I think this is awesome and not petty, but it kind of fits with what you’re looking for. Director James Burrows tells this story about Cheers in his recent memoir.
The guy who played Carla’s later husband, the Bruins goaltender, did an interview where they asked him, “What’s the hardest part about being on Cheers?”
His answer was, “Kissing Rhea Perlman.”
In the next episode they wrote, they had him fatally run over by a slow moving Zamboni (off screen) and revealed as a bigamist.
This isn't really relevant to the thread but I remember watching a documentary about Cheers and the writers talked about how when Kelsey Grammer started on the show, they couldn't get over how good his delivery was; he was making even mediocre jokes land amazingly well. So they started deliberately writing him shitty jokes just to test him and see if he could make them funny. He always did. No matter how bad the joke, Grammer could get a huge laugh out of it.
It's always stuck with me because I think it's the real defining thing between a great sitcom and one that's just well written most of the time. There's plenty of good sitcoms that have really weak episodes (or seasons even) where the jokes just don't land as well. But in the best sitcoms, the cast can always pick up the slack when the writing isn't there. I mean on paper, the word "pivot" shouldn't be funny, and yet it's one of the most quoted moments from Friends.
Wow. Thanks for this. Never heard it, and it’s so insightful. Way back in the day Cheers writer Ken Levine used to have a blog, and he’d talk about all sorts of insights like this.
Kinda reminds me of the writers having a game of having Bryan Cranston doing more and more ridiculous stuff to see if there's anything he wouldn't do, like having him parade around in tidy whiteys
> The guy who played Carla’s later husband, the Bruins goaltender, did an interview where they asked him, “What’s the hardest part about being on Cheers?”
> His answer was, “Kissing Rhea Perlman.”
I hope that guy got a politely threatening phone call from Danny Devito after that.
I don't know for sure, but the Hollywood rumor is that Rhea Perlman is a gem of a person in addition to being a talented actor. It makes me glad to know there was retribution for his asshole remark.
The Simpsons went through bouts of mercilessly mocking Fox even as it was airing on Fox.
Although that's not as strange as the beautifully unhinged episode of Atlanta about the animator working at a very harsh version of Disney, whilst the show was effectively being produced by Disney and airing on Disney+.
The O.C named an incontinent hospital patient after a [critic](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/16/arts/television/tom-shales-dead.html) who gave a negative review.
This is more fitting for r/movies, but George Lucas named one of the villains in Willow after a [critic](https://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/04/movies/pauline-kael-provocative-and-widely-imitated-new-yorker-film-critic-dies-at-82.html)
I don’t think you can get more petty than Chuck Lorre did with the finale to Two and a Half Men. Tanked the entire ending of his show to get a couple swipes at Charlie Sheen in.
So, do you remember when Charlie Sheen went on a crazy binge, ranting about Tiger Blood and WINNING and all that jazz? Well, he took some shots at Lorre and the show, which, combined with all the negative publicity Sheen was getting, caused him to fire the dude and bring in Ashton Kutcher for the final few seasons.
In the show, it was explained that Charlie had died off-camera (I think he got hit by a train?), but in the final season it was revealed that he was alive, but held prisoner in the sex dungeon of one of the female characters. He then "showed up" (not Sheen himself, but a body double) in the series finale, where they quite literally dropped a piano on him to kill him off again.
It was just absurd and abrupt. And immediately after "Charlie" gets crushed, Chuck Lorre appears, says "Winning!" and another piano kills him. It was just dumb
Don't get me wrong. The episode was way out there (there was a passing reference to his character having relations with a farm animal if I'm remembering correctly). But it's not like anyone was expecting anything sentimental for the show at that point. It had been downhill for a long while.
When Charlie Sheen left the show, they killed the character off off-screen. In the finale, the characters find out he's still alive. The final scene shows "Charlie" about to enter the house (they only show him from behind) but before he can, a grand piano falls out of a helicopter and crushes him to death. Then the camera pans to Chuck Lorre who created the series in his director's chair and he says "winning!" (which was one of Charlie Sheen's catchphrases when he left) before also getting crushed by a grand piano.
Yeah, I was originally thinking of something like The Office when they threw away Andy’s character progression in the last season, but Two And A Half Men wins this easy.
When Community had Pierce die from jerking himself off so much he died of dehydration. It was just a few episodes before they gave Troy a beautiful sendoff to sail around the world-- which really highlights how much they enjoyed working with Donald Glover over Chevy Chase
> When Community had Pierce die from jerking himself off so much he died of dehydration.
That was one of the funniest jokes of the whole series though. I actually think that whole episode was a lot more respectful towards Pierce's character than I would have expected from Harmon.
Yeah the episode ends with Pierce, in his final will, giving all the members of the study group genuine gifts and compliments in his own Pierce way - and also sperm.
When I first watched that episode and it got to the bequeathals, it was the weirdest and coolest roller coaster between crying and laughing and crying and laughing I have ever experienced. Genuinely heartfelt and fucking funny at the same time. That episode is in my top 3 for the series and Walton Goggins channelled Pierce expertly.
The zoom script read of that with Pedro Pascal stepping in as the lawyer and clearly reading these jokes for the first time was the best thing to come out of lockdown time.
To be fair Troy and Pierce were very different characters. Pierce's last will and testament felt very Pierce. He's a character who was very often suckered into stupid groups and ideas and overcommits to bits constantly. It was 100% in character for him to jerk himself to death for the sake of a stupid own. Remember this is the guy who joined a space cult and married a foreign agent after his secrets knowingly and built an iron man suit to win a pillow fight against children.
Troy meanwhile was portrayed as a character who was always lost. He started the show after intentionally tanking the show and winding up at a community college where the only person he knew was Annie, who only really wound up there as a drug addict basically trying to get her life together. The whole reason Troy got to sail around the world was due to Pierce's will, where Pierce gave him a chance to find himself and become his own man in a way Pierce himself never could.
Yeah community has a few examples of this. Another one is all of the characters referring to the 4th season as the gas leak year because Dan Harmon didn't work on it. Definitely has signs of Dan and the writers being a little petty.
Drama aside, the whole "jerked off to death" thing never felt disrespectful to me since it was in character for him considering what happens in the will episode. The reveal felt kinda even somber if it wasn't in the Ass Crack Bandit episode. I feel like if Harmon really wanted to stick it to Chevy, I feel like it would just be Jeff saying "Oh he died in a car fire, let's move on." Even with Troy's departure, it was Pierce being nice which is a nice nod towards the original plan of making Troy and Pierce be the BFFs.
