In serial dramas and comedies it occasionally happens that the actor playing a regular character needs to be replaced. The character isn’t written out of the show; they just start being played by a different performer. Sometimes this is done without any in-universe comment—perhaps the producers hope the audience won’t notice or won’t care—though sometimes there’s some story-internal explanation for the character’s change in appearance.
I’m wondering if any live-action TV show has permanently replaced more than one regular character’s actor simultaneously. Can anyone name any examples? If you watched such a show, did you find the sudden replacements jarring?
The classic example is losing both McLean Stevenson and Wayne Rogers on Mash at the same time. It’s only two actors, but they were both huge leads and big parts of what made the show a hit.
Oddly enough, they survived it and thrived with the replacements.
Yeah, I’m not talking about cast turnover in general, but rather cast turnovers that don’t result in the loss or gain of any characters. Maybe the thread title should have been “TV shows that replace several characters’ actors simultaneously”.
Doctor Who did it when they switched the Doctor from Matt Smith to Peter Capaldi and the Master from John Sim to Michelle Gomez. Of course, they go by different rules.
It happened in soap operas I used to watch. Usually, a voice-over would simply announce, “The role of Jeremy is now being played by John Smith.” That was it.
the TV series Bewitched replaced the actors for several characters, some of them pretty close in time, but not simultaneously. It’s the closest case I can think of to the OP’s requirements.
Dick Sargent famously replaced Dick York as Darrin Stephens for the last three seasons (1969-1972).
Sandra Gould replaced Alice Pearce as Gladys Kravitz when the latter died in 1966
Irene Vernon played Louise Tate (the wife of Darrin’s boss) until 1966. When her real-life husband, writer Danny Arnold, left the showm, she was presured to leave, apparently, and was replaced by Kasey Rogers
Robert F. Simons and Roy Roberts alternated in the role of Darrin’s father, Frank, but neither really replaced the other – it depended on who was available.
Similarly, five different actresses played Tabitha during the original run.
Last Man Standing. For the first episode of season two they replaced the actress playing the oldest daughter, the actor playing the daughter’s ex-boyfriend (he was only shown once before the switch), and the young actor playing her son at the same time.
Sounds like you’re talking about the replacement of a single actor. If they replaced multiple actors at once, did the voice-over statement rattle off a longer list of names?
Award-winning voice actor Maggie Roswell performed the voices of several supporting characters on The Simpsons, including Maude Flanders, Helen Lovejoy, Luann Van Houten, Miss Hoover, Martha Quimby, Princess Kashmir, Shary Bobbins and Barbara Bush. She was fired after the 8th season over a salary dispute; subsequently, her roles were taken over by Marcia Mitzman Gaven (who never won any awards) and her most popular character, Maude Flanders, was eventually killed off. (Does this count as several characters?)
OT trivia: when Kasey Rogers was under contract to Paramount, the studio billed her as Laura Elliot, and it was under that name that she played Miriam, the wife of Guy Haines, who gets murdered early in the Alfred Hitchcock film Strangers on a Train. The glasses she wore in SOAT weren’t real, and actually made it hard for her to see. As soon as her Paramount contract ran out, she started using the name Kasey Rogers.
I can think of lots of single examples – Aunt Viv on The Fresh Prince, played by Janet Hubert-Whitten and then by Daphne Maxwell Reid; Becky Connor on Roseanne, played by Lecy Goranson and Sarah Chalke (and brilliantly highlighted at the end of the first episode that had the substitution by having the family watch “Bewitched,” and comment on how gullible the audience was to not notice a new Darren) – but no dual simultaneous ones come to mind.
Charles in Charge doesn’t really fill the bill, since they were different characters. But after the first season they replaced the entire Pembroke family with the Powell family. The two families filled the same purpose in the series, even if the characters were different.
It helped that, in the in-universe setting, staff would normally rotate in and out. The same was true for ER, which also had major cast changes over the years. Law & Order, the same.
The way soap operas do it (that I’ve seen anyway) is that the voiceover makes the announcement the first time that character appears on screen with the new actor. Not necessarily at the beginning of the episode. So if they are in the same scene, I imagine it would announce them successively; though I can imagine they would just write it so there’s not a big long list. The Young and the Restless has had some pretty significant cast changes in the last few years (my wife watches, and I only see it every once in a while, and maybe a year ago I realized I had no idea who anyone was). I think I did see one scene with a multi-announcement voiceover. FWIW.
Mad About You had three different sets of actors (Paul Dooley and Nancy Dussault, John Karlen and Penny Fuller, and Carroll O’Connor and Carol Burnett) as Jamie’s parents.
Game of Thrones has two. Gregor “The Mountain” Clegane was played by Conan Stevens in season one, Ian Whyte in season two, and Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson in seasons 4-5. Tommen Baratheon was portrayed by Callum Wharry in seasons 1-2 and Dean-Charles Chapman in season four onward. (Chapman also played a minor role in season three as a Lannister prince who gets murdered.)
The pilot episode of The Sopranos featured Siberia Federico as Irina Peltsin (Tony’s goomar) and Michael Santoro as Father Phil Intintola. The roles were recast with Oksana Babiy and Paul Schulze for the rest of the series.