* Zack on Bones. They turned him into a serial killer for shock value.
* Amanda Rollins on SVU. They made her into an antagonist randomly screaming at sex workers.
Oh, yeah. *Bones* was one of my favorite shows and then suddenly Zack, IMO the best assistant, is turned into some psychotic villain with a vendetta against the main characters. I dropped the series on the spot.
SVU, and any other *Law & Order*, are notoriously bad at writing off characters, no one can simply retire or find a less stressful job, they have to commit murder or something.
I like how they ended her character. I know the actress wasn't happy that she was let go but they treated her character with respect, giving her a husband and a job teaching at Fordham (it's too bad she didn't get a job at Hudson so she could occasionally guest)
Zack was bad but if I remember the actor had some health issues and needed to stop so they wrote him out with brief cameos in the last few seasons. I loved his character but I can understand why they did it at least
Zack never killed anyone, he even clarifies that with Sweets. What he did was still wildly out of character, but they basically reveal he never helped the master kill/eat anyone.
This was what I came here to say. Richard Schiff was not happy at all with what they did to Toby, but to his credit he still gave it his all on screen.
>but to his credit he still gave it his all on screen
I mean kinda, he said that he purposefully acted it >!like Toby was actually confessing to cover for someone else, !
From some of his interview comments (I think perhaps the West Wing Weekly podcast? But not sure if it was the pod episode that actually correlated to the TV episode, since he appeared a number of times and they did some touring shows which featured audience Q&A's), he played it that way because he really did think his character was nobly covering for someone else - but the storyline arced across several episodes with a mini-cliffhanger and it wasn't until he got the following episodes' scripts he realized what had happened.
AFAIK Schiff has never identified who / what the argument was with / about, and it's never been confirmed by someone from the writer's room or production team, but his explanation seems very plausible to me. This is just a guess on my part, but I think the likely source of conflict was a scene from the show where Toby's brother dies a few episodes earlier, and Toby and Josh get into a physical fight in his office - Schiff has said he loved the episode overall but he hated that particular scene, arguing vociferously that Toby, by far the most reserved character on the entire show, would *never* get into a fistfight at work, let alone in his White House office 63 feet from the Oval.
I’ve chosen to believe he’s taking the fall for CJ. I know it’s not true, I think that’s been confirmed, but it fits better to me that Toby would rather go to prison and spare the president and CJ.
Sorkin wasn’t there and they didn’t know what they were doing. Honestly after he left the only characters they didn’t butcher were CJ and Bartlett, although the whole recreating of the Camp David Accords was one of the weirdest arcs I’ve ever seen.
Per Schiff himself in multiple interviews, he had issues with one of the producers and after one particularly big argument, very shortly afterwards received the script of the episode which revealed him to be the leak. I can't recall if the issue stemmed from his usual acting role, or his directing role - he actually started directing a few West Wing episodes for the first time towards the end of season 6, which dovetailed closely with the leak timeline.
Tara's death was one of the most baffling TV moments I've ever seen.
One minute she's there, then suddenly her mother is screaming "My baby's dead!" and that was it. No death scene, no body, just gone. Not even just offscreen death, but literally just inches off screen
It was like the actress didn't show up for the last day of filming and they just said "fuck it"
I literally thought that it wasn’t shown because it was going to be a revelation later in the season that her mom killed her and blamed it on the Hep V vampires. Nope. It was strange we never saw it.
Of course Varys had something to do in the final season. The man known for making moves in the shadows via his "web" of spies decides one day to commit treason out in the open in front of numerous people, and it got him burnt to a crisp by a dragon. Top notch writing.
Because in the books by that point he was helping >!Aegon Blackfyre!< take the Iron Throne with the Golden Company, not Dany and her forces. >!As well as assassinating Kevan Lannister and Grand Maester Pycelle to cause chaos in King's Landing!<
So with that storyline eliminated, he quite literally has nothing to do in the show.
It might be unpopular, but God Aegon VI is/was such a terrible idea by GRRM...like really introducing a "main player for the throne" that late into the series.
I also think George made a huge mistake not doing a 5 year time skip, ideally the 4th book should've been the bridge in between two trilogy of books. I mean it's a little ridiculous to have book Bran and Arya be 8 and 9 like seriously what???
I mostly overheard that show while my girlfriend watched it and it was crazy how stupid he started to sound in dialogue by the last couple seasons. I remember a conversation between him and Varys where I asked, did those guys both get a TBI last season or what?
Bran's the most useless character ever. A bunch of people died to save his ass, but he never does anything worthwhile. I guess he figured out Jon's parentage, but so did Sam.
Bran learned about the parentage, Sam learned about the anullment between Rhaegar and the Dorne wife, changing Jon from an adopted bastard, to rightful king.
Which yes, ended up meaningless
you mean you dont like hearing what used to be two of the most cunning and politically savvy characters in the entire show being reduced to making “HURR DURR IM A DWARF BUT YOU HAVE NO PENIS” jokes and actively discussing their treasonous plans out in the open and with random other people?
Yes, GOT was terrible with it.
I think they got afraid to take these characters to a deeper place they were going in the books because they had become enormous fictional stars by season 4.
Tyrion is absolutely on his villain arc right now in the books. A dark turn after killing his father and fleeing. They didn't want the viewing public to adjust how they view their fav Lannister.
They eventually took Dany to her villain mode, but it kinda shows they were rushing it more toward the end when they realized there was no other choice for her...they could have ceded it more explicitly, more often.
And Arya I do not feel they portrayed tragically enough. Shes a child soldier and thats ultimately a tragic turn for her life. Ultimately her goal as little girl was to grow up to be a knight, but it took a dark, more brutal and bloody turn much quicker. But I think they mostly just played it up as badass fighter girl.
Varys is the top example for me probably. It’s a perfect example of how the writers in the last season lacked the cleverness or imagination to write anything even slightly complex. He spent the whole show plotting behind the scenes so subtly that we didn’t even know his motives until near the end, and then for no reason he just went and started talking openly about committing treason.
It’s so weird to me that the writers idea for a good exit was to have him just… kill a baby. I know he cameos again as a defence attorney at some point but I barely remember that episode.
I don’t actively keep up with SVU but I have a general knowledge of the characters and everything and reading this literally made my jaw drop. Why would they do that.
Euthanasia. The child had no quality of life and the parents were split on what to do. He sided with the mother, against both the father and the states wishes…. Which ended up meaning a more manual (but gentle?) approach
Danny on The Mindy Project. Once it was clear that Chris Messina wanted to do other things, they switched his character from largely a lovable curmudgeon with some solid redeeming values to a ridiculous, overbearing, near misogynist who no longer resembled the character of the 3 seasons prior. They couldn’t go too far, though, since he was endgame, but my recollection of that time on the show was thinking about why the hell they would undo character development, creating these pointless contradictions.
Does he ever come back? I dug the show but stopped watching when he left.
And yeah, they just made him a monster. But the show always had a really harsh edge to it so I didn't find it *too* out of place.
Came here for this response. I loved Danny just as much as Mindy in the first few seasons. His crossover into irredeemable jerk is one of my greatest television disappointments.
I abhor season 5 for exactly that reason. The sheer smugness constantly on display by Diane about them getting married was so annoying that it made the show unwatchable.
Joe Swanson in Family Guy. Started out a really positive portrayal of a guy who's disability never stopped him; recent seasons he's become the butt of jokes and a victim.
I think because he's very representative of Seth's old approach to politics, which a lot of fans quickly grew tired of and found hypocritical. So you get the episode where Quagmire calls him out and from there, Seth made Brian into an awful character whose only redeeming factor is his good relationship with Stewie.
He's still a genius, it's just that early on, he was more of a supervillain caricature, and now he's one of the more likeable characters in the show. I prefer that to him becoming like Rick in Rick and Morty.
carl grimes
7x16, season finale, saviors and scavengers have our group at gunpoint. there's a distraction and carl starts the war by shooting & killing 2 of them point blank. this is same season that he sneaks into a cargo truck & guns a bunch of them down.
8x01 he's a morgan-level pacifist where the first scene of the season is him talking to rick about how we need to bring peace??
That's one of the things I can't stand about the Scott Gimple era.
Yeah, with >!Carl dying!<, the show couldn't do the comic's ending anyway, but Carl had already become a much different character compared to his comic counterpart by Season 8. (Not to mention one of Comic Carl's most important character development moments being given to Show Carol instead in Season 4 during "The Grove" episode.)
Plus, like you mentioned, Seasons 6 and 7 already set up Morgan to be Rick's voice of reason until, suddenly, they did a 180 on his character as well so he could be more easily transferred over to ~~Fear The Walking Dead~~ The Morgan Show which doesn't even keep his character arcs consistent in that show either. Also, that caused Jesus' characterization to be ruined just so he could be a foil to Morgan during Season 8.
Season 8 was so mishandled in nearly every way. The *only* thing I prefer in Season 8 of the show vs the All Out War arc in the comics is the show-exclusive Negan vs Simon power struggle which added more depth to The Saviors that the comics were lacking at that part of the story.
I rather liked that in the comics Rick was his own voice of reason. Wanting to keep negen alive to show everyone a better way though he really wanted to kill him
Wish the show followed the comics more
Carl from Shameless let some dude murder his girlfriend and shrugged it off, cause the writers were just throwing shit at the wall to see what'd stick.
That show was basically a cartoon. Like when Fiona decided that she wanted to buy a building so she did, just like that. And then not only did she buy the building she was the one maintenance person for the whole building.