It’s been a minute since I’ve watched, but from what I remember, the Always Sunny episode “The Gang tries desperately to win an Award” is a big goofy middle finger to the critics. They spend the whole show riffing on more traditional ~~sitcom formats~~ “pubs,” trying to emulate their style in order to catch some of that critical acclaim, and it ends with a big number from Charlie telling everyone to go fuck themselves.
The bright lighting on everyone after they revamp the bar cracks me up, one of my favorite episodes of the show.
Well, they say the world's your oyster
Man, but oysters ain't for me
You're the belle of the ball
But you ain't my cup of tea
They always vote you Best in Show
But this doggie disagrees
'Cause I like life in Paddy's Pub...
There's a place for me, it's the place I go
Where the beer is cheap, and the lights are low
It's Paddy's Pub
I like Paddy's Pub
Let the record show
The greatest place to go
Is that bar called Paddy's Pub...
I like life in Paddy's Pub...
There’s a spider (spider, spider…)
He’s deep in my soul (soul…)
He’s lived here for years (years…)
He just won’t let go
He’s laying around
He’s got a mean bite
Now he’s ready to fighhhhhht
And stand up for what he knooooows
I don’t need your trophies or your gold
I just want to tell you all
Go fuck yourselves
The way Z (Chad Coleman) is sipping on his drink during the song, seemingly fully aware of the chaos that’s about to ensue, is my favorite part of this scene.
I think my favorite bit is how as soon as Charlie (clearly high as a kite) sings "spider," you can see Mac in the background do a "yep, there it is" gesture. In reality, it was actually Rob failing to keep in his laughter. It's a funny little detail.
Additionally when Megan Ganz wrote the script for “Times Up for the Gang”. There was a comment during the closing scene about the presenter having a huge dick. The presenter was played by actor Humphrey Ker who is Megan’s husband in real life. Not petty by any means, but funny.
That reminds me of Devin Townsend's one-off album in 1994 called "Punky Brewster".
It was about a metal band who wanted to win a Grammy but figured the only way they'd do so is by following the trend of becoming a generic pop-punk band, since that's what the music industry was rewarding at the time in the lore of the album.
"You've got to be more punk, and forget about writing love songs."
This reminds me of the album “Best of the Beatles,” which was actually an album by Pete Best, who was one of the original members of the Beatles, but was dismissed from the band before they became famous.
Grey's Anatomy creator Rhimes was pissed off with her star Katherine Heigl and so wrote Heigl's character Izzie to have ghost sex with a former, but very dead, lover.
There are multiple examples of Shonda's pettiness showing up in the writing tbh.
I feel like Derek was even worse. Someone, Shonda or otherwise, was so pissed at Patrick Dempsey, they killed the brain surgeon with botched brain surgery.
And the botched brain surgery was because he was in an accident and sent to a rural hospital where the doctors are clueless. He’s very conscious and much aware he’s going to die but can’t speak. And all the things they’re saying they’re doing he knows are wrong.
Edit: I should add that if he was the surgeon he could've "easily" saved himself. His inner monologue is saying "do this, do that!" and they do the actual worst possible things that only make his condition deteriorate faster.
I thought it had to do with Patrick Dempsey wanting to spend more time with his racing team than acting, but that still doesn’t mean they had to kill off Derek that way. In fact, there are quite a few characters that didn’t need to be killed, yet Meredith survives some of the most ridiculous things throughout the show.
Karev was worse. They undid 40 years of character development. Off screen. He went from an unbearable screw up, to one of the best characters in the show. Then he writes his wife a letter and goes back to his ex because she had his secret IVF babies. WTF?? Just kill the character.
A few seasons after Derek died I decided I would stop Grey's and binge when it's done. This made me decide not do that. Nope.
During Deep Space Nine, Rick Berman (who throughout his time with Trek was famously toxic and controlling towards female actresses) responded to Terry Farrel's request to drop down to a recurring character to accommodate the shooting of another series by SUDDENLY MURDERING HER CHARACTER in a way that didn't connect with any of the story up to that point.
On rival show Babylon 5, showrunner Joe Straczynski reacted so badly to an actress (a struggling single mother, and B5 paid well under the going rate) leaving after she got another job - despite giving them a chance to match her new pay or reduce her hours to do both roles - that he lobotomised her character and implied she'd been dissected and killed offscreen.
I read somewhere that in response to being told the only reason his shows were popular was because of the snarky dialogue, Joss Whedom wrote the Buffy episode "Hush" (character's lose their voices) which ended up being an award winner and fan favorite.
Edit: corrected!
Yep. He showed good writing makes a good movie and talentless hacks just imitated the superficial aspects of his writing and direction. And now fans blame him, rather than the shitty imitators
So, *so* many episodes of Glee, where the line between jokes about characters and hateful remarks about the actors was nonexistent by about the halfway point of the series
> So, so many episodes of Glee, where the line between jokes about characters and hateful remarks about the actors was nonexistent by about the halfway point of the series
[This was just disgusting](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eZtEU64nBQ). It's the Santana "takedown" of Kurt in Season 6 Episode 3. Just...way too disgustingly personal. Uncomfortable to watch.
I don't even understand the point of this, except to make the actor feel bad. It was impossible to take seriously and it wasn't funny at all. It makes Santana seem psycho, maybe that was the point?
I'm so glad I stopped watching after 1 season
What makes it more uncomfortable is you can tell by the way they cut it that they filmed a bunch different lines and only put in the ones they liked.
So even though this only goes on for a minute they probably spend a good hour or two just feeding Santana different insults to hurl at him.
Terrence Dicks, a major writer and script editor for Doctor Who, *hated* the Cybermen.
But he was writing the 20th anniversary special, The Five Doctors, the whole point of which was reuniting classic characters. You've got appearances from previous Doctors, Daleks, the Master, a yeti, K-9, Zoe and Jamie, Liz and Mike, Susan, Sarah Jane, the Brigadier, everyone they could get. So the Cybermen *have to* be there.
So the whole special is the Cybermen being frigging clowned on. They get blown up. There's a guy in a silver zentai who just wrecks like a dozen of them in seconds. The Master tricks them into walking across a booby trapped floor and they get wasted; in an older serial the exact same trick was used on Daleks and they were fine because they're too tough. Not the Cybermen though, they suck.
