of 8 Simple Rules in that it will continue on for a while, even tho you can probably count on your fingers the number of people who still watch the show 
Thanks. I guess I didn’t remember that as well as I thought I did - but they did write out the character in a way that felt pretty awkward.
You must have a lot of fingers, more than 13.78 Million of them anyway. 2.5 Men was ranked #11 overall for the 2012-2013 season - which is about as high as they’ve ever been ranked.
It wasn’t Mariette Hartley, it was Suzanne Pleshette.
It actually seems kind of fitting. “I … am Spartacus.”
The adorable Kellie Waymire played Crewman Cutler on Enterprise and after she unexpectedly died they did… nothing. No title card, no in-story explanation, just plain nothing. The character apparently lived on and was mentioned once in the next season but they couldn’t come up with anything on behalf of the actress.
have you seen the redhead in their commercials?
But if you insist.
Bewitched had quite a few roles played by different actors. Gladys Kravitz (as you mentioned), Darrin (of course), Louise Tate (reportedly fired when her husband [a producer] also left the show), and IMDb credits no fewer than six Tabithas (but most under an alternate spelling).
Also relevant to this thread is the death of Marion Lorne, who played Aunt Clara. Like Pearce, she received a posthumous Emmy for her performance on the show. The role was not re-cast directly, but did lead to the casting of Alice Ghostley as Esmeralda, a similar bumbling witch type or role.
Hmm, that might have been an interesting pair to watch. I wonder if anyone on the show thought to suggest Hartley, for the few of us left who even remember their Polaroid commercials.
Yeah, that’s only CG in the sense that they put the woman’s real head on someone else’s body. It’s more akin to a green screen effect than what we normally think of as CG.
You can’t really blame Maytag. They created a character that calls for older men to be cast in the role. If you start with older men and add the passage of time, you end up with dead people.
Jesse White was 50 when he got the part. He played it until he was 71. He retired and later died at age 80. Gordon Jump took the part when he was 57 and played it until he was 71. He died a couple of months after retiring due to declining health. Hardy Rawls took the role at age 51 and played it until he was 55. He’s still alive at 60. Clay Jackson replaced Rawls at age 33 and is still alive and playing the part.
So “Ole Lonely” isn’t a cursed part. None of the people who’ve been cast for it died at an early age.
Yet.
Dun dun duuuuuuuuuuuun.
It is off-topic, but for information’s sake: The character’s name is “Red.”
It reminded me of those Clutch Cargo cartoons, except that it wasn’t just the lips that moved. I thought it was creative the way they, in order to add some semblance of reality, had the caregiver walk past her a couple times so they could show the caregiver’s shadow passing over her.
In the 1950’s, The Three Stooges made four shorts featuring Shemp as the third stooge, after Shemp had died! They did it by remaking earlier shorts, and using a double seen only from behind for any “new” scenes that were to be included, or by having Shemp off doing something else while Moe and Larry carried the scene.
Alias Smith and Jones had Roger Davis take over the role of Hannibal “Smith” Heyes after Pete Duel’s suicide, which happened right after watching an episode of the show. They also had to bring in a new voice-over actor to replace… Roger Davis.
Barbara Colby, who had played a barmaid on The Odd Couple not long before, and a recurring hooker on MTM. She was actually murdered in an LA parking lot:
They got through the remainder of the third season (Conrad’s death was announced in the Thanksgiving episode, IIRC) by making Lucy Bates the new rollcall sergeant. Apparently this didn’t fly for some people (producers, network execs, audience, I don’t know), because she was replaced in that capacity by Sgt. Stan Jablonski (Robert Prosky) at the start of the fourth season.
There was some degree of continuity with Coach on Cheers!, because he and Woody had been pen-pals. When Nick Colasanto died in the middle of the third season, they explained Coach’s absence with things like having him attend a black family’s annual reunion by mistake (“They call him ‘Uncle Whitey’”). On the show, his death wasn’t dealt with until the start of the fourth season,* when Woody showed up on the bar’s doorstep and Diane came back after the latest cliffhanger. (Coach had just “passed away.”)
*Though there was an on-screen tribute to him in February.
When Dennis Miller’s sense of humor died, he just started appearing more on Fox.