Fiona abandoning the kids was far worse, she literally fucking adopted them. The judge warned her that by adopting the kids she longer has the option of leaving to have her own life and then she tells the kids they have to pay their own rent because she's done taking care of them.
Ian also became unbearable. The occupy Fiona shit was so cringe. I also wasn’t too fond of Fiona and Lipp by the end of it. I get there were a lot of seasons so you run out of things to keep things interesting and fresh but I found it lazy of them to just kept rehashing things. That being said, I actually kind of starting liking Debbie
Ross in Friends. At the beginning of the show he takes some ribbing for his ex-wife leaving him for a woman, but overall he's really presented as the most stable, successful, and mature of the six main cast members. By the end of the show his entire character is defined by his on again/off again relationship with Rachel where he is constantly either the one screwing up or at least portrayed as the one in the wrong, everybody dunks on him constantly for being divorced three times, he makes borderline sociopathic decisions (like not actually getting his drunken Vegas marriage to Rachel annulled and just thinking that somehow she'll never find out and this will never come up), and having what is arguably still the most prestigious job of anybody in the cast (college paleontology professor) only gets him mocked for being a nerd.
Another example where the character assassination was more or less actually called out by the actor was Frank Burns in M\*A\*S\*H. You could argue Frank doesn't count since he was always an antagonist, but Larry Linville ultimately left the series because the writers had made Frank *such* a jerk and so utterly lacking in any redeeming qualities that Linville felt there was nothing left to do with the character.
I'm amazed it took me scrolling this far to find Frank Burns, who really typifies the character assassination here.
While originally a foil and antagonist for Hawkeye and Trapper, he eventually just became a punching bag. He was so neutered he no longer presented any kind of challenge to the protagonists, even when placed in command of the camp.
This got even worse when Hotlips got engaged and cut off their relationship, making Frank into an unhinged, pathetic whiner.
I don't blame Larry Linville for bailing. He and the character were done dirty. His replacement, Charles Emerson Winchester III was a much more effective foil.
Also agree 100% about Ross. As a student of paleontology and Anthropology at the time, Ross was my favourite in the early seasons. By the end I actively dreaded any Ross-centric story lines. I think I like Captain Sobel better than Ross.
In Community S3 Annie goes through an arc where she essentially grows out of her schoolgirl phase and moves on from her infatuation with Jeff, discovering her own self worth.
Only for S4 to completely regress the character where she continues to dress like a child and act like an infatuated schoolgirl around Jeff. Annie as a character was one of the most affected parts of Harmon's absence.
Haley Dunphy-Modern Family
She went from a party girl to wanting to get a job and make something of herself and to be a better person only to be stuck as a mom and getting married to Dylan.
Hope Mikaelson-Legacies
I swear the Legacies writers hated Hope. Hope had potential to be a great character instead they literally turned her into her boyfriends mommy and her entire life revolves around Landon. Every other word was “But what about Landon!”
Yeah it seemed like the writers were on the right track with Haley’s character for a stretch and then just tossed it out the window. Very disappointing ending for her.
I think a really good example of this is Pierce in Community. In season one, he was portrayed as more of the lovable grandpa of the group who wasn’t with the times, was outdated and a little racist, but ultimately meant well in his actions. As production went on and Chevy Chase became more and more of a problem, they wrote his character to be more bigoted, angry, conniving, and downright awful. Just look at the episode where he is in the hospital. Everything he does is just horribly spiteful.
Often times, I think back to the boating episode in season one and the Pierce you see there is a completely different character than what he is in the following seasons. It’s a real shame.
Edit: just watch this Season one scene and you’ll see exactly what I mean. A completely different person. https://youtu.be/dlvZtXTEMug
And I get Chevy Chase is an asshole, but he actually is really funny, as both an actor and writer. One of his main complaints is that the show was making him too unlikable and stupid, and he was correct. It would have been better if they kept his softer side there.
Funny how they put that exact argument in the show.
"Pierce acts out because we treat him like a villain."
"No, we treat him like a villain because he acts out"
Man, Dan Harmon was really screwed up during the community years. Such a shame, community couldve been so much better than what it was if he held it together.
Though you can argue what made community do unique was the guys unique world view at the time
>Often times, I think back to the boating episode in season one and the Pierce you see there is a completely different character than what he is in the following seasons. It’s a real shame.
All the characters are very different in season 1. So is the way of sitcom writing. Most sitcoms have a first season that has much more general appeal and the characters are more muted. Once they've built an audience and been renewed they can finally start writing the show that they envisioned.
Totally! But I would argue that Pierce's character in particular was skewed by the on set actions of his actor. Dan Harmon likes to lean into what is going on around him in his life while working on his shows, just look at some of the depressive beginning seasons of Rick and Morty. Dan and Chevy didn't get along which influenced Harmon's decision to turn his character into an ass.
I'll be the guy to disagree there. Britta became a much better, funnier, and more lovable character as the show progressed. Early Britta was easily to me the least interesting and least funny character in the study group, but she ended up my favorite.
Word on the street is the actress started putting more and more of her own personality into her character, and Gillian seems to be a huge goof...
The cast member who'd regularly go to wrestling shows and excitedly talk about it years before Alison Brie did GLOW?
Yeah, apparently everyone who met her at Pro Wrestling Guerrilla shows loved how friendly and goofy she was.
What bugs me the most is that at end of season 2 they give the character a send-off with Pierce having redeemed himself, but then bring him back on season 3 and give him some development and then kill him off-screen in Season 4. More than character assassination, they had no idea what to do with the character and when the actor became a problem they just dropped everything.
The entire last season was such a cluster f, the last 2 episodes really seemed like the writers went "of shit, we only have 2 episodes left to wrap up the 50 story lines we've created. Ef it 'aliens'". The whole series had a good ending with season 5, they should have just ended it there.
I highly doubt the downfall of Andy was because of the Hangover.
Rather with Michael gone and Jim and Pam now married they needed to do something to keep people on board and what they settled on was that the show had to have a new "dumb boss" character. They couldn't use Dwight because manager was his endgame, so they went with Andy and had him revert to a complete asshole overnight.
He was also the most famous at the time and they were likely trying to replicate the “40-year old virgin” bump they got with Carrell early in the show, with “The Hangover”
The weird thing is Andy the manager season 8 is still endearing and is basically a pretty decent albeit annoying guy. It wasn't until season 9 where he reverted right back to season 3 Andy.
This was the thing, he was actually on a similar arc to Michael in terms of improving as a person and becoming more sympathetic, and then it seemed like they made the call that Season 9 was about Dwight's arc and happy ending - which was good - and that they needed Andy to be less sympathetic.
It's been a while, but I noticed that Leslie Knope's pre-Ben boyfriends were inclined to undergo sudden, out-of-character heel turns when it was time for them to be written out of the show.
Louis CKs one was the funniest. They brought him back just to turn him into a piece of shit. Just in case anyone thought they were the better couple i guess?
I’ve noticed this happens in female-led sitcoms so that the female character, who they want to be likeable and a good representation of females in media, doesn’t turn out to be the bad guy and churning and burning guys. My favorite show is New Girl and they did this. They introduced a character who was perfect for Zooey Deschanel’s character and some people saw could have been endgame but they wrote him out by basically having him uncharacteristically disappear and ghost her so the fault couldn’t be on her for them not ending up together. Then there was a boyfriend she cheated on and he left upset, but they couldn’t leave it open that she was the bad guy so they reintroduced him 3 seasons later and she dated him again until he left her for his first love
I’ve always hated how evil Tony Almeida became in 24. From badass heroic sidekick to a flat out terrorist killing civilians. He was the best character on the show IMO.
Jon Snow went from a stupid, full of himself kid to a great leader who inspired, to being under Khalessi’s thumb. It was sad to see…. In fact I think this post applies to many characters on GoT now that I think on it.
Straight up. I loved Tony. I know they killed off his wife and kid but I really felt like they were building him up to have the same level or loyalty to Jack as Chloe did. Then he disappears and is just... a literal terrorist. And he didn't even really have an arc to build it up or give him any kind of out for redemption or anything. He just disappeared for a few seasons and came back as a straight monster.
Well, he was one a giant revenge mission to take down yet another group behind the season 5 conspiracy (outside of Logan and the other group that got taken down in season 6). Jack wasn't too much better when he snapped and started murdering his way through NYC. Stephen Saunders' basically predicted Jack's downfall with his comparison to his own life though Tony probably ended up going down the more similar path.
I feel like you're maybe misremembering Tony's arc. He's in their organization and certainly kills civilians (and Larry :( ) but his goal is to meet and kill Alan Wilson, the head of said organization.
I don't think that's "flat out terrorist," he's undercover in some capacity. Just, very deep cover. By himself.
I was never that big a fan of Monica Reyes in the original *X-Files* run, but Christ did the revival just do her *completely* dirty in a way she - love her or hate her - didn't deserve. Especially the way her character goes out at the very end, it's just... odd. A character assassination in all senses of the phrase. Before the revival started, I was hoping we'd see John Doggett, who I actually *do* love, at some point, but seeing how Reyes (and other legacy characters) got treated, I'm actually glad Doggett left out so I didn't have to see his character destroyed.
Beat me to it. Chris Carter should have never been in charge of that revival. Literally shit all over his own life’s work.
I just watch the original 9 seasons and the 2 movies, and head canon those last two seasons entirely differently in my head.
My vote goes to Nancy Botwin of Weeds. That show was essentially Breaking Bad before Breaking Bad. Nancy was always morally dubious but she was still somewhat relatable and likable (for the most part, anyway).
