Conflating a person’s values with a disability doesn’t fly here.
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Mayfield (to Boba Fett): Is it true you got knocked into a sarlaac pit by a blind guy?
Boba Fett: Shut up!!!
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She fucked around; she found out.
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I remember on the original Dynasty when they recast Steve Carrington (with a young Jack Coleman!) there was an elaborate storyline to explain why it was a different actor (something about being in an offshore oil rig explosion, extensive reconstructive surgery, and amnesia?).
When Fallon Carrington was recast the writers just decided, “fuck it, it’s a different actor who looks nothing like the old one, who cares?”
(Funnily enough the original actor who played Steve Carrington came back for the reunion series and the whole “reconstructive surgery” plot was conveniently ignored.)
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Apparently the people behind The Librarians and Leverage have this as standard policy. If you’re a garbage person or create a hostile environment on set they’ll kill your character off in as insulting a way as possible. Then replace them with a newly introduced equivalent. Mysterious cousin, long lost son, unmentioned twin. What ever makes it very clear you were replaced, and lets them just continue on as if you weren’t there.
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That’s an excellent suggestion!
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As a soap opera watcher big time in the '80’s, they switched out actors all the time. Usually, at the beginning of the episode, the announcer would come on and say “The role of John Smith is now being played by Gary Jones”. Worked well enough then. Glad the hateful witch is gone, now replace her with a decent human being.
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This is what I don’t get. Like sports stars with multimillion dollar contracts that can’t not commit some petty crime that puts everything at risk. You finally made it big, after what was probably a lot of hard work, and can’t stop the idiot behaviors long enough to really rake it in.
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Love me some classic Eddie
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people talking about whether they should recast her? i mean, although her character was kinda cool, she wasn’t that important. she wasn’t the main character. the star wars universe is huge and it would be pretty easy to just not see that character again.
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Swapping out actors, whether it was on “Bewitched” or on daytime or nighttime soap operas, always struck me personally as a sign of contempt for the audience on the part of a show’s producers and story team. Rather than write their way out of the problem of an actor who leaves the show, they just say “screw it, most of these lunkheads will just accept a new actor in this central role and a good number of them won’t really notice.”
It could work in soap operas, with their ensemble casts of interchangeable and generic pretty-boy and -girl actors. It could also work in the old-style sequential sitcoms where the closest you got to plot arcs was a character with a catch phrase (those characters are never re-cast). In higher quality shows with audiences that expect more, though, re-casting becomes more jarring to a regular viewer.
Since Disney and the showrunners here aren’t lazy corner-cutters, and since Carano’s character hasn’t achieved “breakout” status, I’m sure they won’t re-cast the role in the spin-off show. Instead they’ll re-write with a new background for the tough and cool woman character and find another actor who can bring her to life on the screen (and who’s less of an arsehole off-screen).
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It really depends on the narrative and the characters involved. In the case of Bewitched, Dick York couldn’t continue in the role due to a degenerative spinal condition. Since Darrin was such a huge part of the show, it made more sense to recast than to try to explain why we never saw her husband again. And the audience needed a devoted husband to play tug-of-war with Samantha’s mother, Endora, over how the main character should live her life-- mundane or witchy. So bringing a new loved one into her life wouldn’t have worked at all.
Today’s viewers are more media-savvy, and (IMHO) tend to have higher expectations of continuity… so it’s a lot harder to get away with recasting. If it’s due to illness, death, or conflicting commitments, watchers will likely accept a replacement actor in the same role better. In the case of a lesser character like Carano’s, it’s probably easier to switch them out with a suspiciously similar substitute.
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I think alot of the recast is about representation of someone on screen who clearly shows that a woman can kick ass and be awesome and is not a size zero. Also, the rumors were she was going to headline the Rangers of the new republic show so keeping her character around would be good. From an in universe pov, it was neat to have another survivor of Alderaan and how they dealt with losing their homeworld.
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As noted above, I agree. “Bewitched” was a low-stakes old-fashioned sequential sitcom, so re-casting with a rough look-and-sound-alike like Dick Sargent was a good enough solution there, taking about the same effort as re-writing. If we start off each new episode as if the events of all the previous episodes never happened, it’s easier to just shrug this off, too. The re-casting isn’t the first or deepest aspect of laziness and contempt for the audience on shows like that.
By the way, Dick York was a really interesting and decent person by all accounts.
Absolutely. These days, the only place in TV where you can still re-cast a character is on whatever remains of daytime soaps. I don’t think you could get away with it on a modern sitcom (the last time I remember them trying it was decades ago on “Roseanne”, but even then the re-casting of the daughter was so subject to public mockery that the show itself finally had to lean into it).
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I’d argue that based on the structure of Bewitched, there was no way to write Darren out that wouldn’t be more of an insult to the audience than recasting him-- he really was central to the show’s concept. Recasting was the only reasonable option at that point. Any other solution would create a very different show, and altering the formula could have tanked the ratings.
I haven’t caught up with enough of the Mandalorian to know how central Carano’s character is to the plot. From what I’ve heard, she’s an occasional ally, so it’s likely they can find a creative way to write her out and bring in a new character.
(Though I agree with you, in part. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been frustrated by characters being killed off for no better reason than their actor’s departure. Why not have the writers use their imaginations and come up with a more interesting plot twist, instead of a pedestrian trope?
)
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Bewitched also was contrained by the limits of its time. Divorce and death (the only real ways out for the Darren character) were – with rare exceptions – taboo subjects in the dramas of the time, let alone sitcoms. That said, the re-casting was still jarring for me even as a kid watching it in re-runs, but it quickly became an object lesson about the kind of expectations I should have for various kinds of shows.
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She is completely peripheral. The galaxy is huge and one could easily never have a reason to visit that planet again, or if he did, she decided to join the New Republic out right, or went off to do something else. It’s like a co-worker who leaves. You had fun talking to them at work, but they can leave and you never see them again.
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im missing the reference… but anyhow? cool! 
we gotta turn hateful moments into GOOD things,-- it helps, i think
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With your disdain for Soap Operas, I doubt you would understand how they work. Some stories have gone on for decades, people falling in and out of love, just established relationships or people needed for a storyline. You don’t just wrap up one of these stories in a couple of weeks and figure it’s all OK. Watchers are extremely loyal to their shows and don’t like it when a “character” disappears. It’s not so much the actor, unless they become superstars, but the story.
Janine Randall
The basic point is valid, whatever I think of soap operas (zero interest) or 1960s sitcoms (watched them in re-runs, again and again). Any show that relies on hack writers recycling the same basic plots for a bunch of cardboard characters to sleepwalk their way through really doesn’t have to worry about a sophisticated audience. The producers can just say “screw it, it ain’t that kind of show” and find someone else knowing that viewers won’t react badly to swapping out an actor in the role of a major character.
Dick Sargent was basically a taller, thinner version of Dick York who could do the slow burns and occasional panicked moments required from the beetle-browed straight-man character. Good enough. I’m sure swapping out an actor with a reasonable facsimile in soap operas is even easier.
The Law and Order franchise does a variation on this practise, recycling the same stock company of working NYC actors for different roles. It gets amusing when the syndicated re-runs are shown out of sequence and the actor who just played a homeless junkie in one episode is playing a billionaire in the next.
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