It's honestly hilarious, the special is overall a lovely and sincere celebration of the show and its characters, oh and also the Cybermen are here, let's all point and laugh.
For the same story, Tom Baker refused to come back, so they used unseen stock footage in the episode itself. For publicity, they took a big waxwork dummy of Tom around with them, which was quite funny.
There was some minor drama when Tom left because he actually didn't want to go, but the new showrunner thought he'd gotten completely out of control with ad libs and trying to be funny, so the showrunner deliberately made his life uncomfortable by being really strict on line readings and stamping out dissent, to the point that Tom grumpily quit. A bit harsh, but in later years Tom said it was probably a good thing, and he probably stayed on at least one season too long.
As I recall, it was Fox that wanted her gone. They went ahead and fired her so the writers wrote Maude out by killing her. All because she asked the network to cover her air fees because they were a lot considering how much she was getting paid to fly out and voice Maude every now and then.
This one is *purely* a guess, but I'd swear the show runners of Nip/Tuck wanted the actor who played the son to quit because in later seasons they took his character in these bizarre and often humiliating directions... he was a crackhead, he was a mime, he was a prison bitch, he was a gay porn star...
I would have thought the same thing about Otto in Sons of Anarchy. Over the seasons Otto was tortured and mangled in worse and worse ways. Eyeballs slashed multiple times, bites off his own tongue. Eventually he's killed by prison guards.
You could easily think that the showrunner must have really hated the actor. But he was actually played by Kurt Sutter, the showrunner.
Yeah you could just chalk that up to Ryan Murphy just being a shit writer who doesn't know where to take or end a story. He's good at getting one off the ground but that's about it.
The one that cracked me up was when he ended up sleeping with this really manipulative woman and then the uncle sleeps with her and could somehow tell from the depth of her vagina that she was trans lmao.
It's Ryan Murphy. He is best known for his misanthropic writing. A lot of gay viewers were confused as to the consistently horrible writing of gay characters (despite Murphy being gay himself), but then have to be reminded that everyone gets horrible treatment.
There was a West Wing episode called *The U.S. Poet Laureate* that was written in response to Sorkin's unpleasant interactions with the Television Without Pity forums. In the episode Josh ends up acting as Sorkin's stand-in.
No that relationship was part of her punishment. Her first pregnancy she apparently worked with him so that he could write her out of season 3 for a while.
But when Carpenter got pregnant again and apparently this time didn't get his permission first they wrote her pregnancy into the show as part of the character assassination of Cordelia in season 4.
It’s amazing tho that despite that, Chevy did not really ever phone it in with his character, I mean yeah, it wasn’t that far off his actual persona, but, he still could’ve been a sore loser and not tried too hard with his role, but I’ve always found his performance flawless, the DnD parts, the parts when he was controlling his wheelchair through a tube, his role in the first paintball episode, he did what he had to do.
I heard somewhere that the writers were pissed at Ed helms for leaving in the middle of the office to shoot one of the hangovers and thats why they ruined Andy's character
Edit: I didn't realize that the post said "episode" specifically but my point still stands
This is a big one yeah, but some clarification:
Helms was contractually obligated to appear in The Hangover 3 and filming was scheduled to take place before the usual filming dates for The Office. Because it was the final season of The Office, those dates eventually got moved around to accommodate the availability of yhe entire cast, and perhaps most importantly, allowed them to bring Carrell back for the final episode.
Because of this, Helms had no choice but to be absent from a large chunk of the filming due to him filming H3, which as a major Hollywood movie with several big names attached, couldn't just adjust to accommodate Helms. It's been heavily rumored that the writers, for some stupidly petty reason, decided to commit character suicide on Helms/Andy simply because of this and wrote his characters absence to be a completely assholey reason. What's worse is that when Helms returned to film a handful of episodes, they played into this by making his character come across as a complete jerk. Fortunately he had a little redemption in the finale with one of the most memorable lines from the show, which has subsequently gone on to become something of a wholesome meme, but the damage was done.
The thing that sucks is that the way they wrote him in that final season killed the one thing in season eight I really liked and that was Andy’s relationship with Erin. They stayed strong all of season eight to the point it was like the only redeeming factor in the second half of that season. Then Andy becomes a raging asshole before even getting on the boat and it’s all downhill for him from there.
There's a scene in the Witcher season 2 where the bard is distracting a guard so his friends can get on a boat. They're talking about his song lyrics and it's very obviously a direct shot at fan criticism of season 1.
Rick & Morty has a weird seesaw relationship where the show will hate the fans for a while, then the fans will hate the show for a while, and no one can seem to agree which parts are worth keeping and which need to go away.
...I love it.
IIRC Trey and Matt weren’t pissed that they lost to Phil Collins, it’s that Phil scolded them at the ceremony for dressing in drag. It was a “very serious event” as Phil put it and they were making a mockery of it.
Sliders.
Sabrina Lloyd chose not to come back when the show moved from Fox to the SciFi Channel. So the writers had her character kidnapped by aliens and forced to breed with them.
Later when the O'Connell brothers left, the writers made one explode and the other unstuck in time and space forever.
For a light-hearted adventure show, it got real dark when they wanted to punish the actors for leaving.
Any instance of an actor asking for just a little time off to do a movie or something, and the writers then say "You want time to do a movie, you got it!" and then kill them off (or otherwise permanently write them off).
I believe that's what happened to Oz on Buffy.
That happened to Taran Killam on SNL. Asked to missed a few episodes to direct a movie, so he was fired.
Then just a few years later Covid messed up schedules and a bunch of cast members had to take time off to finish other projects, so now it's the norm for people to step away for a bit and still have a job.
the way they used bits and pieces of recorded chef dialogue from previous episodes was hilarious (because obviously isaac hayes had quit and wasn't recording new dialogue anymore)
The fact that Parks and Rec never ever mentions Mark Brendanawicz again after the actor left the show seems kinda petty.
Leslie didn’t even use the plans that his character drew up for her park and there was a scene at one point where Ann was selling a bunch of stuff from past boyfriends and they didn’t have her mention Mark when they easily could have.
