TV stars who were fired?

Interesting! I did not know that.

Landau apparently had a roving eye, so Bain would loiter on set even when not needed for Space:1999, driving the crew crazy in the process.

I've said for years that the production of Space:1999 would make for an incredible, Mad Men-like show in its own right. Between the Andersons, the Landaus, Fred Freiberger and some of the more high-strung actors, high-profile guest stars, and high-as-a-kite directors, you've got at least 2-3 seasons worth of solid material to work with...

 

When the BUCK ROGERS IN THE 25th CENTURY series was retooled for its second season, actor Tim O'Connor was essentially fired from his Dr. Huer character.

 

Or he was a head in his time.

 

Terry Farrell after the fourth season of "Becker"

 

Here are some more that I don't think have been mentioned yet. In all cases, it's unclear if the actors jumped or they were pushed.

Gary Dourdan's character Warrick Brown was killed off in the final episode of the eighth season of the original CSI. I was always under the impression that he was fired due to drug use, but I've also heard that he left over failed contract negotiations.

Charisma Carpenter's character Cordelia Chase was written out of Angel during the show's fourth season, although she did return for a one-time appearance in the fifth season. I never understood this one, and don't think I've ever heard a good explanation for why it happened.

Genvieve Bujold was cast as Capt. Janeway on Star Trek: Voyager.
From Memory Alpha

She quit after a day and a half of shooting, with the public reason being she was unaccustomed to the hectic pace of television filming. Other rumored reasons included dissatisfaction with her performance on the part of the producers and dissatisfaction with the character on the part of Bujold. As Rick Berman politely put it in the October 8-14, 1994 issue of TV Guide: "It was immediately obvious it was not a good fit."

In 2006, Rick Berman shed more light on Bujold's departure from the series. "This was a woman, who in no way, was going to be able to deal with the rigors of episodic television." He tried telling his feeling about Bujold to Voyager co-creators Jeri Taylor and Michael Piller, who assured Berman that it was not going to be a problem. Berman recounted some of Bujold's problems on the set of "Caretaker", from her having trouble with memorizing seven pages of dialogue a day, to wanting to not have her hair touched up by hair dressers, to not wanting to have to work with a director she did not know. Berman also recalled that after working on the set during the second day of shooting, Bujold went to her trailer in tears. Later, both "Caretaker" director Winrich Kolbe and Berman met with her there and asked her to go home.​

 

He wasn't really fired----his family moved to the East Coast after the first season wrapped so they quietly replaced him.

 

Hey, he was District Attorney Hamilton Burger! Can't have the DA smoking the evil weed!!

 

Norm was a horrible man on SNL, I miss him, ha!

 

He was obviously getting his monster spouses mixed up! Yvonne De Carlo starred in a great film noir with Burt Lancaster, Criss Cross.

 

Speaking of Lee Meriwether, she replaced Julie Newmar as Catwoman on Batman. Does anyone know why? And then Meriwether was replaced by Eartha Kitt, who must've been the first black villainess on TV.

 

I've always heard he was fired because he was a pain in the *** on set and because he and Danny Bonaduce didn't get along at all...

 

Well, I can believe it, considering I read it in TV Guide and let's face it, back in those days they didn't dish that kind of dirt up for the public to read. And also because, well, who the heck COULD get along with Danny Bonaduce, then or now???
What throws me is how I remember reading that 40+ years later!

 

I have no respect for Norm MacDonald, after he, and two other people, viciously attacked a woman. (albeit not physically) The two other people, and the woman, shall remain nameless in this thread, and that's final.

 

Meriwether appeared as Catwoman only once, in the Batman theatrical movie which was filmed between seasons 1 and 2 of the Batman series. Newmar was unavailable because she was working on a film called Monsieur Lecoq, which wound up being unfinished and unreleased. Meriwether wasn't so much a replacement as a fill-in, since Newmar came back after that to film season 2 of the series.

It's unclear why Newmar was not in season 3. She has said that she left Batman because her filming schedule for McKenna's Gold conflicted with the schedule for the series. However, this has been called into question by an analysis of the evidence (notably, the fact that Burgess Meredith had no problem appearing in both McKenna's Gold and season 3 of Batman), so it's possible she chose to leave for other reasons. It appears that regardless of the specifics, the decision to leave was hers.

