I always figured it was a big FU to the actress. “You want to leave the show? We’ll assassinate your character with the worst exit possible.”
Just like Serena “Is this because I’m a lesbian?” Southerlyn.
I think maybe you should watch the last few episodes of season two again (which is great because it’s such a rewatchable show). Mark doesn’t get the Chuck Cunningham treatment.
He says Ann breaking up with him is one of the reasons he takes the buy out and quits, followed by him having an appropriately respectable send off with Leslie at the pit. So it was a pretty well-managed this-character/actor-is-leaving-the-show ending for him.
On Family Ties, the youngest child went from being a baby to being about five years old in between seasons (while the rest of the cast didn’t age at all).
This happens on more than one occasion on sitcoms, when everybody realizes that once all the hoopla surrounding the birth is over, sitcom babies are boring.
On soap operas, that is as common as multiple returns from the dead.
(And I see that there is both a Wikipedia and a TvTropes page for it.)
Joan Crawford replaced her real life adopted daughter (30ish years her junior) on the soap opera she was on when she came down with appendicitis . Apparently it was real creepy!
I think Stephen King referred to is as “the kid trick”. Soap opera children grow up very quickly so that they can have adult problems and be part of the plots. They can also have children of their own, who grow up fast, etc. Of course, another soap tradition is to have matriarch characters who have been on the show for decades. If you draw out the family trees, aren’t there characters who have appeared along with their great-great-great-great-grandchildren?
I figure on Bewitched they didn’t have much choice. Dick York was physically unable to continue acting* and the premise of the show was a mundane man married to a witch.
- In the 50s and 60s, if you were a male actor who worked in Hollywood you rode horses in Westerns. York damaged his back doing that. He got worse as the series continued. When he quit, they couldn’t write the character out.
This happened on The Drew Carey Show, too. Steve and Mimi’s baby, King Gus, grew from an infant into a five-year-old in between seasons.
Brian Bonsall, the kid on Family Ties, was himself replaced on Star Trek. He played Worf’s son, Alexander, on Star Trek: The Next Generation. A few years later, the character showed up on Deep Space Nine, apparently aged approximately ten years and serving in the Klingon Defense Force. The explanation given was that Klingons age more quickly than humans do.
Ridiculous in a good way: Danger 5 changed from an Austin Powers-style 60s setting to a 80s teen comedy/Rambo/Arnold setting. One character changed from vaguely southern European to black. All intentional and in character, with no explanation. It’s lovely.
Victoria Windham became pregnant when playing Rachel on Another World. The pregnancy was written into the script with the birth of baby Jamie.
10 years later, Jamie made Rachel a grandmother!
I’ve mentioned this at least once or twice before in similar threads but British sitcom “My Hero”. About this lady’s marriage to a superhero. I loved that, it was very funny, the hero guy was just brilliant… and then the actor decided to move on. So they sort of did a Doctor Who, except he lost his body in a bet and had to get another one. And was recast using the campest, most flamboyant gay actor they could find. Which is fine, but you know, kind of weird on a show revolving around his straight relationship. But you could see past it and figure “well sometimes you get ultra-camp straight or bi people too” but he was also really, really shit. He had all the charm of a cardboard box and was just somehow completely incapable of being funny. That, unsurprisingly, ended up its final season…
(That was “Dallas”.)
any one where you have 20-somethings playing teenagers. I understand why they do it, but it’s kind of hard to ignore.
True, but Knots Landing was a spin-off of Dallas, and multiple plotlines in Knots Landing’s 1985-86 season were based on the characters’ reactions to Bobby dying. When it turned out that Bobby had not, in fact, died, those plotlines no longer made sense. As I understand it, the show dealt with that by simply never mentioning the fact that Bobby was alive again.
They lampshade it in the final episode too:
Well yes, they did wrap up his character’s departure pretty well, he didn’t just vanish without a trace like Chuck. But the fact that nobody ever mentions him again, especially Ann or Leslie, is just odd.
That was one of the things I always liked about MASH*. While several characters left over the years, they weren’t completely forgotten about. When the situation called for it, departed characters would be mentioned. Hawkeye would occasionally talk about Trapper, everyone remembered Henry Blake fondly, and even Frank Burns was mentioned at times when you would logically expect people to be thinking about him.
James Garner talked about the various injuries that he had from his tv shows. He said he, James Arness and other actors would always share information about new doctors they used and what their specialties were. Garner felt that David Janssen died young because of various injuries frm his tv shows.
Chalke now does the voice of the mom on Rick and Morty. She’s awesome on that, too.
There was Mrs. Columbo, a spin-off show about the wife of famous NBC detective Lt (that’s my given first name) Columbo. It tried to capitalize on the success of Columbo, but didn’t work.
From Wikipedia:
Shortly after the Columbo series ended its original run on NBC in 1978, despite objections from Columbo producers Richard Levinson and William Link, NBC executive Fred Silverman went forward in producing Mrs. Columbo as a spin-off to the original series. The information NBC released about the show was unambiguous about the fact that Mrs. Columbo in the new series was in fact the theretofore unseen wife frequently mentioned on Columbo. The show received poor ratings, however, and as part of efforts to revamp it, the linkage between this Kate Columbo and the Mrs. Columbo of the original television series was reduced. The name of the character was changed to Kate Callahan after an off-screen divorce, and the series was renamed Kate the Detective, followed by Kate Loves a Mystery.
In this ultimate incarnation, the producers completed their retreat from the show’s original premise, and Kate Callahan was then regarded as being a completely different character than Mrs. Columbo of Columbo, Kate’s ex-husband now named Philip. None of the changes aided the new show’s ratings, however, and it was pulled from the air in 1980, after 13 episodes.
Completely revamped twice, with no connection to the original at all, in only 13 episodes! Take that,* It’s About Time*!