We'll probably never know the reasons for the death of every character who's died on
a TV show, but some stories from the behind the scenes just couldn't stay under wraps.
Here are some of the most scandalous reasons some well-known TV characters kicked the fictional
bucket.
Shannen Doherty is arguably better known for being difficult to work with than she is for
her acting. After Tori Spelling witnessed what looked like a fistfight between her and
Jennie Garth on the set of 90201, she asked her father, producer Aaron Spelling, to fire
Doherty.
Just a few years later, however, Aaron Spelling surprisingly cast Doherty in another project,
the WB supernatural drama Charmed. History repeated itself: Doherty quit the show in
2001 after reports of a feud with co-star Alyssa Milano. After a season three cliffhanger
that left her character's fate in jeopardy, the season four opener revealed that the character
had died.
"I don't understand why magic can't fix this, and why it can't bring Prue back. It's not
like we haven't cheated death before. I don't understand why this time is any different."
T. R. Knight left Grey's Anatomy in 2009 after five seasons despite the fact that his character,
young doctor George O'Malley, was a fan favorite. Knight knew something was up with the show's
first nine episodes of the 2008-09 season when he landed only 48 minutes of screen time,
less than half of co-star Sandra Oh. Rather than ask producer Shonda Rhimes just what
was happening, he walked away instead. He told Entertainment Weekly,
Perhaps he angered Rhimes. His horrific death could certainly imply that: He's hit by a
bus, admitted to the very hospital where he worked, and, after his doctor friends finally
recognize him, he's pronounced brain-dead and passes away.
One of the biggest new shows of the 2004-05 season was also among the most innovative:
ABC's time- and mind-bending desert island sci-fi adventure series Lost. Many of its
cast became stars, and the show won the Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series. But some actors
on the show didn't enjoy the process of making the series. Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, who
played the mysterious and conflicted Nigerian priest Mr. Eko, left the series in Season
3. Why? Well, while this might be hard to believe, Akinnuoye-Agbaje hated filming in
Hawaii. He asked to leave the show, and long-term plans for Mr. Eko were cancelled. The character
was killed off, a victim of the Smoke Monster
"The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. The Lord is my shepherd…"
Eko wasn't the only character killed off the beloved sci-fi show. From the outside, it
appeared that Lost characters Ana Lucia Cortez and Libby Smith, portrayed by Michelle Rodriguez
and Cynthia Watros, met their ends due to offscreen misbehavior. During the middle of
the show's second season, both actresses were arrested on suspicion of drunk driving and
failed sobriety tests. Not long after, both characters died.
In actuality, the arrests didn't affect the show at all. In an interview with TV Guide,
Lost co-creator Damon Lindelof said that the characters' deaths had already been written.
In the case of Ana Lucia Cortez, Michelle Rodriguez only wanted to do one season of
the show anyhow. The fact that her character also happened to die at the same time as Watros'
Libby was just a coincidence.
Seinfeld's occasional callous cruelty was part of the appeal of the show, but the show
outdid itself in one episode when it killed off a major recurring character. George Costanza's
fiancée, Susan Ross, died at the end of the seventh season, having ingested a toxic amount
of glue from licking wedding invitation envelopes.
"So, she's dead."
"Yes."
"Huh."
Apparently, George, who'd wanted out of the engagement, wasn't the only one happy to hear
the news of the character's death. In an interview with Howard Stern several years later, actor
Jason Alexander revealed that actress Heidi Swedberg just didn't sync up with him:
"Her instincts for doing a scene, where the comedy was, and mine were always misfiring."
He wasn't the only one on set who felt that way. Alexander related how his co-star Julia
Louis-Dreyfus agreed with him, casually remarking:
Once writer Larry David heard this, that was the end of Susan Ross.
Poor Carla Tortelli. Just when it looked like she'd finally found true love with hockey
player Eddie LeBec, the poor doofus went and got himself killed. While Cheers was generally
one of the more reserved comedies on television during its 11-year run, the writers scratched
their wacky itch when it came time to kill Eddie. He's killed in a bizarre Zamboni accident,
setting up a wacky chain of events that led to Carla meeting Eddie's secret other wife
during the funeral. In 2006, Cheers writer Ken Levine revealed on his blog just why they
killed off Eddie LeBec, and in such a perplexing way. Actor Jay Thomas, who also worked as
a radio DJ, responded to a caller who asked him how it felt to act on Cheers. Levine recalled
Thomas making some distasteful remarks about his co-star.
