TV can be a brutal business — for actors and viewers alike. Every time you tune in, you run the risk of watching one of your favorite TV characters abruptly succumb to Sudden Death Syndrome. Prestige dramas excel at killing off beloved characters without compunction (or foreshadowing). That’s not surprising, considering these shows exist to break your heart. But nowadays, even situation comedies are okay with bumping off major players — and these deaths are rarely informed by storytelling structure. Nervous networks execs, backstage scandals, difficult personalities, and dissatisfied actors can all too easily culminate in a character’s untimely demise. Just ask George Costanza’s dead fiancée.
Of course, ixnayed characters aren’t always killed off. Sometimes they leave home for “college,” never to return. Or perhaps they’re left stranded in Tibet with a five-year supply of opium and some enticingly plump pillows. In very, very, very rare instances, characters are transformed into scary inter-dimensional trees attached to what looks like a talking brain. Why, you ask? Well, the reasons behind these creative decisions are often more bizarre than what winds up onscreen.
Without further ado, let’s take a look at a few popular characters who were abruptly written off their television shows — and find out why we were forced to say goodbye. Please note: you’re officially in spoiler country now, so don’t say we didn’t warn you.
Kal Penn left House to join the West Wing (The real one)
Back in 2009, viewers of the medical drama House were shocked to discover the fate of beloved character Lawrence Kutner, M.D., played by Kal Penn. When the affable young man doesn’t show up for work in the season five episode “Simple Explanation,” two concerned coworkers head over to his apartment and soon stumble upon his slumped body, complete with a “single gunshot wound to the right temple.” He had committed suicide.
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As gory as his death was, Kutner’s suicide wasn’t inspired by backstage malice on the part of producers. Penn asked to leave the show for a unique — in fact, unprecedented — reason: He’d been invited to work in the Obama administration as “the associate director in the White House office of public liaison.”
“I’ve been thinking about [moving into politics] for a while,” he told Entertainment Weekly in 2009. “But probably from the time I was a kid, I really enjoyed that balance between the arts and public service.” However, he wasn’t necessarily pleased to find out his character died in a self-inflicted spray of blood and tears. “That news struck me in the same way we hope it strikes the audience,” he revealed. “There was a little bit of anger and some depression.”
Penn has since returned to acting to appear in loads of other projects. He even returned to House a few times as a ghostly drug-induced hallucination, as one does.
South Park cooked Chef’s goose
In March 2006, Isaac Hayes, a scientologist, was reportedly still very upset about the Scientology-skewering South Park episode “Trapped in the Closet,” which originally aired in November 2005. Hayes’ camp announced he’d no longer voice the role of Chef, whom he’d played for nine years. He lamented, “There is a place in this world for satire, but there is a time when satire ends, and … bigotry towards religious beliefs of others begins.”
According to Isaac Hayes III, the musician and voice actor’s son, his father “did not quit South Park; someone quit South Park for him.” In 2016, Hayes III told The Hollywood Reporter his father suffered a stroke in January 2006 that rendered him unable to speak. He “really didn’t have that much comprehension,” he revealed, and was allegedly in no condition to make his own decisions. He claimed somebody in his father’s circle effectively quit the show on Hayes’ behalf. “Everybody around my father was involved in Scientology,” he said. “His assistants, the core group of people. … We don’t know who [did it.]”
Following Hayes’ departure from the show, South Park killed off his character in “The Return of Chef” episode. While standing on a rope bridge, a bolt of lightning sets Chef on fire. Then he cracks open his head on some jagged rocks, is impaled through the chest by a branch, is torn to pieces by a bear and a lion, and is shot in the chest.
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