TV Characters Almost Killed Off in Season 1: Boyd, Eleven, Jack, NoHo Hank, The Armorer and 9 Others
Stranger Things minus Eleven? No NoHo Hank for Barry? Dr. Jack Shephard lost so soon after we met him…?
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Yep, it’s true. Those and other TV characters that came to be integral to their respective series were at some point in the creative process earmarked for an early (ahem) “dismissal,” to be killed off in the very first season — and sometimes in the pilot episode!
What convinced Vince Gilligan to let Jesse Pinkman keep Breaking Bad? What emotional appeal bought Livia Soprano some extra time? How did Julianna Margulies learn that ER‘s Carol was not being scrubbed out after just one episode?
Below, TVLine has rounded up more than a dozen anecdotes about how Boyd Crowder, Officer Renko, Detective Greggs, Mando’s Armorer, Buffy‘s Spike and others saw their brief existences extended beyond one season — and the reason behind each change of heart.
Review our rundown of those very early brushes with near-death, then weigh in on the ones you are most glad earned a reprieve!
NoHo Hank, Barry
Anthony Carrigan’s Chechen mafia member gave the acclaimed HBO dramedy much of its levity, so it’s hard to imagine Barry’s world without him. And yet….
“I was almost killed in the first episode,” Carrigan shared in a May Los Angeles Times feature on the series’ swan song. Thinking back to that pilot shoot, Barry creator/star Bill Hader said to Carrigan, “We were lining up the shot where you were supposed to get shot, and I went over to our [director of photography] and [co-creator Berg] and I was like, [Whispers] “Should we kill him? I don’t think we can kill him.”
One of few bullets dodged on Barry!
Jesse and Hank, Breaking Bad
Can you imagine Breaking Bad without “Yeah, science!”? Throughout the acclaimed AMC drama’s five-season run, Aaron Paul’s Jesse Pinkman was very much meth master Walter White’s righthand man. But that right hand was nearly lopped off early on.
“My intention was that at the end of Season 1, Jesse would die horribly, which would make Walt feel really guilty and force him to question his criminality,” Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan revealed to New York magazine in March 2010. “But it became clear to me that Aaron Paul was an absolute asset to the show. I’d no more kill him off now than cut off one of my pinkies.”
Dean Norris’ Hank, meanwhile, owes his extended lease on life to the WGA strike of 2007-08.
“We were writing and shooting and editing in a vacuum, no one had seen the show yet, and I really had the feeling that I needed to throw the kitchen sink at it, that the writers and I needed to get every bit of drama,” Gilligan told Kevin Pollak’s Chat Show in November 2015. “The writers strike came along, and we didn’t get to do our last two episodes,” the series’ creator continued, and as such, “we had to end our Season 1 with seven episodes instead of nine. Our ninth episode that year, we were seriously leaning toward killing off Hank, Walt’s brother-in-law, played by Dean Norris.”
Carol, ER
Even Julianna Margulies believed that her ER run had very swiftly ended with nurse Carol Hathaway’s suicide attempt in the NBC drama’s pilot episode. “I had no idea I was coming back,” she told the Los Angeles Times in November 1994. “I was hired as a guest star, just for the pilot.” But early test screenings picked up on audience affinity for Carol, and her fate was changed up.
As Margulies recalled on The Rich Eisen Show (28:00 in the video above) “The way they shot my death… my character ODs in the pilot… the shot my overdose through George Clooney’s eyes, through the eyes of Sherri [Stringfield] and Noan [Wyle] and Anthony Edwards an Eric [LaSalle]… and you just see they’re stricken…. So I’m back in New York about to take another job and George Clooney called me and said, ‘I get the feeling they want to keep you alive. Don’t take another job.’”
Renko, Hill Street Blues
Though urban legend says that both Andrew “Andy” Renko and Officer Robert “Bobby” Hill (played by Charles Haid and Michael Warren) were initially supposed to die in Hill Street Blues‘ series premiere, the fact is that only one of the officers was penciled in for an early demise.
“Renko was meant to die in the premiere,” after he and partner Bobby were gunned down upon stumbled across a drug buy, per a May 2014 feature on Haid in the Daily Hampshire Gazette. “But audience testing for Renko went through the roof,” the paper reported, “so Renko survived the shooting — and Haid, having quietly heard about the tests, was able to negotiate special billing in the credits.”
Boyd, Justified
Inspired as it was by novelist Elmore Leonard’s Fire in the Hole, FX’s Justified aimed to close out its pilot with U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens shooting dead nemesis Boyd Crowder, akin to how the novella ends.
Boyd, however, survived said shooting, and lived on to make mayhem for another day (and then some!).
“When we decided to keep Boyd alive, that was a big decision,” Justified series creator Graham Yost told NPR in 2015. “When we shot the pilot, Boyd was dead at the end of [it]. And then we tested the show and we had all just fallen in love with Walton [Goggins] and the chemistry between Walton and Tim [Olyphant], so we decided to keep him alive.”
A decision that, to this very day, is paying the franchise dividends.