Then the show decided to double-down on her being a selfish danger-junkie, and she lost all semblance of likability.
When Walter White similarly revealed himself as also being a selfish danger-junkie, the show still managed to continue to frame him in a sympathetic light. Weeds seriously dropped the ball.
Heylia was the conscience of the show. Once she was gone, of course, everyone lost interest.
Nancy was never written to have a conscience of her own without Heylia, so she was doomed to never become a great anti-hero.
This has to be said, Alison from Umbrella Academy.
She was fine in the first 2 seasons. Her powers are interesting, and she had a good arc. But then, season 3 came and…
She literally sexually molested her brother using her powers, and almost killed her entire family to get back with the child that she never really had.
Allison always had a dark streak. Back in season one, there was a montage of the rumors she'd spun which showed how she had used her powers to help obtain her successful career. Most of them were things like 'I heard a rumor that I got the part'. One of the last rumors was 'I heard a rumor that you loved me', implying that even her marriage was something that she strongarmed her way into. Long before she tried to assault her brother, she manipulated her husband into falling for her.
I think she thought that she was a better person than she actually was and often acted like it. In season two, she did make a strong shot at self-improvement. The writers could have handled the backslide much better than they did, but I think who she was in season 3 was always in her.
I still have beef with the fact that at the end of Season 1, she had a clear shot at Vanya, and didn't take it, causing the events of Season 2, and *nobody called her out on it*.
I will grant that I liked her in Season 2, having to build herself up from nothing, including that she didn't have her Rumor abilities.
I couldn't bring myself to watch Season 3 though.
I mean, they teased her becoming absolutely terrible for 2 seasons. She literally controlled the life of her husband and daughter, and STILL portrayed herself as a victim who deserves the family she abused. Season 3 was just she being herself without pretending to be anything else.
This wasn’t character assassination though. She’d always been a dark character, who was outwardly charming and when compared with her less-than-charming brothers looked like a good person. But don’t forget her entire career and life pre-apocalypse was built on lies and manipulation. Her forcing Luther wasn’t the first time she’d forced someone to be with her
Barney from how I met your mother... Spend an entire show building him up as a giant asshole so then when you give him an excellent story arc with Robin where his character grows and matures because of his relationship it has actual meaning, and the audience actively roots for him to be better and sees him as more than a caricature....only to pull the rug out from underneath a character we've grown to like so that we can shoe horn the
*******IS THIS SPOILERS STILL THIS SHOW ENDED A LONG TIME AGO BUT IM PUTTING THIS HERE ANYWAYS**************
Final act of Ted being able to finally be in a relationship with her. They made Barney the unlikeable reason why his relationship falls apart and then take away all of the character growth he had to get to that point rendering it moot. Yes he gets his "but baby daughter means everything" consolation prize, but even this is very one dimensional compared to the hard work that went into redeeming his character. Very frustrating and unfair in my opinion.
Also the alternate ending to HIMYM is the canonical ending. I will recognize no other 🤣
**Obvious Spoilers for HIMYM final season:**
The entire last season was show assassination. Although, 9 seasons is too many for 99.9% of shows to still be good. But 22 episodes spent on one day and one episode on 22+ years... Not just any episode mind you, the whole title, backbone story, and thrust of the show crammed into one episode. Then result, and goal of those 22 (not great) episodes are discarded in about 5 minutes in the very next and final episode. They wasted 11 hours of your time so they could have two people meet at a train station
For some reason I was totally oblivious to the alternate ending. It's more satisfying. It's definitely more Fairy Tale. Although it might be a little too nice and tidy (I recognize it is the ending of a sitcom). Yet, Ted somehow comes across as more of a a self absorbed prick than before. He removes the romantic agency of all the other characters. "Get X woman to fall in love with me", "Let Aunt Robin get married", "Let Uncle Barney get married." "Let", WTF? Thank god for Ted! While it's likely splitting hairs, "Met the wrong woman" seems more condescending than "Met another woman that wasn't right for me." I think it because it rings as these human beings were obstacles not people that made me happy for a short while and steps in my self discovery. I guess those lines are predicated on the notion that Ted is the romantic fate nexus and it was his destiny get everyone together.
That's always been the big issue of the show for me and why it really gets painful after about 5 seasons. Hearing Ted whine every episode because he doesn't have a wife, 2.5 kids and a white picket fence in the suburbs before he's 30 became extremely grating for me.
On the next episode of "How I became a insufferable %#Q!#$."
Alternate Ending: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhB5oQgQpOI
Rory from Gilmore Girls. She is so self-absorbed and beyond unlikeable in season four. It was such a departure to her personality at the beginning of the series so when I rewatch i'm having to prepare myself for what is about to happen.
Lorelai was such a terrible mother, daughter, and partner through the entire show, but especially season 6. Her daughter goes to court, and Lorelai misses it because her feelings are hurt, because *once again* she has forgotten that she is a parent, and that is supposed to take precedence over being besties with her kid.
Honestly, after a rewatch, Rory was always self absorbed and kind of an asshole. She cheated on Dean, broke his marriage up, and the entire town blamed Dean’s wife for being reasonably upset instead of Rory, the other woman.
Then she quit Yale and had an identity crisis because Mitchum Huntzburger told her she wasn’t cut out to be a journalist
Well, DEAN broke his marriage up. Rory was an idiot, but it's not HER fault that a married man decided to sleep with her.
It's definitely just beyond awful that basically Luke and Lindsay (Dean's wife) are the only people who have a problem with Rory and Dean openly dating when he's still married. In a small town like that, no matter how beloved Rory was, EVERYBODY would be shitting on her every chance they got for her being a homewrecker.
I feel like there's this weird aura around Rory's character where what people think about her is different than she's actually portrayed. So many people were upset at how she turned out in the revival series but as someone who watched Gilmore Girls casually it seemed completely realistic based on how her character has always been. She's literally had everything handed to her, never really built any resilience. She was always in this weird bubble socially. I can understand if it's someone's comfort show that it can be jarring to see things from another perspective or to have the vibe ruined, etc. But doesn't mean it's not true to the character.
Lauren Graham and Alexis Bledel (and Kelly Bishop too, damn) are so charming, so I think you're right that as soon as the show starts bringing out some of their characters' less savory traits, people think "They're ruining this perfect charming character I love!" instead of the show... doing exactly what (I think, at least) seems to be the goal of the show which is to capture three generations of complicated wealthy white women dealing with the ways inherited wealth and small-town living both suit and repel them. It definitely makes for uneven watching and there are storylines I remember groaning through (I am and always will be a Logan hater, but again, maybe that's the point), but it's still a really lovely show.
The master bounty hunter whose one canon successful mission hinged on correctly intuiting a man like Han Solo would hide in the garbage and squatting there with him.
Even the actor himself thought that the character talked too much. I also don't get why he was so cool and powerful in The Mandalorian, but became weak and dumb in TBoBF.
Unpopular take: but Boba Fett was never that cool. He was the best toy from Empire Strikes Back.
Otherwise, he's the guy that's so lazy and unreliable that Darth Vader has to remind him he can't just disintegrate Han and Leia or he'll get in trouble. Then he falls into the giant burping sand vagina and dies.
I never understood the fascination with Fett.
He was a cartoon character introduced to sell action figures. Then he shows up in empire, has only 4 lines, 5 minutes of screen time, and goes out in a slapstick death. He actually yells "what the??", gets eaten, and then comedy burp.
this is a great character?
You said it yourself, he was made to sell toys
kids who played with those toys turned him into a badass in their heads and then grew up to create media where he wasn't a chump who got clown on and fell in a pit
A failed example for me is Jamie Dutton on Yellowstone. They keep trying to make me hate him and it's not working. Dude got dealt a bad hand, was treated like shit by his father, went to law school and became a damn good attorney, and then is still disliked by his father.
And it's made worse by Beth monologuing like an edgy teen about him every other episode and blaming him for something that she should really be blaming her father and society in general for.
I agree, Jamie is getting a raw deal all the way around and he's literally the only one being realistic about trying to save the ranch. John would have the ranch in bankruptcy in a year, maybe two and lose it all, but he won't compromise an inch.
Will Bailey from The West Wing, while not as bad as what they did to Toby, still had a real bad fall. He started out as a guy who was determined to get a dead man elected to congress because the alternative choice was worse, to the right hand man of a vice president who shouldn’t have been Vice President and trying to make him president when he knows really that he shouldn’t.
They had a moment in the middle of the presidential campaign where he asks Leo what he saw in the Vice to make him the right guy to be the Veep. Dude, you where there when it happened! You know why they chose him! They were handed a list of shitty candidates by the republicans knowing that none of them could win in the presidential race! They just chose the least shitty of the shitty! You wrote a epic roast that the President almost read at his announcement as veep choice!
It's gotta' be Isaac Hayes's character Chef from South Park, Chef. After a falling out with Matt Stone and Trey Parker over their depiction of Scientology, they split ways. Then Matt Stone and Trey Parker clipped together different dialogue from different episodes to make him look like a child predator and the episode ends with him being killed. So that one takes the cake for me, not sure why no one has mentioned it yet.
Isaac Hayes III (his son): "Isaac Hayes did not quit South Park; someone quit South Park for him. What happened was that in January 2006 my dad had a stroke and lost the ability to speak. He really didn’t have that much comprehension, and he had to relearn to play the piano and a lot of different things. He was in no position to resign under his own knowledge. At the time, everybody around my father was involved in Scientology — his assistants, the core group of people. So someone quit South Park on Isaac Hayes’ behalf. We don’t know who."
