TV stars who were fired?

My family watched the entire run of Roseanne. I didn't think Chalke did so bad being Becky. She was believable enough...
What's the difference in attitude you speak of, I'm curious to know what you thought.

 

No argument there. I understand why Reed was unhappy (given how the show had changed from its original style/tone) but I agree that it was not a good idea to complain in the manner he did, and he had no reason to expect his complaints would be heeded.

I almost wonder if he was deliberately trying to provoke Schwartz into firing him? As Paul noted upthread, he hated the show and wanted out of his contract.

 

I haven't watched the show since the original run, but my recollection of Goranson's Becky is that she was assertive, often argumentative, and strong-willed. By contrast, Chalke's Becky was much more passive and timid. Some of it was probably down to the writing, but I think a lot of it was due to how they played the character. As I noted above, the subplot where Becky has a flirtation with David was one instance where it really struck me. I can't imagine Goranson's Becky being attracted to David, but with Chalke's Becky it fit.

 

Plenty of contestants on The Celebrity Apprentice.

 

I think one of the problems with actors is that some feel "trapped" by a role and feel like they're having to turn down better work, or they prefer the kind of life where they get to do different kinds of shows and parts, or they feel they can make more money elsewhere. Maybe it's a combination of the three. I know that in the case of Mandy Patinkin, he was really disturbed by the content of Criminal Minds, so it was purely a moral judgement there.

It's nice to believe that if you're making $50,000 or $100,000 or $250,000 a week, you would put up with damned near anything. But I think especially for stage-trained actors, they like the idea of doing a part for maybe 4-5 months, then moving on to something different. Doing the same thing for 5 years can be a drag, even if you're making huge money. BTW, I think all the actors on shows like Brady Bunch are bitter that the show creators made money in perpetuity, but the actors got very little in residuals over the years. There are rare exceptions like Buddy Ebsen, who owned part of Beverly Hillbillies and Barnaby Jones, but for the most part, actors did not start to get serious royalty money until the 1980s.

 

Leonard and Leonid Schwartz in their book "Brady, Brady, Brady" mention

The Schwartzes also gave Reed a chance to direct and the second time he messed up badly: they had to come in and straighten things out. Reed was nice to them afterwards: for about a week.

We can ridicule "The Brady Bunch" all we want, and a lot of it was silly. But it has been a major cultural force for the last 40 years and it was not a hugely popular show when first broadcast. The Schwartzes in their book "Brady,Brady,Brady" mention how they would get letters from prisoners saying how much they liked watching the show because it reminded them of a happier time in their life.

As a footnote I went to the NASCAR race in Darlington, SC over Labor day weekend. They use a "retro' gimmick now...cars with paint schemes from the past and it's a huge hit. Who did they get to sing the national anthem? Barry Williams (no, not Johnny Bravo). Not a terrible voice but he doesn't really know how to sing. Sang so slowly the Air Force fly by out of Mississippi which usually happens at the end came around "gave proof thru the night"...

 

Yep, Robert Reed strikes me as a neurotic, difficult guy. And that never happens in the acting business.

I've often cited shows like Gilligan's Island and Brady Bunch of examples of bad shows that are nonetheless classics, because they totally define a genre plus they lasted for many, many years. I think both are awful shows that are corny and predictable and silly, but that doesn't detract from the fact that they're an important part of TV history. If I say the title of either one and then use it to describe a new show -- "It's like The Brady Bunch, only with Afghanistan immigrants living in the Bronx" -- you would know exactly what I meant. (Sort of.)

I thought the Brady Bunch Movie was 10,000 times funnier than the TV show, because they took every aspect of the show that was awful and made it a hyper-bizarre multi-level joke. The very fact that the back yard had Astroturf and was clearly in a studio, and then they referred to that in the movie, just had me on the floor. That's a very clever, funny movie.

 

Amanda Blake was fired from Gunsmoke after Season 19. The series was cancelled after Season 20.