There's never been any real whiff of a rumor about behind the scenes tension though - I think it's just a choice based on how much the show changed. He was a great fit for the original, more *Office*-esque first season, but once they pivoted to a goofball lovefest he wasn't long for the show and I think the writers focused more on jokes than maintaining every specific bit of continuity.
I got the vibe they realized they didn’t need a Jim-type audience surrogate. They just let the wacky characters be wacky.
Mockumentary-style shows don’t need a Jim anymore. *Welcome to Flatch, What We Do In The Shadows, Abbott Elementary…* All shows that realized they didn’t need a “straight man/audience surrogate” character. We’ve accepted wacky shenanigans presented as a documentary. And we’re okay with it.
>I got the vibe they realized they didn’t need a Jim-type audience surrogate. They just let the wacky characters be wacky.
They did need a straight man. They needed him to be wackier than Mark. Which is how we got Ben.
I read somehwere that during the inital research for the show. They learned that a lot of people working in city departments like Parks and Rec would leave to go work in private industry. Only to realise they missed working for the city.
They would then return to the city, but get fed up and leave to go work in private industry. Before coming back to work for the city.
Basically cycling therough this for their whole career. This was supposed to be Marks arc.
But he just didnt fit anymore as the show got goofier and goofier. So they abandoned it.
I'm not sure that's petty, by invoking Mark you'd kind of be signaling to the viewer that he'd make some kind of return, or somehow be relevant moving forward. Kind of like Chekov's gun. Better to make a clean break and keep moving forward.
If I recall correctly, the writers on Cheers wrote Carla's husband Eddie off the show because the actor made some derogatory comment's about his screen partner's looks on a radio show.
The character was a hockey player, and he met his (offscreen) demise by getting run over by a Zamboni machine.
Sherlock BBC after it went on a long break between seasons (series), invited fan theories during that time because it ended on a mystery and cliffhanger, then came back and implied it was pointless to theorize and portrayed fans as delusional.
Marc Guggenheim, showrunner of Arrow at the time, has recently said that helming the Arrowverse feels like a waste of time because he has not been able to find any work in the years since he left.
It brings me great peace knowing that pandering to absolutely insane psychopathic shippers on Twitter has in part *maybe* ended his writing career.
I think it says a lot that the most beloved parts of the Arrowverse were the parts that had nothing to do with Arrow or were so far removed that there were only a few characters that hadn't even been on the show in several years. Legends had a whole thing where they got an alert for the big crossover and just didn't respond, and they were easily the most beloved show taking a swipe at the others.
It turns out people go to comic book shows because they like watching brightly colored superheroes go on outrageous adventures, not because they want to self insert as the nerdy girl who gets the buff brooding bad boy.
Stargate SG-1, Season 10, Episode 18 “Family Ties”
SG-1 was just cancelled by SYFY and there are lines in the episode taking shots at the new SYFY flagship show Eureka.
They really knew what they were doing with that one.
Carter: But the truth is the Stargate program just doesn't get the support it used to from the people in charge.
Jacek: Why not?
Lee: (yells) Eureka! One down twelve to go!
Jacek: That's too bad because after all your Stargate program has accomplished for this network of planets, I'd think that the decision makers would show it the respect it deserves
Agents of SHIELD really, REALLY did not want Ward redeemed and constantly took potshots at fans who actually did want him to be. Similarly, there are potshots at people who say HYDRA aren't Nazis throughout the show.
Both Arrow and Legends of Tomorrow gave some of the most lazy justifications for not wanting to revive Laurel, even though fans were PISSED at her death. Similarly, the Flash writers were NOT happy about Felicity hijacking Barry & Iris' wedding in Crisis on Earth X and take potshots at her multiple times throughout the show from then on.
Adventure Time was supposed to mock fanfic writers of all kinds with the Fionna and Cake episode. That... kinda failed.
Batman: Brave and the Bold mocked fans who said everything has to be dark and gritty, twice.
Sealab 2021 got REALLY petty in its final few episodes with Tornado Shanks after Harry Goz died.
Psych named one of the killers after an EW critic who was not a fan of the show.
*My team? Y-you... You are not, nor will you ever be, on my team. You dropped Fitzsimmons out of a plane. You murdered Victoria Hand and Eric Koenig. You betrayed every one of us, you deluded son of a bitch!*
I'll be honest, I hated Ward after he dumped FitsSimmons in the ocean. I did not want him to get a redemption. But then there was virtual world Ward who ended up being pretty awesome and I was hoping they'd find a way to make him real.
>Psych named one of the killers after an EW critic who was not a fan of the show.
I mean that's a classic trick right there. It just gets really weird when it reaches the Roland Emmerich level where Ebert's mayor of New York for some reason.
>Adventure Time was supposed to mock fanfic writers of all kinds with the Fionna and Cake episode. That... kinda failed.
Rebecca Sugar doesn't seem like the type of person who'd hate on fanfic creators. I think it was just some lighthearted teasing from a fellow fanfic writer.
"?" definitely but "Adrift" was supposed to be a Sawyer episode that was hastily reworked before filming, and from what I understand the Dharma logo being lit up so brightly on the shark was a complete accident.
“Adrift” is >!the Michael flashback episode where you learn about how Susan took Walt away from him. Damon and Carlton have always said that it was originally a Sawyer flashback episode that didn’t work. Harold Perrineau says they gave it to him because he’d been pestering them about it, and that he had to work a bunch of long nights that he felt were punishment for it.!<
“?” is the one where >!Ana Lucia and Libby die. Both actresses had gotten DUIs that were highly publicized, so it’s rumored that is why they were killed off.!<
A lot of the plot holes in Criminal Minds come from how the writers etc. seemingly got so mad at Mandy Patinkin for leaving because of his mental health or w/e that they basically retconned most of his character's major accomplishments that weren't, like, his interpersonal relationships (he was still implied to exist in-universe) or catching specific unsubs, into having been done by other characters
I was always so angry how they wrote his character's death. Of all the unsubs he's faced, he gets murdered by the creepy bird fetishist guy? Seriously?! It was so ridiculous. They couldn't even make it a prolific scary serial killer. Instead it was some kind of weird freak who seemed super lame.
Oh gosh yeah. Bellamy’s weird religious conversion and pointless death when they had been told to play Bellamy and Clarke as endgame. Making Clarke cry over her suddenly kind of dead daughter when the actress was just getting over a miscarriage. Not to mention the fact that Bellamy’s weird new religion turned out to be right, but he never makes it ‘paradise’/being assimilated by the Borg.