 

And there is the infamous Brian Dunkleman who "quit" American Idol. The story is Brian was going to be fired and turned in his resignation instead. The show became enormous while he drifted into obscurity.

 

I know that Gerry & Sylvia Anderson had terrible creative battles on Space:1999, so much so that Gerry basically pulled rank and fired her from the show (whereupon she divorced him, taking millions from him in the settlement). This is why Fred Freiberger was brought in as her replacement. I think the idea was to do three things: 1) cut costs; 2) make the show more friendly to American viewers; 3) and "lighten up" the scripts to make the show a little more fun and less serious. What I remember 40 years ago is that it felt like they were taking a show that wanted to be Star Trek and instead give it shades of Lost in Space, and the end result was not good. The budget cuts also forced them to lose a couple of good supporting actors and even composer Barry Gray. I think Space:1999 is a good example of a show that could have been a lot better than it turned out, but it never measured up to its potential.

There was a very funny Mad Magazine parody of Space:1999 that showed Barbara Bain in wires, like a marionette, recalling the Supermarionation puppet shows Gerry Anderson did in the 1960s. The sad thing for Anderson is that he fought for many years to try to do a sophisticated TV series with real actors and get away from puppets, only to realize years later that the thing he would be remembered for the most were the Thunderbird shows, which were a lot of fun and actually very well-done.

Dunkelman is well aware of this. He and Ryan Seacrest were just former radio guys (Dunkelman more really a stand-up comic and actor), and he genuinely believed the producers would stick to the 2-host setup that was popular all over the world for Idol. I think what Dunkelman hadn't considered was how ambitious and political Seacrest was. It didn't hurt that Seacrest was very smooth and glib on camera, plus he looked good. Howard Stern has had Dunkelman on his radio show a few times and razzed him for being "The Pete Best of American Idol," but Dunkelman was surprisingly good-natured and philosophical about it.

‘American Idol’ Finale: Former Co-Host Brian Dunkleman Reveals All

 

Well, my understanding is that the Andersons were on course for divorce for awhile, although the actual announcement came as a shock to everybody. It allegedly had little to do with 1999 and more to do with Gerry and Sylvia being sick of each other (in particular, Gerry being sick of Sylvia).

The show was essentially cancelled after the first season. Ratings in the US were great (although fell a bit in the second half of the first season), but syndication was expensive in those days for a first run show (all of those prints!), so it wasn't a huge moneymaker. But in the UK it was a ratings bomb, due largely to ITV bungling the scheduling of what should have been their cash cow. Freiberger was brought in almost on a lark, pitched his idiotic concept of the program and promised to bring it in on about half the budget. He was able to schmooze the ITC brass (successfully B.S. them, essentially) and promised he'd make the show more of a hit in the US (amusing, since he killed Star Trek). To everybody's surprise - most of all Gerry's - Freiberger got the cash and the second season was on. Barry Morse wasn't willing to take a pay cut, so that was the end of Victor Bergman (and arguably the program's best actor and best character). They almost didn't bring back Nick Tate as Alan Carter, 'till it was pointed out he got more fan mail than any other actor.

Anyhow, Y2 was exactly the tacky disaster you'd expect from Fred Freiberger. Gerry essentially checked out, and staff writers like Johnny Byrne did their best to fight Freiberger's stupidity - Landau was absolutely furious, as well he should have been - but since the show only got picked up again thanks to Freiberger it was a lost cause. Granted, not all of the program's problems were due to Freddy - ITC brass in New York tried to direct the program by telegram. So one week they'd get a telegram requesting more "monsters" - somebody must have ran the numbers and figured out the first season's "Dragon's Domain" was a massive success - and then a few weeks of cheezy rubber clad monsters later (thanks to the slashed budget), they'd get another memo screaming at them for having "too many monsters" on the program.

Death by executive dipshttery.

Yup, pretty much. Their biggest problem was they didn't hire a stable of solid science fiction writers to script at least a few of the episodes. Guys like Theodore Sturgeon, Harlan Ellison and Norman Spinrad are what differentiated Star Trek from Lost In Space, and why the former is considered a classic while the latter is regarded as a tacky joke (especially after its first season)...

