Reno 911! characters Garcia, Clemmy, and Kimball were killed off in a taco stand explosion at the end of season 5.
Unhappily Ever After killed off Joyce Van Patten’s in-the-opening-credits character before Season 3 – and then killed off Stephanie Hodge, likewise, before Season 5.
Hodge got un-killed-off, but Van Patten stayed dead.
Emmett Kelly, Grace’s father-in-law on Grace Under Fire. He was only in five episodes, the last of which aired in 1995, but the actor is still alive.
Bradford Meade on Ugly Betty. He was the publisher, Daniel Meade’s father and Betty’s big boss. Killed purely to further the plot. It’s arguable that Ugly Betty isn’t a sitcom in the strictest sense of the word (hour-long, no laugh track, “dramedy”), but it was so over-the-top, I think we can consider it.
Did Barney Miller’s wife expliciltly die? She appeared in early seasons, and Barney’s single status played into at least one later storyline.
IIRC, she left him. Couldn’t take being married to a cop anymore.
Nitpick. While Lucille Ball’s character was a widow, Vivian Vance’s character was divorced.
Wasn’t there a character killed off in the last episode of the first season “Popular”…Nurse Bobbi Glass, I think, one of two roles Diane Delano had on the show. I seem to remember them conducting a “vote to kill off a character” online, along with every other season ending cliff hanger they could think of.
Kenney dies so damned much i am going to rename him “the Lazarus Child”
Mama’s Family: Aunt Fran, played by Rue McClanahan, was killed off when the show moved from network to first-run syndication.
One of the main plot lines from the first season of “Soap” was the murder of Robert Urich’s character, a tennis pro who was sexually active with several women, after seven episodes.
Didn’t remember that. A divorced character that far back? And yet they changed Mary Richards from a divorced woman to merely just having a breakup of a long relationship to please the network.
When Mandy Patemkin left Criminal Minds as Jason Gideon after season 3, he was written out, leaving the BAU because he was disillusioned with it. The character was killed off in season 10, seven years later.
The network was afraid people would think she’d divorced Dick van Dyke. THAT was the big no-no, not being divorced per se.
I’m struggling. All I’ve got is:
Becky from Roseanne… Except the CHARACTER doesn’t die. Just a change of actress.
The first episode of The Shield deliberately made it look like Reed Diamond’s character Terry Crowley was going to have a starring role. But he died at the end of the episode. But The Shield is no sit-com.
More in line with the OP and Farscape was Sci-Fi with quite a lot of comedic elements. The blue skinned humanoid plant Zhaan died on the show. In real life actress Virginia Hey was having bad reactions to the blue make up.
There was a British TV series called Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) at the end of the sixties. Basically a private detective drama with a constant thread of humour. Martin Hopkirk, played by Kenneth Cope, is killed in the first episode. However this creates the premise of the show: Hopkirk continues to appear in a starring role but he now portrays a ghost only his partner Randall can see.
According to Wiki it was renamed My Partner the Ghost in the USA.
TCMF-2L
Hang on, a genuine one. Ernie ‘Coach’ Pantusso died on Cheers after actor Nicholas Colasanto died in real life.
TCMF-2L
Would “Bub” on My Three Sons qualify?
Not sure if he was killed off, but he was replaced because of William Frawley’s retirement (poor health)
Bub went to Ireland.
Also, because they had to figure out some way to get George out of marrying her. Having George married would have been all kinds of wrong.
It wasn’t just that they wanted more dating episodes for Ann-- they actually married her to Howard Hesseman a season later. Ron Rifkin wasn’t thought to have the right chemistry for Ann or the show (I remember when it was new, and this was true; he was kind of a sore thumb), but they wanted to figure out a way to keep Cousin Oliver-- I mean, his son, Alex-- on the show, so they killed him off rather than have him simply break up with Ann, so they could do the whole story arc where Alex moves in with Ann and finishes the school year in Indianapolis before he goes to live with his mother in Chicago.
After Alex left the show, Julie had a baby, which was a more sensible way of bringing in new blood. The main set also shifted from the apartment to a house that Barbara, Julie, and their husbands rented together. Barbara and her husband were on the market to adopt a child, and it looked like the show was going to be revamped as a family sitcom about the two sisters and their kids, with Ann’s role diminished (Bonnie Franklin reportedly didn’t want to do more than one more season anyway). Then Mackenzie Phillips showed up high again, and the producers carried through with a threat to fire her permanently and ban her from the set.
Julie is who they should have killed, if you ever followed the opinions of a lot of fans of the show on the IMDb boards.
Rifkin commented on leaving the show in an interview. He had a long string of sitcoms he’d been asked to leave, and at the time, ODAAT was just the latest. He had a sense of humor about it.
Uncle Charlie was fully interchangeable, so I’m not sure that even qualifies as getting rid of the character.
“Poor health” being a euphemism for alcoholism.
Not really a sitcom.
Violates the “not due to the actor’s death” exception.