The first episode of CSI also did this.
Miami Vice did something similar. They had somebody who appeared to be a main character in the series get killed in the second episode.
Well, either 13 or 14…
The British series Spooks (known as MI-5 in North America) killed off its characters at a pretty steady pace. Counting off the wiki page, of the 24 characters from “the grid” (the agents and employees of MI-5), only eight survived the series.
I actually counted Tony as one of the deaths, but I didn’t count Silvio, who was in a coma
Slings and Arrows did something similar, with the twist that the character who’s killed off remains part of the main cast - as a ghost.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer tried something similar. In the pilot, a friend of the main characters gets turned into a vampire. The original plan had been to include him in the opening credits, so everyone would assume he had plot armor, making his death more surprising. But they’d need to cut a different intro for the rest of the series without that character in it, and they didn’t have the budget for it.
That seems implausible… The intro is what, a minute? They produced fifty times that much content, every single episode. They didn’t have the budget for an extra 2% of an episode?
I can believe that extra 2% putting the show over budget in the first season. But also, screen running time isn’t a great indicator of cost. The intro was a sequence of fast edits from episodes throughout the season. Super cheap if you’re working with existing footage, but the character in question dies halfway through the first episode, so there’s no other footage of him to use. They’d have to film scenes with him specifically for inclusion in the opening credits, which can get pretty expensive pretty quickly. Or stick to using just the ~10 minutes of screen time he actually got, which maybe didn’t have enough material to pull the gag off.
They revisited the idea in Season 3, when one of the background characters does a spell to make him the most important person in Sunnydale, and the intro is reworked to make it a show about him, instead.
Marcus Cole (frozen, awaiting revival), Keffer, Talia (erased), Kosh, Londo, G’Kar, Sheridan. Last we see of Lennier was him fleeing in shame. His death during the Telepath War wasn’t part of the canon show.
The Expanse killed off a lot of characters, including some that I certainly expected to be around for the long haul.
Liev Schreiber substituted for William Peterson in several episodes of CSI. For a while, it looked as though he was going to be a regular member of the cast, but he was killed off after it was revealed he had a dark past.
I believe JMS said the books were canon.
He also wrote a short story where, centuries later, the planet that “healing” device came from and they figured out how to reverse the effects or something. So Marcus was brought back. He found out he was excessively wealthy because of back pay and interest, so he (a) cloned Ivanova, (b) went to a museum where important people had dumped their brains (memories/personalities) up to close to the moment of death and either copied or stole everything up to the time of her injury, (c) dumped the memories/personality he’d acquired into the brain of the clone, (d) purchased a hyperspace capable ship, and (e) marooned the two of them on a planet that was an earthly paradise but hadn’t developed intelligent life.
It’s a bit overboard, but it sounds like something Marcus would do. He could get dramatic.
Bester started to say she’d been dissected before he stopped himself.
But… did he finally get to… boink her?
The implication is there.
From season 1 of the Walking Dead, only Daryl and Carol were still active at the end. Rick did not die, though they certainly were initially going that way(they wimped out and he survived).
If we go by the opening credits, all of the credited lead cast was off the show and all chracters killed except Rick. That’s right, Daryl and Carol were not credited as leads in season 1.
If we included credited supporting cast, three characters survived out of eighteen.
16.6% survived, 85% were killed off, unless I am mistaken. I’m using Walking Dead Season 1 Wikipedia as a guide for the cast.
Rick says this in the comics and show. “We’re the Walking Dead!”
Huh, I couldn’t remember Marcus’ last name. My brain started to say “Cole”, but then it corrected itself and said “No, that was the guy from City of Heroes”. Huh, I guess Jack Emmet was uncreative with names, in addition to his other flaws.
And I’m pretty sure that I remember, in the show, everyone treating Marcus as dead-dead, and we get a suicide note from Lennier. But it’s been a while since I’ve seen it.
Also add to the dead-list Zathras (though his cousin Zathras did survive to the end).
He is mentioned by Ivanova in the “Absent friends” toast (where they immediately cut to his cryochamber). Delenn mentions Lannier. His note was one of apology, saying he wouldn’t return until he had cleansed himself of his shame and was considered “worthy.” He later is killed in the books during the bombing of Psi Corps Headquarters. Said explosion also killed Lyta Alexander. I thought about including Zathras, but he wasn’t killed so much as sent back in Time with Sinclair. Absent evidence to the contrary we must assume he died a natural death a thousand years ago.
Zathras have very sad life.
Probably have very sad death.
But at least, is symmetry.
Buffy did play with this later. Amber Benson made her first and only appearance in the opening credits in the episode in which Tara was killed. And the opening credits for the season 4 episode “Superstar” included a bunch of specially-shot clips of Danny Strong as Jonathan, as the ep was about him inserting himself into the Scoobies’ memories of their adventures.
Yes, Amber Benson had enough footage at that point to actually edit in content to look comprehensive. Jesse(the character’s name) had, of course, no footage outside the first episode since he dies in it quickly.