That got him fired, and it got Levine and writing partner David Isaacs to write Eddie
LeBec's bizarre death.
While House had its lighter moments, it could get pretty dark too. One example: the fate
of eager diagnostic medicine fellow Lawrence Kutner. The character had to make a hasty
exit when actor Kal Penn embarked on a political career partway through the show's run in 2009,
taking a job with the brand-new Obama administration. Not wanting to pass up the opportunity to
wring a bit of drama out of his departure, the show's writers opted to have Kutner commit
suicide. Chilling as that end may have been, it seems that there were no hard feelings
between the actor and the showrunners. Penn came back to reprise his role as Kutner for
House's series finale in the form of a hallucination.
The only character to appear in every episode of the original Dallas, J. R. Ewing was famously
shot in the cliffhanger episode "A House Divided," which left America wondering "Who Shot J.R.?"
all summer. Though he survived that assassination attempt, a second shooter finally felled the
infamous oilman during the second season of the series' 2010s revival on TNT. While that
plot twist could have served as a shocking and clever callback to the original show's
most famous moment, writers had to include it out of necessity. Larry Hagman, who played
J.R. Ewing on both series, lost his battle to cancer in November 2012. Dallas 2.0 was
still in production, forcing the creative staff to both explain his sudden absence while
also hurriedly writing the character off the show. The end came with "The Furious and the
Fast," which aired several months after Hagman's death, and used pre-existing footage to cobble
together his character's exit story.
John Francis Daley was part of the cast of Fox's long-running procedural drama Bones
from almost the beginning, but not until the end. As Dr. Lance Sweets, Daley played a psychologist
and behavior expert who helped the crime fighters of the series in their investigations. Over
the years, Daley developed a second career as one of the most sought-after comedy screenwriters
in Hollywood, working on the scripts for Horrible Bosses, The Incredible Burt Wonderstone, and
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2. In 2014, Daley was offered the chance to not only write
the new National Lampoon's Vacation, but to direct it as well. Daley asked for a few months
off from Bones to do the movie, but the writers couldn't think of a good way to explain a
prolonged absence. So his character took a bullet from a bad guy and died.
Josh Charles was a huge part of why The Good Wife turned in such compelling drama each
week. His character, Will Gardner, was a brilliant attorney in the show's courtroom scenes, and
he was also a foil and romantic interest for Alicia Florrick. That and the fact that The
Good Wife didn't usually contain a lot of violence meant it was pretty shocking when
Will was brutally shot in a courtroom scene in a 2014 episode.
"He needs help."
"Will! Paramedics!"
But creators Robert and Michelle King didn't have any animosity toward Charles. Before
the 2013-14 season began, Charles knew his contract would be up, and he let the Kings
know that he wanted to move on, allowing them to plan an explosive exit for Will. Charles
explained it all on The Late Show with David Letterman:
Character deaths were a semi-regular occurrence on Scandal. Anyone who got caught up in the
high crimes and political machinations of Olivia Pope generally saw their lifespan decrease
by a few years. That included her fellow fixers like Harrison Wright, played by Columbus Short.
Like so many other Scandal standouts, he went and got himself killed by Olivia's evil father
Eli Pope, a top-secret CIA operative. At the end of season three of Scandal, Harrison finds
out Eli killed the president' son, and it doesn't end well for Harrison.
In April 2014, just days after the episode aired, Short assured viewers that his character
was really dead: He'd quit the show. After enduring a series of legal problems, Short
admitted on Access Hollywood Live that he'd left Scandal due to a drug issue.
Even after more than 30 years, Shelley Long is still best known for her role as Diane
Chambers on Cheers, a show she famously left in 1987 for a film career. She never became
an A-list movie star, but she found one of her most memorable gigs in the recurring role
of DeDe Pritchett, the emotionally distant mother of Claire and Mitchell on Modern Family.
Long prominently bowed out of this show, too, although this time it wasn't her idea, the
Modern Family writers just wanted to explore the effects of death on the family. Before
the beginning of Modern Family's tenth season in 2018, show co-creator Christopher Lloyd
told Entertainment Weekly that a significant character on the show would die.
On the show's Halloween episode, Claire gets a call from her stepfather in which she learns
that DeDee Pritchett died in her sleep. The rest of the episode delves into that impact:
"Okay, how are we gonna handle this?"
"You mean because the two most emotionally complicated people on earth are facing the
loss of the most complicated relationship of their lives?"
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