Matt Stone:" We sort of figured out the whole picture a bit later, but that’s totally what happened."
Hayes III:" My father was not that big of a hypocrite to be part of a show that would constantly poke fun at African-American people, Jewish people, gay people — and only quit when it comes to Scientology. He wouldn’t be that hypocritical."
Stone: "It really sucked, the whole thing. This statement put out that he was quitting, it kind of called us bigots."
Trey Parker: "But we knew in our hearts there was something way more rotten going on."
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/south-park-20-years-history-trey-parker-matt-stone-928212/
A lot of TV shows parodied the hot coffee lawsuit by making episodes with people deliberately making frivolous lawsuits in order to make the claimant of that original case look like an unreasonable asshole. This was mostly at the behest of McDonalds who was a major advertiser on the networks that made those episodes.
In truth, the old woman who sued was literally held at the end of her tethers because McDonalds' lawyers were being highly unreasonable. She just wanted $50,000 for treatment of horrific injuries (such as the flesh of her genitals being fused to her thighs) while McDonalds kept lowballing her on $<1,000 sums.
And McDonalds was found to be willfully negligent; they were already sued for serving their coffee at unsafe temperatures as a cost-cutting measure, which had previously injured other customers. They were also found to have been negligent with that specific order - not only did they not give her a cardboard coffee tray to hold her drink, but they had ignored her order to put sugar into her coffee which she specifically asked for, since it was too dangerous for her to open the cup in her car to stir the sugar in herself.
The millions of dollars awarded was purely to punish McDonalds.
Also, in an instance related to an actual show, Lindsay Lohan's character on Ugly Betty was derailed during a Fallen Princess story arc because Lohan proved to be a *massive* bitch on set, which necessitated her story being cut early.
> they had ignored her order to put sugar into her coffee
Having seen prisoners pour a lot of sugar into kettles and boil the sugar water to throw at other inmates, she kind of got lucky they didn't put sugar in her coffee.
Britta from Community went from being an admittedly not terribly interesting "Lady Winger" into an genuine idiot who would eventually shit her pants in front of her friends.
"Oh, Britta's in this?" is one of the top 5 funniest lines ever on the show and we would never have gotten it without Idiot Britta.
"Knock knock! Who's there? Cancer! Oh good, come on in, I thought it was Britta!"
* Sabrina in the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina
* Bellamy in The 100
* Hope Michaelson in Legacies
* Alaric Saltzman in Legacies
* Alex Karev in Grey's Anatomy
* I haven't watched the most recent seasons, but pretty much all the characters in Family Guy when compared to the earlier seasons
* Haley Dunphy in Modern Family
* Kat in Euphoria
Britta from Community. In the first episode she starts out as a very interesting, empathetic person who could work as a benevolent foil for Jeff and keep him in check... and then the show changed direction and she doesn't really feel the same.
He was introduced as a flaming asshole, he ended the show as a flaming asshole, the “character assassination” was in the middle when they pretended he was suddenly an alright dude because Andy and Erin were as close as they could get to replicating the Jim and Pam will they won’t they we all loved in the early seasons.
Yeah it’s less of an assassination and more uneven writing. He regressed from a likeable guy to something a little worse than how he was when we met him with no real explanation.
I actually think the direction they took Andy after his initial freakout was a very good choice and felt natural. Even as manager I found him very likeable if a bit weak in the role. The shift even from the end of season 8 where he puts the past aside with Nellie and the beginning of season 9 when he mercilessly torments her is super jarring and makes 0 sense unless there was something going on off screen.
They mostly assassinated his intelligence. It was always apparent he was dumber than his pedigree, as it’s explained several times that he got in to Cornell because of his legacy status. Though he was socially clueless, he was at least somewhat competent. By the end they turn him into the second dumbest person on the show behind Erin.
Behind Kevin Malone. It's ridiculous how much they flanderized him. He started out seeming like an average (okay maybe slightly below) intelligence dude and ended up unknowingly caring for a dead turtle.
Surely the worst has the be Ned Flanders. In the early seasons he's the foil to Homer, but then over the years becomes nothing but a religious goody goody. All the interesting traits for him went out the window.
That’s actually a different term coined specifically for Ned Flanders called Flanderization. Where the notable traits of a character become more and more overwhelming and they lose all semblance of being an actual character and just become an embodiment of those traits.
I'd say Michael in The Office goes through this. To start he's just kind of a clueless buffoon with no social skills but always means well. By the end he's a caricature of himself.
Michael definitely grows quite a bit by the end of the series. I can see the argument that the things he says are a bit more ridiculous but I don’t think he was a caricature in the end. Many characters on the office fit that trope however. Kevin is a prime example.
Still going on, but Jamie Dutton on Yellowstone. Went from a law and politics expert whose loyalty to his father in Season 1-2 was his major flaw to getting bullied and dragged around the ear (sometimes literally) by his sister Beth in every scene and getting constantly manipulated by everyone around him. The show has basically turned into a cavalcade of scenes torturing this character the past two seasons. A significant portion of the viewership is rooting for the guy to at least get a win for once at this point even though he's not a good person.
Yeah I don't blame Jamie for anything at this point.
He tried to make amends with Beth, but is rebuffed at every turn and she continues to destroy his life and has threatened to destroy his relationship with his child. Makes complete sense that he would take the measures he has in recent episodes.
His father as well seemed to set him up for failure by pushing him into law school ('because he needed a lawyer in the family') and then hating him because he isn't a cowboy. He denies the love that Jamie craves because Jamie is exactly what he made him to be.
Also, it's a show about doctors. You can write doctors off your doctor show by having them just move to a different city to be a doctor there instead. If the character is a plastic surgery specialist then you write them off with "hey the XYZ hospital in Austin has an opening in their rhinoplasty department so I think I'm going to take it and move there."
Literally!! Like why does no one but Cristina just…get a new job? That’s the easiest way out and leaves the door open for the character to come back later if they wanted, which seems like it would’ve been a good choice for Karev since his departure seemed to be a response to a sudden personal crisis of the actor. But no, instead they have him turn out to be a fucking psychopath who’s spent months sneakily messaging his ex from a decade ago, who also is psychotic for having had secret babies with his old sperm from their brief marriage that she hasn’t told him about in this whole time, and then he decides to just abandon his new wifey to go run off with the ex? Insanity. Just have him get a new job and off screen get divorced, or kill him in a car wreck or something. Not that bizarro bad fanfiction.
their new ham handed way to write people off seems to no longer be deaths but "im gonna run off with my ex". even if the character had seriously invested time into a new relationship that seemed fit to last forever and had well and truly moved on.
they did this with kepner, only to reverse course a couple seasons later so they could pull the same stunt with Jackson, and they did this with robbins as well when the split there was a half season long arc about a bitter custody battle!
* Zack on Bones. They turned him into a serial killer for shock value. * Amanda Rollins on SVU. They made her into an antagonist randomly screaming at sex workers.
Oh, yeah. *Bones* was one of my favorite shows and then suddenly Zack, IMO the best assistant, is turned into some psychotic villain with a vendetta against the main characters. I dropped the series on the spot. SVU, and any other *Law & Order*, are notoriously bad at writing off characters, no one can simply retire or find a less stressful job, they have to commit murder or something.
Ironically, Rollins >!was just written off by finding a less stressful job. !<
I like how they ended her character. I know the actress wasn't happy that she was let go but they treated her character with respect, giving her a husband and a job teaching at Fordham (it's too bad she didn't get a job at Hudson so she could occasionally guest)
Zack was bad but if I remember the actor had some health issues and needed to stop so they wrote him out with brief cameos in the last few seasons. I loved his character but I can understand why they did it at least
Zack never killed anyone, he even clarifies that with Sweets. What he did was still wildly out of character, but they basically reveal he never helped the master kill/eat anyone.
Another SVU example: Dana Lewis
Toby Ziegler in the final season of The West Wing.
This was what I came here to say. Richard Schiff was not happy at all with what they did to Toby, but to his credit he still gave it his all on screen.
>but to his credit he still gave it his all on screen I mean kinda, he said that he purposefully acted it >!like Toby was actually confessing to cover for someone else, !
From some of his interview comments (I think perhaps the West Wing Weekly podcast? But not sure if it was the pod episode that actually correlated to the TV episode, since he appeared a number of times and they did some touring shows which featured audience Q&A's), he played it that way because he really did think his character was nobly covering for someone else - but the storyline arced across several episodes with a mini-cliffhanger and it wasn't until he got the following episodes' scripts he realized what had happened. AFAIK Schiff has never identified who / what the argument was with / about, and it's never been confirmed by someone from the writer's room or production team, but his explanation seems very plausible to me. This is just a guess on my part, but I think the likely source of conflict was a scene from the show where Toby's brother dies a few episodes earlier, and Toby and Josh get into a physical fight in his office - Schiff has said he loved the episode overall but he hated that particular scene, arguing vociferously that Toby, by far the most reserved character on the entire show, would *never* get into a fistfight at work, let alone in his White House office 63 feet from the Oval.
I still think it’s in character for him to have done that but not the execution. And he did get done dirty by that.
I’ve chosen to believe he’s taking the fall for CJ. I know it’s not true, I think that’s been confirmed, but it fits better to me that Toby would rather go to prison and spare the president and CJ.
It’s kinda hard to rectify that with the shock CJ has of him telling her though
Zzzzzzzzieegler. Zzzzzieeeegler
Absolute fucking bullshit, he never would have done that without going 100 rounds with bartlet or cj first.