 

Was she fired or did she just decide she wanted more free time. I've heard both versions. Apparently by not being there a 20th season, she missed out on a lot of residuals. Later in life she had health problems with cancer (heavy cigarette smoker) and AIDS (contracted from her fourth husband.

 

She was fired. The producer finally tired of her constant complaining. The story is well documented in the book Gunsmoke An American Institution by Ben Costello.

 

That's very interesting. I remember when she left the show it seemed to be a little abrupt, but it does harken back to the standard deal that actors can get away with complaining to a point, but there's a line that gets crossed where they're just whiners and troublemakers. In fairness, sometimes the actors are 100% right and the scripts do suck and the actors are better judges of material than the producers. I think the key nowadays is the actors have to negotiate to be given the title of Producer along with the other 12 guys actually producing, and then they'll get more of a say in how the show is done.

If you watch the credits for all the major one-hour dramatic shows, any time you have a "seasoned" actor as the star, they'll also have a credit as Producer. And that's the reason why.

 

Yep, hard to get thru that video clip but if you can make it to around 4 minutes you can see Rerun get down! Brady's and What's Happenin' all in the same show!

 

Artie Lang was fired from Mad TV, but think they re-hired him back to finish things. It's been many years since I listened to Howard Stern but he was technically fried from that show too. They won't let him back at all, not even for a different show

 

Vidiot, wasn't Norm Macdonald a writer on Rosanne for a while? This leads me to Norm's firing from SNL (along with writer james Downey). I read that NBC head, Don Ohlmeyer, was upset that Norm kept telling O.J. Simpson jokes on weekend updat. Apparently, Ohlmeyer was close to O.J.

 

Yes he did write from 92-93. He talks about it a little bit here www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEWw7IG0x7A (audio only) It's quite funny.

He also has a book out Based on a True Story by Norm Macdonald | PenguinRandomHouse.com »

 

Barbara Bain was essentially fired from MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE after her husband. Martin Landau and the producers couldn't come to an agreement for him to get more money than Peter Graves. Ms. Bain was to report to wardrobe for the start of the fourth season, but she never showed, so they fired her and sued her for breach of contract. Lee Meriwether was abruptly told she was hired to be the female member of the team, but she too was shot down when others in charge wanted Dina Merrill to fill the role. Miss Merrill had agreed to guest - but wanted no parts of a regular series gig. Meriwether was brought back several times in one-off appearances totally six episodes, but was never given the gig full time.

 

Thank you for the explanation.

 

Back to the "Roseanne" thing with the Beckys, I've watched pretty much the full run several times. I think eventually Chalke's Becky was a pretty "regular" character. If anything, she seemed *more* prominent than Goranson had been near the end of her run, because they had Goranson doing the Suzanne Somers "calling on the phone" thing near the end of her first run.

There came a time later in the series when all of the background characters, including both the David and Mark characters, were effectively near leads on the show. I believe Chalke's Becky had a number of episodes. I recall one where she works at a "Hooters" type restaurant and everybody chides Mark for letting her work there, and so on.

The two Beckys were indeed vastly different. I think both Goranson and Sara Gilbert were both (to the fortune of the show's producers) very good young actresses. They were major players on the show in a way that the "kids" on sitcoms very rarely have been. When Goranson left, Gilbert became an even more prominent force on the show.

When Chalke came in, she did just kind of play Becky as whiney and bratty, and seemed to be going for "ditzy" more than Goranson ever did. Goranson's Becky was in fact the academic overachiever, and there was a whole story line eventually built into the show, one of the many relatively realistic storylines on the show, where Becky and everyone feels she's turned into an underachiever getting saddled with marrying Mark, etc.

I think Chalke wasn't really right for the part, but I never sensed they intensely reigned back the character throughout her run because of it. I wouldn't be surprised if Roseanne was in on casting her and was trying to subvert the whole thing a little bit by hiring someone who looked and acted so vastly different.