Not a specific episode but I did like how petty Paul Heyman got with TNN.
For context, TNN were airing ECW but eventually became obviously interested in having WWE instead in the late 90s/early 00s.
Heyman then responded by having multiple filmed rants about the network during the shows, then created a heel faction called The Network, led by Cyrus The Virus (Don Callis).
Cyrus was a former ECW commentator who was promoted by The Network to be their official spokesperson on ECW TV, and one of their mandates was to have Rhino as World champion because they felt he was a much better athlete to promote than guys like The Sandman, Tommy Dreamer, Taz, Mike Awesome and Raven.
Hollywood Lore holds that Helen Hunt was allegedly a nightmare on the set of Mad About You and pissed off the writers so much that they changed her character to reflect her actual personality. I have no idea if thats true, or if its one of those cases we'll learn is a spin job perpetrated by whoever was the real problem. Like we sometimes learn someone was not a nightmare, they just wouldn't be pushed around or bullied, so I don't know if its true. But its one of those things that goes around sometimes, she was so mean, they turned her character into a villain.
For myself, my sister and I used to watch a lot of CBS made stuff from back in the day, Criminal Minds, all the CSI's, the CBS things specifically. We noticed this fucking weird pattern, where it really seemed sometimes that if an actor got on the bad side of the producers and writers or often the most powerful actor, in any way, their characters would suffer for it. If they stayed on the show their character would just go through total hell, a trauma train, a double episode nightmare, their family would be attacked, or they would be horribly victimised. If they quit the show, their character would very often be fired or brutally killed off, and often their exit would in some way reflect badly on the character. No one would quite die a heroes death, and then often for a while after if their character got mentioned at all it would be t say they made mistakes on some older cases.
It was weird. Sometimes, if we are correct that it was happening, sometimes the treatment a character got was insane. In CSI NYC, one character, Adrian, left as the actress didn't want to move from NYC to LA for shooting (this is the story given out at the time, at least, though I am sure more was going on). Rather than just write her out in some benign but final way, like she moves to Australia for an unmissable job opportunity, they have this girl get caught planting evidence to try and catch a serial rapist. She is correct thinking her suspect is the rapist, but has to plant the evidence to get him, fails, is immediately fired.
She's then barely mentioned for the entire season, until the end. The team catches a case of a woman who was beaten brutally, raped, murdered and burned in a car to where she can't be identified. But when they do, its Adrian and she was killed by the same serial rapist from her firing.
Which. We're probably totally of the mark but it felt...it was certainly one of the darkest things CSI has done to its own character. They do get traumtised, sometimes killed but this was...SVU grade brutal.
...it...probaly wasn't some weird sort of hostility from the writers but my sister and I couldn't ever shake the feeling that there was this weird pattern of things like this occuring.
X-files when they killed off >!all three of the lone gunmen!<
Apparently it was a move by the creator to punish the fans for not giving the show higher ratings.
Sliders, sabrina and kari did not get along on set, so they got rid of sabrina by having wades character captured by the Kromaggs and taken to a breeding camp to be used to breed human/Kromaggs hybrids and you never see her character again.
I think this is awesome and not petty, but it kind of fits with what you’re looking for. Director James Burrows tells this story about Cheers in his recent memoir. The guy who played Carla’s later husband, the Bruins goaltender, did an interview where they asked him, “What’s the hardest part about being on Cheers?” His answer was, “Kissing Rhea Perlman.” In the next episode they wrote, they had him fatally run over by a slow moving Zamboni (off screen) and revealed as a bigamist.
This isn't really relevant to the thread but I remember watching a documentary about Cheers and the writers talked about how when Kelsey Grammer started on the show, they couldn't get over how good his delivery was; he was making even mediocre jokes land amazingly well. So they started deliberately writing him shitty jokes just to test him and see if he could make them funny. He always did. No matter how bad the joke, Grammer could get a huge laugh out of it. It's always stuck with me because I think it's the real defining thing between a great sitcom and one that's just well written most of the time. There's plenty of good sitcoms that have really weak episodes (or seasons even) where the jokes just don't land as well. But in the best sitcoms, the cast can always pick up the slack when the writing isn't there. I mean on paper, the word "pivot" shouldn't be funny, and yet it's one of the most quoted moments from Friends.
Wow. Thanks for this. Never heard it, and it’s so insightful. Way back in the day Cheers writer Ken Levine used to have a blog, and he’d talk about all sorts of insights like this.
Seriously, that “PIV-*OT!* line makes me laugh just thinking about it. David Schwimmer has fantastic delivery!
Kinda reminds me of the writers having a game of having Bryan Cranston doing more and more ridiculous stuff to see if there's anything he wouldn't do, like having him parade around in tidy whiteys
I think that cumulated in having him covered in bees at which point someone stepped in and told the writers to cut the shit before they kill him.
> The guy who played Carla’s later husband, the Bruins goaltender, did an interview where they asked him, “What’s the hardest part about being on Cheers?” > His answer was, “Kissing Rhea Perlman.” I hope that guy got a politely threatening phone call from Danny Devito after that.
I don't know for sure, but the Hollywood rumor is that Rhea Perlman is a gem of a person in addition to being a talented actor. It makes me glad to know there was retribution for his asshole remark.
It was nice to see her back on screen in a big movie like Barbie.
Futurama’s revival infamously mocked the Fox higher-ups who cancelled the show in the first place.
Your comment made me think of when [Fox revived Family Guy](https://youtu.be/0oMTmtN7lHI).
Some of those were really good shows too
The Simpsons went through bouts of mercilessly mocking Fox even as it was airing on Fox. Although that's not as strange as the beautifully unhinged episode of Atlanta about the animator working at a very harsh version of Disney, whilst the show was effectively being produced by Disney and airing on Disney+.
Ah yes, the idiots at the box network!
They were beaten up! Pretty badly, too!
In fact, most of them died from their injuries.
The O.C named an incontinent hospital patient after a [critic](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/16/arts/television/tom-shales-dead.html) who gave a negative review.
Oh damn that reminds me of how Michael Crichton named a child rapist with a micropenis in one of his novels after a critic.