Big time I wonder what happened for the writers to do this
Sorkin wasn’t there and they didn’t know what they were doing. Honestly after he left the only characters they didn’t butcher were CJ and Bartlett, although the whole recreating of the Camp David Accords was one of the weirdest arcs I’ve ever seen.
Per Schiff himself in multiple interviews, he had issues with one of the producers and after one particularly big argument, very shortly afterwards received the script of the episode which revealed him to be the leak. I can't recall if the issue stemmed from his usual acting role, or his directing role - he actually started directing a few West Wing episodes for the first time towards the end of season 6, which dovetailed closely with the leak timeline.
Cordelia Chase Angel season 4
Came here to say this, just the worst.
In True Blood you got the impression the writers actively hated Tara. Completely ruined her character and literally killed her off.
Tara's death was one of the most baffling TV moments I've ever seen. One minute she's there, then suddenly her mother is screaming "My baby's dead!" and that was it. No death scene, no body, just gone. Not even just offscreen death, but literally just inches off screen It was like the actress didn't show up for the last day of filming and they just said "fuck it"
I literally thought that it wasn’t shown because it was going to be a revelation later in the season that her mom killed her and blamed it on the Hep V vampires. Nope. It was strange we never saw it.
Tyrion and Varys on GoT.
Tyrion moreso, I think. He just became an actual fool. Varys just kinda stopped having anything to do.
Of course Varys had something to do in the final season. The man known for making moves in the shadows via his "web" of spies decides one day to commit treason out in the open in front of numerous people, and it got him burnt to a crisp by a dragon. Top notch writing.
Because in the books by that point he was helping >!Aegon Blackfyre!< take the Iron Throne with the Golden Company, not Dany and her forces. >!As well as assassinating Kevan Lannister and Grand Maester Pycelle to cause chaos in King's Landing!< So with that storyline eliminated, he quite literally has nothing to do in the show.
It might be unpopular, but God Aegon VI is/was such a terrible idea by GRRM...like really introducing a "main player for the throne" that late into the series. I also think George made a huge mistake not doing a 5 year time skip, ideally the 4th book should've been the bridge in between two trilogy of books. I mean it's a little ridiculous to have book Bran and Arya be 8 and 9 like seriously what???
I mostly overheard that show while my girlfriend watched it and it was crazy how stupid he started to sound in dialogue by the last couple seasons. I remember a conversation between him and Varys where I asked, did those guys both get a TBI last season or what?
"And who here has a better story than Bran?" \*Literally everyone\*
Bran's the most useless character ever. A bunch of people died to save his ass, but he never does anything worthwhile. I guess he figured out Jon's parentage, but so did Sam.
> I guess he figured out Jon's parentage which ended up being meaningless
Bran learned about the parentage, Sam learned about the anullment between Rhaegar and the Dorne wife, changing Jon from an adopted bastard, to rightful king. Which yes, ended up meaningless
Lyanna: "He's the rightful heir, Ned, you must protect him!" Ned: "You may rest easy, sweet sister, for no one will give a shit in twenty years."
you mean you dont like hearing what used to be two of the most cunning and politically savvy characters in the entire show being reduced to making “HURR DURR IM A DWARF BUT YOU HAVE NO PENIS” jokes and actively discussing their treasonous plans out in the open and with random other people?
Tyrion kept dropping the ball, and I was expecting him to pull off something brilliant.....but nah. Bran the broken.
Yes, GOT was terrible with it. I think they got afraid to take these characters to a deeper place they were going in the books because they had become enormous fictional stars by season 4. Tyrion is absolutely on his villain arc right now in the books. A dark turn after killing his father and fleeing. They didn't want the viewing public to adjust how they view their fav Lannister. They eventually took Dany to her villain mode, but it kinda shows they were rushing it more toward the end when they realized there was no other choice for her...they could have ceded it more explicitly, more often. And Arya I do not feel they portrayed tragically enough. Shes a child soldier and thats ultimately a tragic turn for her life. Ultimately her goal as little girl was to grow up to be a knight, but it took a dark, more brutal and bloody turn much quicker. But I think they mostly just played it up as badass fighter girl.
Jaime as well. Half the characters in the later GoT seasons really but Jaime's for me was the very worst.
Don't forget Sansa and Arya and Jaime and Brienne and Jon and Stannis and
Yeah, really just everyone, it would be spectacular if it wasn't so wholly terrible.
Don't forget Jamie, threw away 7 seasons of the character development only for them to in a single scene make him revert back to season 1 Jamie.
Varys is the top example for me probably. It’s a perfect example of how the writers in the last season lacked the cleverness or imagination to write anything even slightly complex. He spent the whole show plotting behind the scenes so subtly that we didn’t even know his motives until near the end, and then for no reason he just went and started talking openly about committing treason.
Barba on SVU. I'm still mad about it.
It’s so weird to me that the writers idea for a good exit was to have him just… kill a baby. I know he cameos again as a defence attorney at some point but I barely remember that episode.
I don’t actively keep up with SVU but I have a general knowledge of the characters and everything and reading this literally made my jaw drop. Why would they do that.
Euthanasia. The child had no quality of life and the parents were split on what to do. He sided with the mother, against both the father and the states wishes…. Which ended up meaning a more manual (but gentle?) approach
Seriously!! How ridiculous.
Danny on The Mindy Project. Once it was clear that Chris Messina wanted to do other things, they switched his character from largely a lovable curmudgeon with some solid redeeming values to a ridiculous, overbearing, near misogynist who no longer resembled the character of the 3 seasons prior. They couldn’t go too far, though, since he was endgame, but my recollection of that time on the show was thinking about why the hell they would undo character development, creating these pointless contradictions.
Does he ever come back? I dug the show but stopped watching when he left. And yeah, they just made him a monster. But the show always had a really harsh edge to it so I didn't find it *too* out of place.
He comes back for the last few episodes and they >!reconcile!< in the series finale.
By the end of that show, I wanted his character to no longer be alive.
Came here for this response. I loved Danny just as much as Mindy in the first few seasons. His crossover into irredeemable jerk is one of my greatest television disappointments.
Little Matty Mara went from a sweet angelic priest to sucking for a sixer.
You HAVE to make it sexy or else...you don't eat!
Hips and nips!
The ones who don’t fake it get it the worst
Sometimes you don't have to fake it and it ends, naturally.
The way he delivers “…….naturally” is some of the best comedy I’ve ever seen. That whole bit
The little tongue click is gold
If you wish to absolve yourself in that way it will cost you a whole sixer.
His life becomes objectively worse each episode he's in
Diane from Cheers. Season 5 is hard to watch
I abhor season 5 for exactly that reason. The sheer smugness constantly on display by Diane about them getting married was so annoying that it made the show unwatchable.
Joe Swanson in Family Guy. Started out a really positive portrayal of a guy who's disability never stopped him; recent seasons he's become the butt of jokes and a victim.
I really do miss him being a badass. Brian also comes to mind. He's become really unlikable in the newer seasons.
I think because he's very representative of Seth's old approach to politics, which a lot of fans quickly grew tired of and found hypocritical. So you get the episode where Quagmire calls him out and from there, Seth made Brian into an awful character whose only redeeming factor is his good relationship with Stewie.
Similarly, in Family Guy early seasons Stewie was literally a baby genius. Now he’s just a gay baby
He's only ever gay for laughs. When he has a plot love interest it's always a girl because of course
He's still a genius, it's just that early on, he was more of a supervillain caricature, and now he's one of the more likeable characters in the show. I prefer that to him becoming like Rick in Rick and Morty.
and continually suicidal
He became the moe
carl grimes 7x16, season finale, saviors and scavengers have our group at gunpoint. there's a distraction and carl starts the war by shooting & killing 2 of them point blank. this is same season that he sneaks into a cargo truck & guns a bunch of them down. 8x01 he's a morgan-level pacifist where the first scene of the season is him talking to rick about how we need to bring peace??
That's one of the things I can't stand about the Scott Gimple era. Yeah, with >!Carl dying!<, the show couldn't do the comic's ending anyway, but Carl had already become a much different character compared to his comic counterpart by Season 8. (Not to mention one of Comic Carl's most important character development moments being given to Show Carol instead in Season 4 during "The Grove" episode.) Plus, like you mentioned, Seasons 6 and 7 already set up Morgan to be Rick's voice of reason until, suddenly, they did a 180 on his character as well so he could be more easily transferred over to ~~Fear The Walking Dead~~ The Morgan Show which doesn't even keep his character arcs consistent in that show either. Also, that caused Jesus' characterization to be ruined just so he could be a foil to Morgan during Season 8. Season 8 was so mishandled in nearly every way. The *only* thing I prefer in Season 8 of the show vs the All Out War arc in the comics is the show-exclusive Negan vs Simon power struggle which added more depth to The Saviors that the comics were lacking at that part of the story.
I rather liked that in the comics Rick was his own voice of reason. Wanting to keep negen alive to show everyone a better way though he really wanted to kill him Wish the show followed the comics more
Carl from Shameless let some dude murder his girlfriend and shrugged it off, cause the writers were just throwing shit at the wall to see what'd stick.
That show was basically a cartoon. Like when Fiona decided that she wanted to buy a building so she did, just like that. And then not only did she buy the building she was the one maintenance person for the whole building.
Fiona abandoning the kids was far worse, she literally fucking adopted them. The judge warned her that by adopting the kids she longer has the option of leaving to have her own life and then she tells the kids they have to pay their own rent because she's done taking care of them.
The characters all ceased to exist after s4. 5 onwards was just complete nonsense.
