How Death Affects Shows

With TV shows, things don’t always go according to plan for people who work on different TV shows. One of the most notable ways that this happens is when death happens to someone who was still working on a TV show. It is more noteworthy when it happens to an actor than to anyone else on the show, but it can have numerous effects any way it happens.

One of the most notable recent deaths that affected a TV show was Miguel Ferrer’s death in NCIS: Los Angeles. I’ll have to see the new season to know for sure what will happen with his character and if they get a new assistant director on the show. His character was left in a mystery state and based on the info that I have, they were planning on writing off his character due to his declining health. Hopefully it won’t just be some weird state the character is in forever where we never know a definite state.

8 Simple Rules is a show that was forever changed after John Ritter, who played the main character, died during production of the show’s second season. They handled his death with class. They made a very good and very serious episode of the sitcom that address his death and continued on without the character. That’s how death is in reality. You are sad for a while and then life goes on.

The showrunner of NCIS and NCIS: New Orleans died during production of last season’s episodes. One can wonder how this show will be affected, but the death of a showrunner during a show they did isn’t something I’m familiar with. The only time I think that might have happened was with Frasier, but I’m not sure if the showrunner was the creator who had died or someone else at that point. We’ll see how or even if the shows are affected, but I’m not even sure that they got a new showrunner for NCIS: New Orleans the whole last season as it was already mapped out and wouldn’t need to be changed.

Sometimes, we never really know just how things would change in a show because of the death of someone who worked on it. It can be hard to keep track of it at times and we won’t always know at other times. For instance, when Bob Simon died while working on 60 Minutes, he still had stories to air that hadn’t finished production yet. This affected what reran that summer (I think) and the stories he would have been assigned which were now filled by random CBS news people.

There are tons of examples that I could say in this post, but I don’t think that I will. I hope that the few examples that I did were good enough for you, even if nearly all of them were recent ones that weren’t as notable as some earlier ones might have been.