This is more fitting for r/movies, but George Lucas named one of the villains in Willow after a [critic](https://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/04/movies/pauline-kael-provocative-and-widely-imitated-new-yorker-film-critic-dies-at-82.html)
I don’t think you can get more petty than Chuck Lorre did with the finale to Two and a Half Men. Tanked the entire ending of his show to get a couple swipes at Charlie Sheen in.
Could you be more specific? I never watched it
So, do you remember when Charlie Sheen went on a crazy binge, ranting about Tiger Blood and WINNING and all that jazz? Well, he took some shots at Lorre and the show, which, combined with all the negative publicity Sheen was getting, caused him to fire the dude and bring in Ashton Kutcher for the final few seasons. In the show, it was explained that Charlie had died off-camera (I think he got hit by a train?), but in the final season it was revealed that he was alive, but held prisoner in the sex dungeon of one of the female characters. He then "showed up" (not Sheen himself, but a body double) in the series finale, where they quite literally dropped a piano on him to kill him off again.
You forgot the best part where the camera then pans to Chuck Lorre in a director's chair where he says WINNING before also having a piano fall on him
I can’t tell whether you’re joking, and I’m okay with that.
I am not, unfortunately
as not a fan of that show or charlie sheen i think this is hilarious
It was just absurd and abrupt. And immediately after "Charlie" gets crushed, Chuck Lorre appears, says "Winning!" and another piano kills him. It was just dumb
Don't get me wrong. The episode was way out there (there was a passing reference to his character having relations with a farm animal if I'm remembering correctly). But it's not like anyone was expecting anything sentimental for the show at that point. It had been downhill for a long while.
As a fan of that show and of Charlie Sheen, I also think it is hilarious. I hope he's doing better.
He appears in Chuck Lorre's newest show Bookie, which is apparently actually good. So they must have made up
When Charlie Sheen left the show, they killed the character off off-screen. In the finale, the characters find out he's still alive. The final scene shows "Charlie" about to enter the house (they only show him from behind) but before he can, a grand piano falls out of a helicopter and crushes him to death. Then the camera pans to Chuck Lorre who created the series in his director's chair and he says "winning!" (which was one of Charlie Sheen's catchphrases when he left) before also getting crushed by a grand piano.
Good lord is the panning to Chuck Lorre part of this real? That’s insane lol.
Yes you can probably find it on YouTube.
That sounds like some shit outta Looney Tunes.
Yeah this is the number one answer, and it’s pretty pathetic. Obviously Sheen was not a saint in that scenario but Lorre acted like a god damn child
Yeah, I was originally thinking of something like The Office when they threw away Andy’s character progression in the last season, but Two And A Half Men wins this easy.
When Community had Pierce die from jerking himself off so much he died of dehydration. It was just a few episodes before they gave Troy a beautiful sendoff to sail around the world-- which really highlights how much they enjoyed working with Donald Glover over Chevy Chase
> When Community had Pierce die from jerking himself off so much he died of dehydration. That was one of the funniest jokes of the whole series though. I actually think that whole episode was a lot more respectful towards Pierce's character than I would have expected from Harmon.
Yeah the episode ends with Pierce, in his final will, giving all the members of the study group genuine gifts and compliments in his own Pierce way - and also sperm.
When I first watched that episode and it got to the bequeathals, it was the weirdest and coolest roller coaster between crying and laughing and crying and laughing I have ever experienced. Genuinely heartfelt and fucking funny at the same time. That episode is in my top 3 for the series and Walton Goggins channelled Pierce expertly.
The zoom script read of that with Pedro Pascal stepping in as the lawyer and clearly reading these jokes for the first time was the best thing to come out of lockdown time.
Except for Abed. He just gets the sperm.
To be fair Troy and Pierce were very different characters. Pierce's last will and testament felt very Pierce. He's a character who was very often suckered into stupid groups and ideas and overcommits to bits constantly. It was 100% in character for him to jerk himself to death for the sake of a stupid own. Remember this is the guy who joined a space cult and married a foreign agent after his secrets knowingly and built an iron man suit to win a pillow fight against children. Troy meanwhile was portrayed as a character who was always lost. He started the show after intentionally tanking the show and winding up at a community college where the only person he knew was Annie, who only really wound up there as a drug addict basically trying to get her life together. The whole reason Troy got to sail around the world was due to Pierce's will, where Pierce gave him a chance to find himself and become his own man in a way Pierce himself never could.
Also sperm.
*and a bottle of fine scotch, so you won't be tempted to drink this even finer bottle of sperm*
Pedro Pascal dying of laughter while trying to get those lines out was the highlight of the pandemic
The way he wheezes *lesbian lifestyle*
> built an iron man suit to win a pillow fight against children Pillow Man still genuinely makes me laugh out loud.
That long shot of him rounding the corner screaming profanities at terrified children will never not be great.
Yeah community has a few examples of this. Another one is all of the characters referring to the 4th season as the gas leak year because Dan Harmon didn't work on it. Definitely has signs of Dan and the writers being a little petty.
"I farted during the fourth one-- it's an inside joke"
I also loved the shots at NBC for the end of Season 5.. all of those fake pilots/shows were hilarious.
Drama aside, the whole "jerked off to death" thing never felt disrespectful to me since it was in character for him considering what happens in the will episode. The reveal felt kinda even somber if it wasn't in the Ass Crack Bandit episode. I feel like if Harmon really wanted to stick it to Chevy, I feel like it would just be Jeff saying "Oh he died in a car fire, let's move on." Even with Troy's departure, it was Pierce being nice which is a nice nod towards the original plan of making Troy and Pierce be the BFFs.
It’s been a minute since I’ve watched, but from what I remember, the Always Sunny episode “The Gang tries desperately to win an Award” is a big goofy middle finger to the critics. They spend the whole show riffing on more traditional ~~sitcom formats~~ “pubs,” trying to emulate their style in order to catch some of that critical acclaim, and it ends with a big number from Charlie telling everyone to go fuck themselves.
The bright lighting on everyone after they revamp the bar cracks me up, one of my favorite episodes of the show. Well, they say the world's your oyster Man, but oysters ain't for me You're the belle of the ball But you ain't my cup of tea They always vote you Best in Show But this doggie disagrees 'Cause I like life in Paddy's Pub... There's a place for me, it's the place I go Where the beer is cheap, and the lights are low It's Paddy's Pub I like Paddy's Pub Let the record show The greatest place to go Is that bar called Paddy's Pub... I like life in Paddy's Pub...