Ian also became unbearable. The occupy Fiona shit was so cringe. I also wasn’t too fond of Fiona and Lipp by the end of it. I get there were a lot of seasons so you run out of things to keep things interesting and fresh but I found it lazy of them to just kept rehashing things. That being said, I actually kind of starting liking Debbie
I’m sad that I can’t immerse myself in Jedi: Fallen Order because I can’t separate Ian from that role.
Ross in Friends. At the beginning of the show he takes some ribbing for his ex-wife leaving him for a woman, but overall he's really presented as the most stable, successful, and mature of the six main cast members. By the end of the show his entire character is defined by his on again/off again relationship with Rachel where he is constantly either the one screwing up or at least portrayed as the one in the wrong, everybody dunks on him constantly for being divorced three times, he makes borderline sociopathic decisions (like not actually getting his drunken Vegas marriage to Rachel annulled and just thinking that somehow she'll never find out and this will never come up), and having what is arguably still the most prestigious job of anybody in the cast (college paleontology professor) only gets him mocked for being a nerd. Another example where the character assassination was more or less actually called out by the actor was Frank Burns in M\*A\*S\*H. You could argue Frank doesn't count since he was always an antagonist, but Larry Linville ultimately left the series because the writers had made Frank *such* a jerk and so utterly lacking in any redeeming qualities that Linville felt there was nothing left to do with the character.
I'm amazed it took me scrolling this far to find Frank Burns, who really typifies the character assassination here. While originally a foil and antagonist for Hawkeye and Trapper, he eventually just became a punching bag. He was so neutered he no longer presented any kind of challenge to the protagonists, even when placed in command of the camp. This got even worse when Hotlips got engaged and cut off their relationship, making Frank into an unhinged, pathetic whiner. I don't blame Larry Linville for bailing. He and the character were done dirty. His replacement, Charles Emerson Winchester III was a much more effective foil. Also agree 100% about Ross. As a student of paleontology and Anthropology at the time, Ross was my favourite in the early seasons. By the end I actively dreaded any Ross-centric story lines. I think I like Captain Sobel better than Ross.
In Community S3 Annie goes through an arc where she essentially grows out of her schoolgirl phase and moves on from her infatuation with Jeff, discovering her own self worth. Only for S4 to completely regress the character where she continues to dress like a child and act like an infatuated schoolgirl around Jeff. Annie as a character was one of the most affected parts of Harmon's absence.
You would act weird too if you were exposed to a gas leak for an entire season!
Haley Dunphy-Modern Family She went from a party girl to wanting to get a job and make something of herself and to be a better person only to be stuck as a mom and getting married to Dylan. Hope Mikaelson-Legacies I swear the Legacies writers hated Hope. Hope had potential to be a great character instead they literally turned her into her boyfriends mommy and her entire life revolves around Landon. Every other word was “But what about Landon!”
Yeah it seemed like the writers were on the right track with Haley’s character for a stretch and then just tossed it out the window. Very disappointing ending for her.
I hated how they did an entire "will they won't they" arc of her and Andy, only to then have them break up off screen.
I think a really good example of this is Pierce in Community. In season one, he was portrayed as more of the lovable grandpa of the group who wasn’t with the times, was outdated and a little racist, but ultimately meant well in his actions. As production went on and Chevy Chase became more and more of a problem, they wrote his character to be more bigoted, angry, conniving, and downright awful. Just look at the episode where he is in the hospital. Everything he does is just horribly spiteful. Often times, I think back to the boating episode in season one and the Pierce you see there is a completely different character than what he is in the following seasons. It’s a real shame. Edit: just watch this Season one scene and you’ll see exactly what I mean. A completely different person. https://youtu.be/dlvZtXTEMug
No Pierce those flu shots are for the old folks home! "I'LL BE A LIVING GOD!" Still hilarious
And I get Chevy Chase is an asshole, but he actually is really funny, as both an actor and writer. One of his main complaints is that the show was making him too unlikable and stupid, and he was correct. It would have been better if they kept his softer side there.
[удалено]
Funny how they put that exact argument in the show. "Pierce acts out because we treat him like a villain." "No, we treat him like a villain because he acts out"
Man, Dan Harmon was really screwed up during the community years. Such a shame, community couldve been so much better than what it was if he held it together. Though you can argue what made community do unique was the guys unique world view at the time
>Often times, I think back to the boating episode in season one and the Pierce you see there is a completely different character than what he is in the following seasons. It’s a real shame. All the characters are very different in season 1. So is the way of sitcom writing. Most sitcoms have a first season that has much more general appeal and the characters are more muted. Once they've built an audience and been renewed they can finally start writing the show that they envisioned.
"You seemed smarter than me when I met you."
"Thank you."
Totally! But I would argue that Pierce's character in particular was skewed by the on set actions of his actor. Dan Harmon likes to lean into what is going on around him in his life while working on his shows, just look at some of the depressive beginning seasons of Rick and Morty. Dan and Chevy didn't get along which influenced Harmon's decision to turn his character into an ass.
Yeah but this was mostly season 3. In Season 2 Pierce was becoming more hostile by design. The season end with him leaving the group.
They Britta'ed Britta as well... just as another example of season 1 different character.
I'll be the guy to disagree there. Britta became a much better, funnier, and more lovable character as the show progressed. Early Britta was easily to me the least interesting and least funny character in the study group, but she ended up my favorite. Word on the street is the actress started putting more and more of her own personality into her character, and Gillian seems to be a huge goof...
The cast member who'd regularly go to wrestling shows and excitedly talk about it years before Alison Brie did GLOW? Yeah, apparently everyone who met her at Pro Wrestling Guerrilla shows loved how friendly and goofy she was.
What bugs me the most is that at end of season 2 they give the character a send-off with Pierce having redeemed himself, but then bring him back on season 3 and give him some development and then kill him off-screen in Season 4. More than character assassination, they had no idea what to do with the character and when the actor became a problem they just dropped everything.
apparently they just started using lines that Chevy Chase would say irl around set
Wait, I’m old white man says? No wonder he says everything I’m thinking
Maybe you are right but then again that hospital episode *is* one of my absolute favorite episodes so...
Clarke&Bellamy in The 100 final season
The entire last season was such a cluster f, the last 2 episodes really seemed like the writers went "of shit, we only have 2 episodes left to wrap up the 50 story lines we've created. Ef it 'aliens'". The whole series had a good ending with season 5, they should have just ended it there.
Bellamy I'll give you, Clarke not so much. That was completely in character even if it was ridiculous.
I highly doubt the downfall of Andy was because of the Hangover. Rather with Michael gone and Jim and Pam now married they needed to do something to keep people on board and what they settled on was that the show had to have a new "dumb boss" character. They couldn't use Dwight because manager was his endgame, so they went with Andy and had him revert to a complete asshole overnight.
He was also the most famous at the time and they were likely trying to replicate the “40-year old virgin” bump they got with Carrell early in the show, with “The Hangover”
The weird thing is Andy the manager season 8 is still endearing and is basically a pretty decent albeit annoying guy. It wasn't until season 9 where he reverted right back to season 3 Andy.
This was the thing, he was actually on a similar arc to Michael in terms of improving as a person and becoming more sympathetic, and then it seemed like they made the call that Season 9 was about Dwight's arc and happy ending - which was good - and that they needed Andy to be less sympathetic.
Greg Daniels also came back as writer FT in the last Season, and he preferred nasty S3 Andy to cuddly S6/7-8 Andy.
Eric Matthews on Boy Meets World. Went from being a funny, goofy character to being absolutely nuts.
Do you mean plays with squirrels?
It's been a while, but I noticed that Leslie Knope's pre-Ben boyfriends were inclined to undergo sudden, out-of-character heel turns when it was time for them to be written out of the show.
Louis CKs one was the funniest. They brought him back just to turn him into a piece of shit. Just in case anyone thought they were the better couple i guess?
I’ve noticed this happens in female-led sitcoms so that the female character, who they want to be likeable and a good representation of females in media, doesn’t turn out to be the bad guy and churning and burning guys. My favorite show is New Girl and they did this. They introduced a character who was perfect for Zooey Deschanel’s character and some people saw could have been endgame but they wrote him out by basically having him uncharacteristically disappear and ghost her so the fault couldn’t be on her for them not ending up together. Then there was a boyfriend she cheated on and he left upset, but they couldn’t leave it open that she was the bad guy so they reintroduced him 3 seasons later and she dated him again until he left her for his first love
I’ve always hated how evil Tony Almeida became in 24. From badass heroic sidekick to a flat out terrorist killing civilians. He was the best character on the show IMO. Jon Snow went from a stupid, full of himself kid to a great leader who inspired, to being under Khalessi’s thumb. It was sad to see…. In fact I think this post applies to many characters on GoT now that I think on it.
Straight up. I loved Tony. I know they killed off his wife and kid but I really felt like they were building him up to have the same level or loyalty to Jack as Chloe did. Then he disappears and is just... a literal terrorist. And he didn't even really have an arc to build it up or give him any kind of out for redemption or anything. He just disappeared for a few seasons and came back as a straight monster.
Well, he was one a giant revenge mission to take down yet another group behind the season 5 conspiracy (outside of Logan and the other group that got taken down in season 6). Jack wasn't too much better when he snapped and started murdering his way through NYC. Stephen Saunders' basically predicted Jack's downfall with his comparison to his own life though Tony probably ended up going down the more similar path.
I feel like you're maybe misremembering Tony's arc. He's in their organization and certainly kills civilians (and Larry :( ) but his goal is to meet and kill Alan Wilson, the head of said organization. I don't think that's "flat out terrorist," he's undercover in some capacity. Just, very deep cover. By himself.
