My wife started binging ER recently. She picked up in the middle of the run and has already seen two series regulars die (I’m reading the episode summary and notice another will be killed shortly, and I’m pretty sure without checking that another regular character will die before the series ends.)
Before about the 1980s, regular characters didn’t die, they just got written out. When a major character like Henry Blake in MASH actually did die, it was considered to be a landmark event.
But what series has made a regular practice of it? ER had the advantage of staying on the air for 15 seasons and rotating cast members in and out, so a fatalities were just another way of refreshing the format. Was there a cop show who let you get comfortable with multiple characters who suddenly met unfortunate endings? How about something like The Sopranos?
The only rule is that the regular character can’t simply have been inserted into the cast just to die. We have to have gotten used to the character being there, and actually involved in other stories.
I believe I learned from a similar thread years ago that British sci-fi classic Blake’s 7 will win. I think by the end of the show… all the original 7 including–Blake had been killed off?
Of the 28 regulars of LOST listed on Wikipedia, 18 are killed off by the end of the show, 64%
Of the 44 regulars of Games of Thrones, 30 are killed off, 68%
Blackadder also probably counts though its a bit of a cheat. It wiped out most of its characters at the end of each season (most famously at the end of that last WW1 based season, but it happened at the end of each.)
The gotcha being each season was set in a different era (and the characters were presumed to be the descendants of the characters in the previous season) so they were effectively brought back to life straight away.
It looks like The Sopranos was was 13 of 27 killed off. Probably helped by the good number of non-mobster characters on the show. Almost all of the mobsters were killed off by the end.
I know it’s not an opinion shared by many but I think the episode where they died was one of the best in the series. It was both fan service in real time and a bit of thumbing their nose at the fans in a funny way. It can’t be truly appreciated without following the online bitching by fans at the time.
Even if The Sopranos doesn’t win this thread, I remember hearing somewhere that the actors were always nervous when they got their new scripts, because they were always afraid their characters were going to be killed off. Unlike shows that came before, anyone could die at any time. Not even the main cast was safe, which was unusual for the time.
Not remotely close to some of these examples, but Babylon 5 killed off at least three characters major enough to make it into the opening credits. Another one is debatable, due to time-travel shenanigans, and two more had their deaths seen in prophetic premonitions during the main show, and then “for real” in one of the spin-offs. Also at least two well-recognized recurring characters.