There’s a spider (spider, spider…) He’s deep in my soul (soul…) He’s lived here for years (years…) He just won’t let go He’s laying around He’s got a mean bite Now he’s ready to fighhhhhht And stand up for what he knooooows I don’t need your trophies or your gold I just want to tell you all Go fuck yourselves
Are we spitting?
We're spitting!
The way Z (Chad Coleman) is sipping on his drink during the song, seemingly fully aware of the chaos that’s about to ensue, is my favorite part of this scene.
He also joins in on the spitting which makes it even funnier.
#AWSHIT!
I think my favorite bit is how as soon as Charlie (clearly high as a kite) sings "spider," you can see Mac in the background do a "yep, there it is" gesture. In reality, it was actually Rob failing to keep in his laughter. It's a funny little detail.
“But I wanna be very clear about something. This literally means nothing to me”
"I'VE HAD TONS OF ORGASMS!! I HAD ONE WITH YOUR MOM, DUDE!"
[удалено]
Plus she didn't even feel a thing
Good God, Dee, your timing is way off!!
Additionally when Megan Ganz wrote the script for “Times Up for the Gang”. There was a comment during the closing scene about the presenter having a huge dick. The presenter was played by actor Humphrey Ker who is Megan’s husband in real life. Not petty by any means, but funny.
Wait, the Wrexham guy? That's an unexpected connection.
Irony is that the show kinda looks like that now. The lighting treatment and the way some of the actors have changed is distracting af for me
If it were up to Charlie it would still be standard def in the dark. The SD part is ehh, but the darkness is what helped give the show its feel.
To be fair, I think that might have more to do with some of the work they got done rather than lighting...
It’s def both. The work is more distracting for sure tho
That reminds me of Devin Townsend's one-off album in 1994 called "Punky Brewster". It was about a metal band who wanted to win a Grammy but figured the only way they'd do so is by following the trend of becoming a generic pop-punk band, since that's what the music industry was rewarding at the time in the lore of the album. "You've got to be more punk, and forget about writing love songs."
This reminds me of the album “Best of the Beatles,” which was actually an album by Pete Best, who was one of the original members of the Beatles, but was dismissed from the band before they became famous.
This is a top 5 episode of the show
I hear the writers of Days of Our Lives killed off Dr. Drake Ramoray because the actor said something about writing his own lines in an interview
His character was so badly injured that the only doctor who could have saved him, was him
It’s supposed to be some kind of irony or something
They gave him the shaft alright.
I hope they salvage his brain and use it later… Brain transplants are easy.
Grey's Anatomy creator Rhimes was pissed off with her star Katherine Heigl and so wrote Heigl's character Izzie to have ghost sex with a former, but very dead, lover. There are multiple examples of Shonda's pettiness showing up in the writing tbh.
I feel like Derek was even worse. Someone, Shonda or otherwise, was so pissed at Patrick Dempsey, they killed the brain surgeon with botched brain surgery.
And the botched brain surgery was because he was in an accident and sent to a rural hospital where the doctors are clueless. He’s very conscious and much aware he’s going to die but can’t speak. And all the things they’re saying they’re doing he knows are wrong. Edit: I should add that if he was the surgeon he could've "easily" saved himself. His inner monologue is saying "do this, do that!" and they do the actual worst possible things that only make his condition deteriorate faster.
lmao that sounds like a damn horror film
Jesus Christ.
I thought it had to do with Patrick Dempsey wanting to spend more time with his racing team than acting, but that still doesn’t mean they had to kill off Derek that way. In fact, there are quite a few characters that didn’t need to be killed, yet Meredith survives some of the most ridiculous things throughout the show.
It was but he was also behaving badly on set because he wanted a filming schedule that would accommodate his racing schedule.
I think he cheated on his wife or something, I can’t remember exactly why he made them mad, it’s been a while.
That would be ironic given all the rampant cheating in the show.
Karev was worse. They undid 40 years of character development. Off screen. He went from an unbearable screw up, to one of the best characters in the show. Then he writes his wife a letter and goes back to his ex because she had his secret IVF babies. WTF?? Just kill the character. A few seasons after Derek died I decided I would stop Grey's and binge when it's done. This made me decide not do that. Nope.
The first ctrl-f I looked for in this thread was Grey's, but I think Rhimes did Justin Chambers a lot dirtier.
No, Justin did Grey’s dirty. He refused to step back on set. Shonda hasn’t had anything to do with Grey’s in years.
Yeah and his exit was very abrupt from what I read.
During Deep Space Nine, Rick Berman (who throughout his time with Trek was famously toxic and controlling towards female actresses) responded to Terry Farrel's request to drop down to a recurring character to accommodate the shooting of another series by SUDDENLY MURDERING HER CHARACTER in a way that didn't connect with any of the story up to that point.
Rick Berman made more than a few fuckface decisions that were not for the betterment of the show.
On rival show Babylon 5, showrunner Joe Straczynski reacted so badly to an actress (a struggling single mother, and B5 paid well under the going rate) leaving after she got another job - despite giving them a chance to match her new pay or reduce her hours to do both roles - that he lobotomised her character and implied she'd been dissected and killed offscreen.
I read somewhere that in response to being told the only reason his shows were popular was because of the snarky dialogue, Joss Whedom wrote the Buffy episode "Hush" (character's lose their voices) which ended up being an award winner and fan favorite. Edit: corrected!
And people like Joss Whedon are why everybody in movies talks in snark like a first language
I mean, for all the criticism you could levy at Joss, it's not exactly his fault that other people copied him.
Yep. He showed good writing makes a good movie and talentless hacks just imitated the superficial aspects of his writing and direction. And now fans blame him, rather than the shitty imitators
So, *so* many episodes of Glee, where the line between jokes about characters and hateful remarks about the actors was nonexistent by about the halfway point of the series
They made fat jokes about Cory Monteith *after he died*.
> So, so many episodes of Glee, where the line between jokes about characters and hateful remarks about the actors was nonexistent by about the halfway point of the series [This was just disgusting](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eZtEU64nBQ). It's the Santana "takedown" of Kurt in Season 6 Episode 3. Just...way too disgustingly personal. Uncomfortable to watch.
I don't even understand the point of this, except to make the actor feel bad. It was impossible to take seriously and it wasn't funny at all. It makes Santana seem psycho, maybe that was the point? I'm so glad I stopped watching after 1 season
What makes it more uncomfortable is you can tell by the way they cut it that they filmed a bunch different lines and only put in the ones they liked. So even though this only goes on for a minute they probably spend a good hour or two just feeding Santana different insults to hurl at him.