Curiously, the program came pretty close to getting picked up for a third season. Johnny Byrne had set out a kind of writer's bible, hoping to head off many of the problems Y1 and Y2 had experienced. No idea if Freiberger would have followed it - assuming he even came back as producer - but if it had been followed the show would have improved tremendously. ITC also serious considered a spin-off series starring Catherine Schell as Maya, since she'd proven the most popular character in the second season. And it's easy to see why - she was beautiful, radiated a kind of regal class, and could recite the most ridiculous dialog with absolute conviction, all traits the Landaus, for all their method training, couldn't emulate. There was also talk of jettisoning the Landaus entirely (one of the show's largest expenses) and making Tate and Schell the stars, which I think almost certainly would have been an improvement.

 

My theory as to why Julie Newmar did not do the third season of Batman is because she would have towered over Yvonne Craig.

According to IMDb, Ms. Newmar is 5'11", but Ms. Craig was only 5'4".

Conversely, Eartha Kitt was a mere 5'2".

Next to Julie, Yvonne would have looked like Catwoman's protégé (Pussycat) – not a heroic peer that was supposed to stop CW's villainous ways.

Another reason why Julie might not have been asked back is due to the sexual chemistry between her character and Batman.

In the third season, the producers were often pushing the relationship between Bruce and Barbara, so they might not have wanted Julie there to complicate that dynamic.

But, I think that actors being actors (or actresses being actresses), one of the show's stars might not have wanted to be upstaged by a guest star. And statuesque Julie Newmar would have upstaged Yvonne Craig just by standing next to her.

 

The last Weekend Update anchor worth watching.

 

You can't "viciously attack" any other way.

 

Why not? One would think potential jealousy (or a "cat fight") would add drama to the story. Besides which, according to Adam West, Newmar had been against the idea of Catwoman falling in love with Batman in the first place, so she would have been fine with having that element de-emphasized if they wanted to do that:
"Julie felt that Catwoman should be pure evil, teasing Batman rather than actually falling in love with him.......But Bill Dozier and Stanley had their vision, and she went along with it."

I'm also skeptical of your height theory... I think they could have worked around that with camera angles if they felt it was a problem. I think it's far more likely it was Newmar's decision to leave, rather than the producers' decision to replace her. Popular series regulars don't generally get fired/replaced unless they are causing problems in the workplace or there's money issues, neither of which was the case here.

Okay, I did some further research, and here's what I found timewise:
Shooting for McKenna's Gold began May 16, 1967 and wrapped on September 29, 1967 (according to Gregory Peck: A Biography by Gary Fishgall).
Production of season three of Batman began on July 5th, 1967
On September 14, 1967, Newmar went to Europe to begin shooting Monsieur LeCoq on location in France. She remained there for six months.
Eartha Kitt's first appearance as Catwoman was filmed in October 1967.

Putting all of this together, here's my theory: Newmar was slated to return as Catwoman for season three. However, because she was busy with McKenna's Gold, the producers agreed to hold the role for her and not shoot any Catwoman episodes until she finished with McKenna (this would explain why there were no Catwoman episodes shot for the first three months of production of season three... the plan was to wait until Newmar was available in October). However, after finishing McKenna, Newmar apparently changed her mind and decided to take the Monsieur LeCoq role. Since it was a location shoot in Europe, there was no way she could balance it with doing Batman, so she dropped out of the series. At that point Eartha Kitt was slotted into the Catwoman role.

If the plan had been to go with Kitt all along, it seems unlikely they would not have shot any Catwoman episodes for the first three months of production, and it's notable that those three months of no Catwoman coincide exactly with Newmar's McKenna schedule. This theory also explains why Newmar has said that she didn't appear in season three due to McKenna's Gold... she's confusing the fact that McKenna delayed her scheduled season three debut, and misremembering that it prevented it altogether.

Of course, the fact that Monsieur Lecoq was filmed in late 1967 (not 1966 as I mistakenly said upthread) raises the new question of why Newmar didn't appear in the 1966 Batman film, and what she was doing that year that prevented it.

 

Let's not forget that Howard Cosell appeared in two episodes of the Odd Couple as himself.

 

Was John Amos fired from Good Times, or did he quit?

 

I believe there is an interview upthread where he states he was let go.