Jack, Lost
As detailed in Alan Sepinwall’s The Revolution Was Televised (shop Amazon), the ABC mystery drama’s original plan was to “pull out the rug from under the audience by killing Jack midway through the first episode, forcing Kate to take charge.” (There was even an elaborate plan of misdirection, by courting film star Michael Keaton to play Jack and thus elevate the character’s perceived importance.) But when then-ABC chief Steve McPherson argued that such a bait-and-switch “would teach viewers not to trust the show,” Lost boss Damon Lindelof agreed. As a result, Keaton passed on the longterm gig, Matthew Fox instead filled the role, Jack’s death scene went to the Oceanic pilot, and Kate’s backstory was beefed up with a criminal past.
The Armorer, The Mandalorian
What the forge?! The covert’s skilled and sage Armorer, who to this day dips in and out of Din Djarin’s life, was originally set to perish during The Mandalorian‘s Season 1 finale, as the heroes scrambled to evade Moff Gideon’s troopers.
“We were being set up for [her death]!” portrayer Emily Swallow shared at Dragon Con 2021 (at the 12:00 mark in video above). “Jon [Favreau] told me that he had originally written it that she did sacrifice herself, and that was the end of the Armorer. And then he changed his mind. I was like ‘Thank you!’”
Livia, The Sopranos
David Chase had originally conceived The Sopranos as a feature film, toward the end of which a petulant Tony would smother to death his mother, Livia. That harrowing wielding of a pillow still happened when The Sopranos instead found life as a TV series — at the close of the first season finale — but as detailed in Matt Zoller Seitz and Alan Sepinwall’s The Sopranos Sessions (shop Amazon), Nancy Marchand earned her character a reprieve.
Marchand, who was “pretty sick” with cancer at the time, “said to me at the end of the season, ‘David, just keep me working,’” Chase shares in The Sopranos Sessions. Plus, “she was so good I just couldn’t kill Livia, so we had to invent this whole thing where she was left alive.”
Livia was later killed off early in Season 3, in the wake of Marchand’s real-life passing.
Eleven, Stranger Things
It is hard to imagine that Netflix’s Stranger Things was ready to subtract Eleven from the equation, during the journey to the Upside Down and clash with the Demogorgon that ended Season 1.
“Eleven was going to sacrifice herself to save the day,” series co-creator Ross Duffer shared in Stranger Things: Worlds Turned Upside Down: The Official Behind-the-Scenes Companion (shop Amazon). “That was always the endgame.”
As such, two-thirds of the way into that Season 1 finale, El seemed to dematerialize along with the Demogorgon, after their intense science classroom showdown. The episode ended, though, with Hopper at least symbolically dropping off some Eggos in the woods, for his daughter figure.
“[We] needed to leave [Eleven’s fate] more up in the air, because deep down we knew the show just wouldn’t really work without Eleven,” Ross Duffer explained. “And at that point, we knew how special Millie [Bobby Brown] was. If there was going to be more Stranger Things, Eleven had to come back.”
Logan Roy, Succession
The HBO series’ titular succession plan almost had to be figured out much, much earlier on, if Roy family patriarch Logan (played by Brian Cox) passed on as once planned.
“Originally, I was supposed to die at the end of the first [season],” Cox told the UK’s The Guardian in October 2021. “But I think they realized that Logan is the centrifugal force of the piece…. Everything has to spin off him, and the kids’ vices are all about their father, and relating to their father. Do they love their father, and if so how do they show that love?”
Kima, The Wire
During an October 2014 PaleyFest New York panel, Sonja Sohn — who wound up playing Detective Kima Greggs for all five seasons of HBO’s The Wire — revealed that she had found out by accident, during the filming of Season 1, that Kima was going to be killed off. Series creator David Simon in turn confirmed that Det. Greggs was not intended to survive being shot in Episode 10, but then-HBO Entertainment chief Carolyn Strauss asked Simon keep the character around, and he obliged.
Van, Yellowjackets
For a hot minute there, it looked like the stranded and isolated young Yellowjackets would be down a head heading into Season 2 of the Showtime drama.
“We did have moments of discussing whether or not Van would survive Season 1,” Yellowjackets co-showrunner Jonathan Lisco told EW.com ahead of Season 2. “But Liv Hewson is so great [in the role] and embodied the character of Van in a way that was really revelatory, because Van is able to be both a serious-minded person and extremely glib, sarcastic, funny, and lovable all at the same time.”
That change of plans would not only keep Hewson receiving a paycheck, it also set the stage for Lauren Ambrose to join the cast, as an older Van.
Spike, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Yes, James Marsters didn’t make his Buffy debut until Season 2. But that was nearly the only season in which he appeared, as series boss Joss Whedon struggled with having another sexy bloodsucker on his hands.
“[Joss] said, ‘I don’t like that Anne Rice crap,’” Marsters recalled on Michael Rosenbaum’s Inside of You podcast (embedded above). “He got talked into one romantic interest vampire — that was Angel (played by David Boreanaz) — [but] that was the only one, that was the exception.”
“I remember he backed me up against a wall one day, and he was like, ‘I don’t care how popular you are, kid, you’re dead. You hear me? Dead. Dead!’” says Marsters. “I was just like, ‘It’s your football, man’…. He was angry at the situation.”
Marsters, who by some accounts was only expected to appear in five episodes, instead wound up appearing in the better part of four Buffy seasons, before crossing over to Boreanaz’s Angel spinoff.
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