Having the right actor or actress is an integral aspect of any successful TV show.
Sometimes, these stars are so important that the show can't go on without them.
Here are some major TV shows that just couldn't recover from the loss and replacement of a
leading actor.
Sleepy Hollow, Fox's supernatural police drama, was always a little bit different than other
cop shows.
For starters, one of its main characters was Ichabod Crane from Washington Irving's short
story "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," who comes back to life in the present day after having
died 200 or so years prior.
Crane then helps fight supernatural menaces alongside police lieutenant Abbie Mills.
Over three seasons, Sleepy Hollow settled into its role as a quirky police procedural,
and then it did the unthinkable Abbie died and actress Nicole Beharie left the series.
Despite a steep loss of viewers from season 1 to season 3, Sleepy Hollow returned for
a fourth season without Abbie.
Ichabod was now partnered with a Homeland Security agent named Diana Thomas.
The cast reboot didn't do Sleepy Hollow any favors, though.
The show fell even further in the ratings and was soon canceled.
After seven seasons of the hit Fox sitcom, actor Topher Grace decided to leave That '70s
Show in order to more fiercely pursue his blossoming film career.
Eric wasn't the only member of the gang who left; Kelso, played by the show's other biggest
star, Ashton Kutcher, also left the show, although Kutcher stuck around for a few episodes
in season 8 to explain his character's departure.
To replace two very big holes in its cast, producers hired just one actor, Mad TV veteran
Josh Meyers.
His character, Randy, gets a job at Hyde's record store and has a brief relationship
with Donna, Eric's old girlfriend.
Neither Randy nor Meyers had much time to mesh with the ensemble; the decimated cast
may have contributed to the show's diminished popularity and inevitable ending.
The eighth season of That '70s Show would be its last, although Grace and Kutcher would
both come back to say good-bye for the finale.
"It's like we never run out of things to talk about."
"I knew you burnouts would be down here.
It's almost midnight, Mrs. Foreman is pouring the champagne."
Step by Step was an ABC sitcom about Carol and Frank Lambert, two single parents who
bring their families together.
In addition to all their kids, Frank's nephew Cody lived in a van outside the house.
Cody was a good-natured, air-headed California dude, basically a sitcom version of Ted, from
Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure.
"And I'm Ted Theodore Logan.
Yeah!"
Affable and enthusiastic acting by Sasha Mitchell made the character a fan favorite.
But in 1995, when Mitchell was arrested for spousal assault.
He was convicted later that year, and sentenced to three years of probation and spousal abuse
counseling.
Mitchell wound up behind bars for violating his parole, and reportedly attacked his wife
again.
At the beginning of the sixth season of Step by Step, Cody was gone, replaced by Jean-Luc,
a heavily accented hairdresser colleague of Carol's.
Playing Jean-Luc was Bronson Pinchot, best known for playing the excitable, heavily-accented
Balki on Perfect Strangers and the excitable, heavily-accented Serge in Beverly Hills Cop.
The new cast addition didn't work, and ABC canceled Step by Step at the end of the season.
The show then moved to CBS for a final year... without Pinchot.
After the first season of The Facts of Life, the number of main characters was cut from
10 to just five: Eastland boarding school housemother Mrs. Garrett and four female students.
After those four graduated in the fourth season, Mrs. Garrett opened a gourmet shop and hired
her former students.
And after season seven, Mrs. Garrett herself, Charlotte Rae, left the show.
She thought it was time to move on, later telling Entertainment Weekly that the show
could continue on without her.
But producers loved the show's dynamic of a wise older woman doling out advice to young
women, so they created the role of Mrs. Garrett's sister Beverly Ann.
However, the replacement didn't quite work, and by the ninth season, The Facts of Life
was unceremoniously cancelled.
American Idol has created a number of stars, such as Kelly Clarkson, Jennifer Hudson, Adam
Lambert, and, of course, Simon Cowell.