I recall reading or seeing an interview with Goranson where she says she kind of felt like an outsider when she came back on the show for her short return run. Indeed, it seemed that while they did write her some callback stuff to her early time on the show, it often felt like she was reading lines written for the second style of "Becky", including I think the first episode back where Darlene and Becky are inexplicably constantly fighting to the point of nearly duking it out.

I sense they may well have just written "Becky" out of the show, but the Mark character was becoming more and more prominent and they probably wanted a reason to justify keeping him there.

What I do credit the show with is addressing the two-Becky situation head-on, and even making fun of it. They had an actual "announcer" explain the two Beckys changing out during one episode, and also had the Patty Duke parody with both actresses, the only time (I believe) they had both Beckys on screen at the same time. (I believe the Patty Duke parody is missing on the DVD set).

 

NOT a typo!

 

Yeah, he was on Roseanne for at least 6 episodes as a writer. There was a period of time where Roseanne herself would fire all the writers when she felt they were all slacking off. And it is true that Norm was fired from SNL, despite being well-liked on the show by Lorne Michaels and the cast, because Don Ohlmeyer hated the O.J. jokes. Funny, it turned out that Norm was right about O.J. after all.

 

Roseanne ended up ruining her own sitcom (anyone can re-watch the last two or three seasons to see what I mean).

 

It was pretty ridiculous right from the pilot episode onward. A newlywed couple leaving their honeymoon after 2 hours to go back home and pick up their 6 kids and live-in housekeeper (and dog) and then return to the same hotel for a 'family' honeymoon, is the definition of wacky. Reed should have realized from this initial script how the show was going to go.

 

I didn't know this until just this week, but Norm was asked to host SNL just under two years after being fired. Here's his monologue. It's a good one

Always loved Norm.

 

That earned the pair a (deserved) reputation as difficult, and series TV avoided them like the plague going forward. Bain got some work in the early '70s on TV movies - one with her husband - but it wasn't until the Andersons came calling from London with Space: 1999 that they found regular work again (and promptly became a huge pain in the ass on arrival at Pinewood Studios).

Ironically, the Andersons passed on their first choice to play 1999's Commander John Koenig - Robert Culp - because they thought he would be too difficult: he demanded a co-producer credit.

After 1999 imploded following its dud of a second season, Bain hardly worked for a decade, apart from The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan's Island (really!). Can you say, "We really needed the money!"? It didn't help that 1999 revealed a big problem with Bain and her method-trained acting style - she was great to look at, and could give fantastic face, but when forced by a role to actually recite dialog instead of simply pose and deliver revealing glances... Well...

In fact, part of what made 1999's trashy second season so unwatchable was seeing these two stuck up method actors floundering in the ludicrous sweaty hairy he-man plots cooked up by notorious showkiller, producer Fred Freiberger (the brain trust who brought you Star Trek's mostly-awful third season). If the show had survived for a third season (it was still modestly profitable for ITC), it's likely the duo would have been fired, and Nick Tate as Alan Carter and Catherine Schell as Maya would have received top billing - they were already the fans' favorites, and both were capable of churning out credible performances in spite of the dreadful material. Alas, it wasn't to be - Lew Grade at ITC decided to kill 1999 and fund box office disaster Raise The Titanic instead, a catastrophe so massive it essentially sank ITC. 1999's run ended - ironically enough - just as science fiction caught fire following the release of Star Wars and TV was scrambling to hop on the bandwagon. D'oh!

 

No less than Steven Spielberg did the first new TV pilot for Bain & Landau after they left Mission: Impossible, which was an obscure dramatic TV news show called Savage. Basically, Landau was kind of a Mike Wallace-style confrontational reporter, and Bain was his tough network producer. Spielberg did his best, but the word was that both actors were (in fact) difficult on set, and the show wound up sitting on the shelf for a year or so before being aired only once as an ABC-TV movie. It's kind of a weird footnote in Spielberg's career, very mediocre and kind of forgettable.