I was never that big a fan of Monica Reyes in the original *X-Files* run, but Christ did the revival just do her *completely* dirty in a way she - love her or hate her - didn't deserve. Especially the way her character goes out at the very end, it's just... odd. A character assassination in all senses of the phrase. Before the revival started, I was hoping we'd see John Doggett, who I actually *do* love, at some point, but seeing how Reyes (and other legacy characters) got treated, I'm actually glad Doggett left out so I didn't have to see his character destroyed.
reboot of X-files was a character assassination of the OG X-files. there were some great episodes, but they retconned too much.
Beat me to it. Chris Carter should have never been in charge of that revival. Literally shit all over his own life’s work. I just watch the original 9 seasons and the 2 movies, and head canon those last two seasons entirely differently in my head.
Uhhh, how about *every* character in seasons 7 and 8 of Game of Thrones?
My vote goes to Nancy Botwin of Weeds. That show was essentially Breaking Bad before Breaking Bad. Nancy was always morally dubious but she was still somewhat relatable and likable (for the most part, anyway). Then the show decided to double-down on her being a selfish danger-junkie, and she lost all semblance of likability. When Walter White similarly revealed himself as also being a selfish danger-junkie, the show still managed to continue to frame him in a sympathetic light. Weeds seriously dropped the ball.
Obligatory "Weeds should've ended at the end of season three with >!Agrestic burning down!<"
Heylia was the conscience of the show. Once she was gone, of course, everyone lost interest. Nancy was never written to have a conscience of her own without Heylia, so she was doomed to never become a great anti-hero.
This has to be said, Alison from Umbrella Academy. She was fine in the first 2 seasons. Her powers are interesting, and she had a good arc. But then, season 3 came and… She literally sexually molested her brother using her powers, and almost killed her entire family to get back with the child that she never really had.
Allison always had a dark streak. Back in season one, there was a montage of the rumors she'd spun which showed how she had used her powers to help obtain her successful career. Most of them were things like 'I heard a rumor that I got the part'. One of the last rumors was 'I heard a rumor that you loved me', implying that even her marriage was something that she strongarmed her way into. Long before she tried to assault her brother, she manipulated her husband into falling for her. I think she thought that she was a better person than she actually was and often acted like it. In season two, she did make a strong shot at self-improvement. The writers could have handled the backslide much better than they did, but I think who she was in season 3 was always in her.
I still have beef with the fact that at the end of Season 1, she had a clear shot at Vanya, and didn't take it, causing the events of Season 2, and *nobody called her out on it*. I will grant that I liked her in Season 2, having to build herself up from nothing, including that she didn't have her Rumor abilities. I couldn't bring myself to watch Season 3 though.
I mean, they teased her becoming absolutely terrible for 2 seasons. She literally controlled the life of her husband and daughter, and STILL portrayed herself as a victim who deserves the family she abused. Season 3 was just she being herself without pretending to be anything else.
This wasn’t character assassination though. She’d always been a dark character, who was outwardly charming and when compared with her less-than-charming brothers looked like a good person. But don’t forget her entire career and life pre-apocalypse was built on lies and manipulation. Her forcing Luther wasn’t the first time she’d forced someone to be with her
Barney from how I met your mother... Spend an entire show building him up as a giant asshole so then when you give him an excellent story arc with Robin where his character grows and matures because of his relationship it has actual meaning, and the audience actively roots for him to be better and sees him as more than a caricature....only to pull the rug out from underneath a character we've grown to like so that we can shoe horn the *******IS THIS SPOILERS STILL THIS SHOW ENDED A LONG TIME AGO BUT IM PUTTING THIS HERE ANYWAYS************** Final act of Ted being able to finally be in a relationship with her. They made Barney the unlikeable reason why his relationship falls apart and then take away all of the character growth he had to get to that point rendering it moot. Yes he gets his "but baby daughter means everything" consolation prize, but even this is very one dimensional compared to the hard work that went into redeeming his character. Very frustrating and unfair in my opinion. Also the alternate ending to HIMYM is the canonical ending. I will recognize no other 🤣
Barney has three changes of basic character in the last 20 minutes...then just disappears.
**Obvious Spoilers for HIMYM final season:** The entire last season was show assassination. Although, 9 seasons is too many for 99.9% of shows to still be good. But 22 episodes spent on one day and one episode on 22+ years... Not just any episode mind you, the whole title, backbone story, and thrust of the show crammed into one episode. Then result, and goal of those 22 (not great) episodes are discarded in about 5 minutes in the very next and final episode. They wasted 11 hours of your time so they could have two people meet at a train station For some reason I was totally oblivious to the alternate ending. It's more satisfying. It's definitely more Fairy Tale. Although it might be a little too nice and tidy (I recognize it is the ending of a sitcom). Yet, Ted somehow comes across as more of a a self absorbed prick than before. He removes the romantic agency of all the other characters. "Get X woman to fall in love with me", "Let Aunt Robin get married", "Let Uncle Barney get married." "Let", WTF? Thank god for Ted! While it's likely splitting hairs, "Met the wrong woman" seems more condescending than "Met another woman that wasn't right for me." I think it because it rings as these human beings were obstacles not people that made me happy for a short while and steps in my self discovery. I guess those lines are predicated on the notion that Ted is the romantic fate nexus and it was his destiny get everyone together. That's always been the big issue of the show for me and why it really gets painful after about 5 seasons. Hearing Ted whine every episode because he doesn't have a wife, 2.5 kids and a white picket fence in the suburbs before he's 30 became extremely grating for me. On the next episode of "How I became a insufferable %#Q!#$." Alternate Ending: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhB5oQgQpOI
Barney should have ended up with the stripper (GIVE IT UP GIVE IT UP FOR … I forgot her name). She was so charming.
Quinn.
Rory from Gilmore Girls. She is so self-absorbed and beyond unlikeable in season four. It was such a departure to her personality at the beginning of the series so when I rewatch i'm having to prepare myself for what is about to happen.
Lorelai was such a terrible mother, daughter, and partner through the entire show, but especially season 6. Her daughter goes to court, and Lorelai misses it because her feelings are hurt, because *once again* she has forgotten that she is a parent, and that is supposed to take precedence over being besties with her kid.
Honestly, after a rewatch, Rory was always self absorbed and kind of an asshole. She cheated on Dean, broke his marriage up, and the entire town blamed Dean’s wife for being reasonably upset instead of Rory, the other woman. Then she quit Yale and had an identity crisis because Mitchum Huntzburger told her she wasn’t cut out to be a journalist
Well, DEAN broke his marriage up. Rory was an idiot, but it's not HER fault that a married man decided to sleep with her. It's definitely just beyond awful that basically Luke and Lindsay (Dean's wife) are the only people who have a problem with Rory and Dean openly dating when he's still married. In a small town like that, no matter how beloved Rory was, EVERYBODY would be shitting on her every chance they got for her being a homewrecker.
I feel like there's this weird aura around Rory's character where what people think about her is different than she's actually portrayed. So many people were upset at how she turned out in the revival series but as someone who watched Gilmore Girls casually it seemed completely realistic based on how her character has always been. She's literally had everything handed to her, never really built any resilience. She was always in this weird bubble socially. I can understand if it's someone's comfort show that it can be jarring to see things from another perspective or to have the vibe ruined, etc. But doesn't mean it's not true to the character.
Lauren Graham and Alexis Bledel (and Kelly Bishop too, damn) are so charming, so I think you're right that as soon as the show starts bringing out some of their characters' less savory traits, people think "They're ruining this perfect charming character I love!" instead of the show... doing exactly what (I think, at least) seems to be the goal of the show which is to capture three generations of complicated wealthy white women dealing with the ways inherited wealth and small-town living both suit and repel them. It definitely makes for uneven watching and there are storylines I remember groaning through (I am and always will be a Logan hater, but again, maybe that's the point), but it's still a really lovely show.
Cordelia in season 4 of Angel
That wasn't character assassination, that was career assassination. Whedon didn't want to assassinate the character, but the actress' career.
Book of Boba Fett assassinates the character of Boba Fett.
The master bounty hunter who was killed by a blind guy on accident
The master bounty hunter whose one canon successful mission hinged on correctly intuiting a man like Han Solo would hide in the garbage and squatting there with him.
Even the actor himself thought that the character talked too much. I also don't get why he was so cool and powerful in The Mandalorian, but became weak and dumb in TBoBF.
Unpopular take: but Boba Fett was never that cool. He was the best toy from Empire Strikes Back. Otherwise, he's the guy that's so lazy and unreliable that Darth Vader has to remind him he can't just disintegrate Han and Leia or he'll get in trouble. Then he falls into the giant burping sand vagina and dies.
I never understood the fascination with Fett. He was a cartoon character introduced to sell action figures. Then he shows up in empire, has only 4 lines, 5 minutes of screen time, and goes out in a slapstick death. He actually yells "what the??", gets eaten, and then comedy burp. this is a great character?
You said it yourself, he was made to sell toys kids who played with those toys turned him into a badass in their heads and then grew up to create media where he wasn't a chump who got clown on and fell in a pit
A failed example for me is Jamie Dutton on Yellowstone. They keep trying to make me hate him and it's not working. Dude got dealt a bad hand, was treated like shit by his father, went to law school and became a damn good attorney, and then is still disliked by his father. And it's made worse by Beth monologuing like an edgy teen about him every other episode and blaming him for something that she should really be blaming her father and society in general for.