Audiences couldn't get enough of the judge, who was often brutally and hilariously honest
with contestants.
"Okay.
Best singer in America.
I can honestly say you are the worst singer in America."
Cowell was the biggest star of the series, which was the most-watched show on TV for
an unprecedented eight straight seasons.
But in 2010, after nine seasons, he moved on, in part to develop the American version
of his British talent series The X Factor.
Idol producers had a hard time replacing Cowell, as well as fellow original judge Paula Abdul.
The Idol judges' table saw a lot of stars take a stab at it, but actual singers just
couldn't fill the void left by the music industry guy who criticizes singers.
By the time Fox pulled the plug on American Idol in 2016, it had slipped out of the top
20 most-viewed shows.
"Maybe we've made a mistake.
I mean, maybe we've made a mistake."
News Radio, NBC's critically-acclaimed but low-watched comedy, had no plans to replace
one of its characters and best-known star but tragedy forced the producers' hand.
Between the show's fourth and fifth season, star Phil Hartman was shot to death by his
troubled wife.
It was a horrific crime, and a devastating loss for the show.
But in order to complete enough episodes to sell the show into syndication, NewsRadio
was picked up for another season anyway.
In the season premiere, it was explained that Hartman's character, pompous radio newsreader
Bill McNeal, died of a sudden heart attack.
Replacing him at the newsreader's desk was a new character, Max Louis.
Weird, insecure, and wholly unqualified for the position, Max was portrayed by Hartman's
friend and Saturday Night Live costar Jon Lovitz.
While Lovitz is a great comic actor, he just couldn't overcome the sadness looming over
NewsRadio.
Lovitz's first season would be the show's last.
For the Fox television adaptation of Lethal Weapon, Clayne Crawford took over for Mel
Gibson as "loose cannon" Martin Riggs.
And if on-set reports published by Variety are any indication, Crawford was even harder
to control than his character.
In an episode he directed, a special effects explosion went awry, sending a piece of debris
at co-star Damon Wayans.
When Wayans complained, Crawford referred to his co-star as a "crybaby."
Another time he reportedly screamed and swore at a group of children who wandered near;
on yet another occasion, he reportedly proved so hard to work with that a director walked
off the set in the middle of a shoot.
In May 2018, after two seasons, producers eliminated what they thought was the root
cause of the show's problems and fired Crawford.
They rushed to find somebody to replace him, and quickly hired Seann William Scott to play
Wesley Cole, a new partner for Detective Roger Murtaugh.
Scott couldn't save the show, however.
All that tension didn't totally dissipate, with Wayans announcing that he planned to
leave the series in the middle of the season.
Fox decided to wash their hands of the whole thing in May 2019 and canceled Lethal Weapon.
From 1998 to 2007, Kevin James and Leah Remini starred on the popular CBS sitcom King of
Queens.
James would go on to star in a string of movies like Grown Ups and Paul Blart: Mall Cop, but
in 2016, he returned to the weekly CBS sitcom grind with Kevin Can Wait.
James portrayed Kevin Gable, a family man who has to delay retiring from his police
job due to family and money issues.
Playing opposite James was Erinn Hayes as Kevin's wife, Donna Gable.
At least, that's how it was for the first season.
Kevin Can Wait producers revamped the show for season two: They killed off Donna Gable
and fired Hayes.
James explained the decision to the New York Daily News by saying:
"We were literally just running out of ideas."
They also brought in a new face, who was really a familiar face.
Surprisingly, Leah Remini joined Kevin Can Wait as Kevin's business partner, Vanessa.
However, the nostalgic rebooting couldn't overcome the weird behind-the-scenes shakeup,
and ratings actually dropped in season two.
After the conclusion of the sitcom's second, ill-fated season, CBS didn't wait to cancel
Kevin.
An ensemble dramedy with a culturally diverse cast set in an often surreal rural Alaska,
Northern Exposure was radically different from most other shows on television.
