Today, in the newest Pop Culture Theme Time, I’m asking you what you think was the strangest case of an actor getting demoted from a regular to a recurring character on a TV series.
Pop Culture Theme Time is a feature where I put a question to you to see what you think about a particular theme. I might later revisit the theme for a future Drawing Crazy Patterns or Top Five.
As you well know, TV shows, especially long-running ones, have two major problems with their casts. The first is strictly a narrative one, in that plots that worked in Season 1 might not work still in Season 7. For instance, take a show like Boy Meets World, when Cory Matthews (Ben Savage) was 12 in the first season, his parents, Alan and Amy (William Russ and Betsy Randle), were major parts of his life. When he’s in college in Season 6, not so much. The second problem is monetary. As a show gets older, it gets more expensive, and so shows tend to save money by cutting down on actor salaries. An easy way to do this is simply cut down everyone’s episodes outside of the undisputed STARS of the show. Now, for the most part, even when everyone gets episode cuts, it doesn’t knock you down from a regular to a recurring, but there ARE instances where that’s exactly what happens.
So I want to know what you think was the weirdest instance of an actor being DEMOTED to a recurring character after previously being a regular. Note that instances where the actor themself obviously no longer wants to be a regular is NOT weird at all, so I don’t think stuff like Joseph Gordon-Levitt becoming a recurring character in the final season of 3rd Rock From the Sun or Kaitlyn Dever becoming a recurring character in Season 7 of Last Man Standing (and then a guest star only in the final two seasons) would count, as obviously the reduction was the choice of the actor.
I mean instances where the SHOW decided to demote them, and you think it was an odd choice.
My pick is Stanley Livingston on My Three Sons. By the final season, Livington’s Chip Douglas was the only remaining original son still on the show, and in Season 11, he had married his college girlfriend, Polly, which you would think would open him up for some more plots, but instead, the show basically dropped Chip as a character for the final season, Season 12, featuring him in less than a third of the season’s episodes. It’s so strange to be the central plot point of Season 11 (his whirlwind romance with his college girlfriend, leading to their elopement) only to be dropped entirely the following season (and the show didn’t KNOW Season 12 was its final season, by the way).
Okay, that’s my pick! What’s yours?
Also, feel free to suggest future Pop Culture Theme Time topics to me at brian@poprefs.com!
I know Ernie replaced on son. Were all three sons replaced by the end?
Chip wasn’t replaced, per se, he was just rarely recurring. The two original oldest sons had both left the show by the final season, though.
As much as I followed My Three Sons since its inception, I’m embarrassed to admit that I never really noticed Chip’s marginalisation in that last season. At least, not as something intended.
Even with Don (Robbie) Grady’s departure after the previous season, the show still had plenty of characters around whom to construct episode plots: Steve, Barbara, Dodie, Uncle Charlie, Ernie, Chip, Polly, and Katie. I probably figured that the show just hadn’t gotten around to Chip that much in that season.
And even the devout fans of the show knew it was creaking on its last legs by season twelve. The show was long past its original format of a household of only males. (The early years were the best years, and I did resent the departure from the format with the various marriages [Katie, Barbara, Polly], and the introduction of step-daughter [ugh!] Dodie. But, then I realised the show had to evolve—you couldn’t have a sixty-five-year-old Steve with forty-something sons all sitting around saying, “Boy, are we gonna catch it when Dad gets home!)
Even so, while the series evolved reasonably and logically, with the sons’ and the father’s marriages, the new status quo never quite seemed to equal the original format in holding interest. That’s probably why I wasn’t paying that much attention to the final season.
The West Wing with interest in the show dropping after Sorkin left and the show splitting into two separate storylines (the election and the ongoing story of the administration) meant an increase in cast, mostly for the election episodes, but also in the administration episodes. This lead to Charlie (Dule Hill) and Toby (Richard Schiff) having reduced roles to despite the fact that the administration episodes was lacking characters. May not count as Dule saw the writing on the wall and did the Psyche pilot and agreed to do 6 episodes and Richard still did his minimum contracted episodes (11). Mandy, a main character in Season 1 disappeared without mention after series 1, not even appearing or being mentioned afterwards in episodes to the campaign she’d been part of. I think that’s described as mutual, but it’s clear she was being written less and less as season 1 progressed.
Conversely, it seems the makers of Good Omens liked at least 4 of the Series 1 actors so much that they just recast them. [Series 2 had a much reduced focus than series 1, so a lot of characters just disappeared as their stories had been told.]
Kimberly Drummond on Diff’rent Strokes?
Fascinating pick. It was because the actor was pregnant, but that’s not a good enough reason, so sure, that’s a good one!
As I understand it, virtually all but the titular characters of Bob Hearts Abishola have been demoted to feature characters with appearances on only some episodes. Until then, they would give each character a storyline in every episode (kinda impressive, considering it’s a 22-minute sitcom).
Yeah, good call, Adam, that was a shocking series of demotions.