I agree, Jamie is getting a raw deal all the way around and he's literally the only one being realistic about trying to save the ranch. John would have the ranch in bankruptcy in a year, maybe two and lose it all, but he won't compromise an inch.
Will Bailey from The West Wing, while not as bad as what they did to Toby, still had a real bad fall. He started out as a guy who was determined to get a dead man elected to congress because the alternative choice was worse, to the right hand man of a vice president who shouldn’t have been Vice President and trying to make him president when he knows really that he shouldn’t. They had a moment in the middle of the presidential campaign where he asks Leo what he saw in the Vice to make him the right guy to be the Veep. Dude, you where there when it happened! You know why they chose him! They were handed a list of shitty candidates by the republicans knowing that none of them could win in the presidential race! They just chose the least shitty of the shitty! You wrote a epic roast that the President almost read at his announcement as veep choice!
It's gotta' be Isaac Hayes's character Chef from South Park, Chef. After a falling out with Matt Stone and Trey Parker over their depiction of Scientology, they split ways. Then Matt Stone and Trey Parker clipped together different dialogue from different episodes to make him look like a child predator and the episode ends with him being killed. So that one takes the cake for me, not sure why no one has mentioned it yet.
Isaac Hayes III (his son): "Isaac Hayes did not quit South Park; someone quit South Park for him. What happened was that in January 2006 my dad had a stroke and lost the ability to speak. He really didn’t have that much comprehension, and he had to relearn to play the piano and a lot of different things. He was in no position to resign under his own knowledge. At the time, everybody around my father was involved in Scientology — his assistants, the core group of people. So someone quit South Park on Isaac Hayes’ behalf. We don’t know who." Matt Stone:" We sort of figured out the whole picture a bit later, but that’s totally what happened." Hayes III:" My father was not that big of a hypocrite to be part of a show that would constantly poke fun at African-American people, Jewish people, gay people — and only quit when it comes to Scientology. He wouldn’t be that hypocritical." Stone: "It really sucked, the whole thing. This statement put out that he was quitting, it kind of called us bigots." Trey Parker: "But we knew in our hearts there was something way more rotten going on." https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/south-park-20-years-history-trey-parker-matt-stone-928212/
If you want a case of literal assassination, Georges fiancée Susan on Seinfeld was killed off because the cast didn't get along with her
She was killed off by cheap envelopes .🤣
A lot of TV shows parodied the hot coffee lawsuit by making episodes with people deliberately making frivolous lawsuits in order to make the claimant of that original case look like an unreasonable asshole. This was mostly at the behest of McDonalds who was a major advertiser on the networks that made those episodes. In truth, the old woman who sued was literally held at the end of her tethers because McDonalds' lawyers were being highly unreasonable. She just wanted $50,000 for treatment of horrific injuries (such as the flesh of her genitals being fused to her thighs) while McDonalds kept lowballing her on $<1,000 sums. And McDonalds was found to be willfully negligent; they were already sued for serving their coffee at unsafe temperatures as a cost-cutting measure, which had previously injured other customers. They were also found to have been negligent with that specific order - not only did they not give her a cardboard coffee tray to hold her drink, but they had ignored her order to put sugar into her coffee which she specifically asked for, since it was too dangerous for her to open the cup in her car to stir the sugar in herself. The millions of dollars awarded was purely to punish McDonalds. Also, in an instance related to an actual show, Lindsay Lohan's character on Ugly Betty was derailed during a Fallen Princess story arc because Lohan proved to be a *massive* bitch on set, which necessitated her story being cut early.
> they had ignored her order to put sugar into her coffee Having seen prisoners pour a lot of sugar into kettles and boil the sugar water to throw at other inmates, she kind of got lucky they didn't put sugar in her coffee.
Two words for anyone who thinks she wasn't that hurt: *Fused Labia*
Britta from Community went from being an admittedly not terribly interesting "Lady Winger" into an genuine idiot who would eventually shit her pants in front of her friends.
Brittas devolution is probably the only one I’ll ever support. Idiot Britta is hilarious.
"Oh, Britta's in this?" is one of the top 5 funniest lines ever on the show and we would never have gotten it without Idiot Britta. "Knock knock! Who's there? Cancer! Oh good, come on in, I thought it was Britta!"
BAG-EL!
“Me so hungy” haunts my nightmares even though that is one of the best episodes of the entire show
I mean that was just her being goofy, not an idiot.
It was her being stoned goofy too, I’ve done worse after a joint
* Sabrina in the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina * Bellamy in The 100 * Hope Michaelson in Legacies * Alaric Saltzman in Legacies * Alex Karev in Grey's Anatomy * I haven't watched the most recent seasons, but pretty much all the characters in Family Guy when compared to the earlier seasons * Haley Dunphy in Modern Family * Kat in Euphoria
Cassie in Euphoria Season 2
And Kat. Holy shit Kat's character spiraled. You could tell she was mortified doing that scene telling Ethan she had a brain disease
Britta from Community. In the first episode she starts out as a very interesting, empathetic person who could work as a benevolent foil for Jeff and keep him in check... and then the show changed direction and she doesn't really feel the same.
Jaime lannister arc was fucked by the last 3 episodes.
He was introduced as a flaming asshole, he ended the show as a flaming asshole, the “character assassination” was in the middle when they pretended he was suddenly an alright dude because Andy and Erin were as close as they could get to replicating the Jim and Pam will they won’t they we all loved in the early seasons.
Yeah it’s less of an assassination and more uneven writing. He regressed from a likeable guy to something a little worse than how he was when we met him with no real explanation.
I actually think the direction they took Andy after his initial freakout was a very good choice and felt natural. Even as manager I found him very likeable if a bit weak in the role. The shift even from the end of season 8 where he puts the past aside with Nellie and the beginning of season 9 when he mercilessly torments her is super jarring and makes 0 sense unless there was something going on off screen.
They mostly assassinated his intelligence. It was always apparent he was dumber than his pedigree, as it’s explained several times that he got in to Cornell because of his legacy status. Though he was socially clueless, he was at least somewhat competent. By the end they turn him into the second dumbest person on the show behind Erin.
Behind Kevin Malone. It's ridiculous how much they flanderized him. He started out seeming like an average (okay maybe slightly below) intelligence dude and ended up unknowingly caring for a dead turtle.
might be controversial but I don't like how they handled Gul Dukat at the end of DS9
I agree but I don't think it was character assassination, simply a bad end to his character.
Surely the worst has the be Ned Flanders. In the early seasons he's the foil to Homer, but then over the years becomes nothing but a religious goody goody. All the interesting traits for him went out the window.
"I've done everything the Bible asked! Even the stuff that contradicts the other stuff!"
That’s actually a different term coined specifically for Ned Flanders called Flanderization. Where the notable traits of a character become more and more overwhelming and they lose all semblance of being an actual character and just become an embodiment of those traits.
I'd say Michael in The Office goes through this. To start he's just kind of a clueless buffoon with no social skills but always means well. By the end he's a caricature of himself.
Michael definitely grows quite a bit by the end of the series. I can see the argument that the things he says are a bit more ridiculous but I don’t think he was a caricature in the end. Many characters on the office fit that trope however. Kevin is a prime example.
Still going on, but Jamie Dutton on Yellowstone. Went from a law and politics expert whose loyalty to his father in Season 1-2 was his major flaw to getting bullied and dragged around the ear (sometimes literally) by his sister Beth in every scene and getting constantly manipulated by everyone around him. The show has basically turned into a cavalcade of scenes torturing this character the past two seasons. A significant portion of the viewership is rooting for the guy to at least get a win for once at this point even though he's not a good person.
Yeah I don't blame Jamie for anything at this point. He tried to make amends with Beth, but is rebuffed at every turn and she continues to destroy his life and has threatened to destroy his relationship with his child. Makes complete sense that he would take the measures he has in recent episodes. His father as well seemed to set him up for failure by pushing him into law school ('because he needed a lawyer in the family') and then hating him because he isn't a cowboy. He denies the love that Jamie craves because Jamie is exactly what he made him to be.
Alex Karev on Grey’s Anatomy Also everyone on s8 of Game of thrones
For a show that loves to kill people, Grey’s went through a really stupid route to write off Alex.
Also, it's a show about doctors. You can write doctors off your doctor show by having them just move to a different city to be a doctor there instead. If the character is a plastic surgery specialist then you write them off with "hey the XYZ hospital in Austin has an opening in their rhinoplasty department so I think I'm going to take it and move there."
Literally!! Like why does no one but Cristina just…get a new job? That’s the easiest way out and leaves the door open for the character to come back later if they wanted, which seems like it would’ve been a good choice for Karev since his departure seemed to be a response to a sudden personal crisis of the actor. But no, instead they have him turn out to be a fucking psychopath who’s spent months sneakily messaging his ex from a decade ago, who also is psychotic for having had secret babies with his old sperm from their brief marriage that she hasn’t told him about in this whole time, and then he decides to just abandon his new wifey to go run off with the ex? Insanity. Just have him get a new job and off screen get divorced, or kill him in a car wreck or something. Not that bizarro bad fanfiction.
their new ham handed way to write people off seems to no longer be deaths but "im gonna run off with my ex". even if the character had seriously invested time into a new relationship that seemed fit to last forever and had well and truly moved on. they did this with kepner, only to reverse course a couple seasons later so they could pull the same stunt with Jackson, and they did this with robbins as well when the split there was a half season long arc about a bitter custody battle!
I have completely blacked out Alex Karev's departure. That never happened, the Alex Karev I know never would have done that.