Rob Morrow starred as Dr. Joel Fleischman, a snobby New York City doctor who heads north
to service the tiny town of Cicely.
Northern Exposure was a big hit, reaching the top 20 in the ratings and earning four
straight Emmy nominations for Outstanding Drama Series, and winning the prize in 1992.
But Fleischman's desire to leave Alaska never faded, and Morrow wanted to bounce, too.
Halfway through the show's sixth season, Morrow fled Northern Exposure, reportedly to pursue
new acting challenges and a movie career.
Replacing him was a new physician: Dr. Phillip Capra, portrayed by Paul Provenza, a respected
stand-up comedian who had little acting experience apart from his work on sitcoms.
That inexperience seems to have showed; after just half a season with Provenza at the helm,
the network canceled Northern Exposure.
The high school sitcom Head of the Class debuted on ABC in 1986.
It explored the relationships between a diverse group of highly advanced Manhattan students
and their history teacher Charlie Moore, played by Howard Hesseman.
A big part of why Head of the Class worked is that it was ensemble-focused; the various
kids had personal and academic problems, and Mr. Moore helped them sort things out.
Hesseman portrayed Moore with understatement and subtlety, letting his younger co-stars
take center stage.
However, the actor hated Head of the Class.
In 1989, he told a reporter that he thought the show didn't have much worth.
He said:
"We're not doing the show that I was led to believe I'd do, and it's difficult for me
to get off that."
Unsurprisingly, Hesseman left the show in 1990.
In his place was Scottish comedian Billy Connolly as a teacher named Billy McGregor.
All of a sudden, a show about high school kids' problems was a show about wacky Mr.
McGregor.
ABC seemed to realize that, too.
In 1991, the network canceled Head of the Class and quickly ordered up a new show called
Billy.
Connolly continued to play McGregor, who was now living as a boarder in a California single
mother's house.
Community never had a huge audience during its five-year run on NBC.
Nevertheless, NBC kept renewing the critically-acclaimed comedy about the disparate people who comprise
a Colorado community college study group.
That loyalty remained even after increasing difficulties with Community creator and showrunner
Dan Harmon, who was fired, and then rehired.
However, five seasons was ultimately NBC's limit, leaving internet giant Yahoo! to step
in and renew Community for a sixth season.
"That show's gonna last 3 weeks."
"Six seasons and a movie!"
Original regulars Joel McHale, Gillian Jacobs, Danny Pudi, Ken Jeong, and Alison Brie followed
the series to Yahoo!, but the show had been losing cast members, and kept losing them
as it transitioned to streaming.
Chevy Chase, Donald Glover, and Yvette Nicole Brown were not part of the regular cast of
Community's sixth season.
New actors were added, but the bandaid casting just didn't work out, and there was no seventh
season of Community.
Not enough people tuned in and the show didn't generate as much advertising revenue as Yahoo!
had hoped.
In fact, the revenue was so small that it effectively led to the complete shutdown of
Yahoo!
Screen.
Yahoo!
CFO Ken Goldman said on an earnings call that the company lost $42 million because of Community
and its two other original series.
Scrubs, a dramedy about medical interns desperately trying to figure out what they were doing
as they worked in a hospital, was a critically-acclaimed, Emmy-nominated hit over its first few seasons
on NBC.
The network finally dropped Scrubs after seven seasons in 2008, but got picked up by ABC
to finish things off with an eighth season.
The show's writers and cast prepared a true series finale to cap off those episodes, only
for ABC to unexpectedly renew the series for season 9.
By that point, however, star Zach Braff was ready to move on to other things.
So the show was retooled and rebooted, no longer taking place at a teaching hospital,
but at a medical school.
Familiar doctors were now teachers instead of active surgeons.
Braff moved to the background, and the new narrator and center of the show became Dr.
Lucy Bennett.
Ultimately, the big changes were too much to take, and the ninth season of Scrubs was
its last.
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