I should warn you in advance that this post is on old news that I just haven’t gotten around to covering yet. I still think that it is relevant in some ways so I might as well get to it. I am largely doing this post in reaction to Hartley Sawyer getting fired from his role as Ralph Dibney from The Flash. But there is more to the post to cover as well so I’ll do that too.
His firing can seem dumb in some places. I mean, I can understand tweets getting someone in trouble. But these tweets were made before he was hired on the show. Why do they suddenly care about it now? I didn’t want to delete any old tweets of mine, but now I will because there’s some stuff that I don’t want to stand by or let get me in trouble that I might regret already. His account was deleted and he was apologetic about it. Was he even given a chance to explain?
When an actor is fired from a show, that would obviously leave a gap behind with the character that they played. How would The Flash continue without Ralph? Admittedly, this should be easy for them to solve with the character being a shape shifter. But they might have other plans that couldn’t just be explained with a recast. Still, there is a lot with this character and a potential love interest which will now forever be unresolved as a result. They plan to make use of the woman that was part of his life in some way in the future. But will things work out well?
You see, there always tends to be issues when actors are lost between seasons of a show. They tend to be handled poorly. Once Laurence Fishburne left CSI between seasons, they largely ignored what had happened to his character, leaving that cliffhanger poorly resolved. Private Practice fired an actor between seasons and once this last season started, it was hard for me to get behind the character’s death, largely due to not really seeing the show before. Hawaii Five-0 also handled the departure of two of its characters poorly, leaving lots of plots unresolved, especially with the husband of one of the characters, and they wouldn’t have had to deal with this if they paid these actors a fair pay in the first place. Instead, we had to awkwardly just continue with new people and throwaway lines as to what these characters were doing now.
The only case that I know of where a season of a new show started with a major casting change that was handled well was the fourth season of the original Charmed. With Shannon Doherty gone for possibly still unknown reasons after it, the show had to move on with a new sister replacing her. While it was not a perfect episode in every way, it was still pretty good in tons of ways that I have yet to see in any other show thus far, the upcoming season of The Flash still unknown.
What I do recommend for fans that don’t like the firing is to not give the new character or whoever plays this person any crap. It still makes no sense for so many people to hate Ashton Kusher over him replacing Charlie Sheen on Two and a Half Men. Someone had to replace Charlie after he dared the show to move on without him and it did for quite some time. Only if he was a reasonably minded person and didn’t deserve firing at all would he not be fired from the show. Only Charlie is to blame for his own departure from the show as it wasn’t Ashton’s fault that Charlie needed replaced.
Another example of the type of change that can happen is with showrunners or those who are in charge of the show. It can be hard to explain or notice the change once new showrunners take over. A lot of the time, one can notice and tell right away if a showrunner is different. Other times, the show is improved in a way that it wouldn’t have been otherwise. Too much of Designated Survivor was different due to all of the showrunners changing throughout the show. The fourth season of Community was done without its main writer and many fans hate it more than any other one.
Fans may have different issues trying to move on from such a change in writing with either a character gone or the actor who played said a character being played by someone else instead. They may not move on or be able to deal with it in various ways. I suggest that if you want to abandon a show due to a recast (even if it had nothing to do with a firing), then you should. If you want to keep complaining about a show, then you are dumb. I mean, I guess that there are some things that you can complain about, but don’t constantly be a dick about things. Fans will hopefully deal with things in a good way, but it can be understandable if they are not. I hardly went through all of the examples that I could have with this, but I feel like this is a good place to end this post.
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