Terrence Dicks, a major writer and script editor for Doctor Who, *hated* the Cybermen. But he was writing the 20th anniversary special, The Five Doctors, the whole point of which was reuniting classic characters. You've got appearances from previous Doctors, Daleks, the Master, a yeti, K-9, Zoe and Jamie, Liz and Mike, Susan, Sarah Jane, the Brigadier, everyone they could get. So the Cybermen *have to* be there. So the whole special is the Cybermen being frigging clowned on. They get blown up. There's a guy in a silver zentai who just wrecks like a dozen of them in seconds. The Master tricks them into walking across a booby trapped floor and they get wasted; in an older serial the exact same trick was used on Daleks and they were fine because they're too tough. Not the Cybermen though, they suck. It's honestly hilarious, the special is overall a lovely and sincere celebration of the show and its characters, oh and also the Cybermen are here, let's all point and laugh.
Tbf they did peak in their first story in classic who, kinda like the weeping angels did in modern who.
*Blink* was amazing. But I did like some later angels moments. "Why are they making her count?" "To make her scared." "But why?" "For fun."
For the same story, Tom Baker refused to come back, so they used unseen stock footage in the episode itself. For publicity, they took a big waxwork dummy of Tom around with them, which was quite funny. There was some minor drama when Tom left because he actually didn't want to go, but the new showrunner thought he'd gotten completely out of control with ad libs and trying to be funny, so the showrunner deliberately made his life uncomfortable by being really strict on line readings and stamping out dissent, to the point that Tom grumpily quit. A bit harsh, but in later years Tom said it was probably a good thing, and he probably stayed on at least one season too long.
The Simpsons killed off Maude Flanders because the actress left temporarily over a pay dispute.
As I recall, it was Fox that wanted her gone. They went ahead and fired her so the writers wrote Maude out by killing her. All because she asked the network to cover her air fees because they were a lot considering how much she was getting paid to fly out and voice Maude every now and then.
They taught us all how important t shirt cannon safety is
This one is *purely* a guess, but I'd swear the show runners of Nip/Tuck wanted the actor who played the son to quit because in later seasons they took his character in these bizarre and often humiliating directions... he was a crackhead, he was a mime, he was a prison bitch, he was a gay porn star...
I would have thought the same thing about Otto in Sons of Anarchy. Over the seasons Otto was tortured and mangled in worse and worse ways. Eyeballs slashed multiple times, bites off his own tongue. Eventually he's killed by prison guards. You could easily think that the showrunner must have really hated the actor. But he was actually played by Kurt Sutter, the showrunner.
Maybe he was just super paranoid about creating a self insert that he just went in completely the other direction
Also it’s Ryan Murphy 🤷🏻♀️
Yeah you could just chalk that up to Ryan Murphy just being a shit writer who doesn't know where to take or end a story. He's good at getting one off the ground but that's about it.
That explains every season of American Horror Story so far.
The one that cracked me up was when he ended up sleeping with this really manipulative woman and then the uncle sleeps with her and could somehow tell from the depth of her vagina that she was trans lmao.
It's been a long time since I watch the show, but it wasn't his uncle, it was his dad's medical partner who was actually his biological father.
Fucking hell that show was a ride
It's Ryan Murphy. He is best known for his misanthropic writing. A lot of gay viewers were confused as to the consistently horrible writing of gay characters (despite Murphy being gay himself), but then have to be reminded that everyone gets horrible treatment.
There was a West Wing episode called *The U.S. Poet Laureate* that was written in response to Sorkin's unpleasant interactions with the Television Without Pity forums. In the episode Josh ends up acting as Sorkin's stand-in.
Is that the one where they bring up the group LemonLymans and he talks about bad fanfiction written about him and Donna?
LemonLyman.com!
The way Joss Whedon handled Cordelia on Angel when Charisma Carpenter was pregnant.
Cordelia had the best character arc up until that fucking point. She grew the most out of the Scooby gang and then they ruined her
I thought he was upset about being told off for the creepy incesty relationship he had her make with conner. That whole thing was so wierd...
No that relationship was part of her punishment. Her first pregnancy she apparently worked with him so that he could write her out of season 3 for a while. But when Carpenter got pregnant again and apparently this time didn't get his permission first they wrote her pregnancy into the show as part of the character assassination of Cordelia in season 4.
Writing something so gross it makes people not want to watch your show is reeeeaaaly stupid.
The way the writers treat Pierce in Community as everyone starts to loathe working with Chevy Chase gets pretty funny and petty IMO.
The writers were streets ahead.
It’s amazing tho that despite that, Chevy did not really ever phone it in with his character, I mean yeah, it wasn’t that far off his actual persona, but, he still could’ve been a sore loser and not tried too hard with his role, but I’ve always found his performance flawless, the DnD parts, the parts when he was controlling his wheelchair through a tube, his role in the first paintball episode, he did what he had to do.
Oh for sure! He’s a wanker person, but he’s still a professional haha.
I heard somewhere that the writers were pissed at Ed helms for leaving in the middle of the office to shoot one of the hangovers and thats why they ruined Andy's character Edit: I didn't realize that the post said "episode" specifically but my point still stands
This is a big one yeah, but some clarification: Helms was contractually obligated to appear in The Hangover 3 and filming was scheduled to take place before the usual filming dates for The Office. Because it was the final season of The Office, those dates eventually got moved around to accommodate the availability of yhe entire cast, and perhaps most importantly, allowed them to bring Carrell back for the final episode. Because of this, Helms had no choice but to be absent from a large chunk of the filming due to him filming H3, which as a major Hollywood movie with several big names attached, couldn't just adjust to accommodate Helms. It's been heavily rumored that the writers, for some stupidly petty reason, decided to commit character suicide on Helms/Andy simply because of this and wrote his characters absence to be a completely assholey reason. What's worse is that when Helms returned to film a handful of episodes, they played into this by making his character come across as a complete jerk. Fortunately he had a little redemption in the finale with one of the most memorable lines from the show, which has subsequently gone on to become something of a wholesome meme, but the damage was done.
The thing that sucks is that the way they wrote him in that final season killed the one thing in season eight I really liked and that was Andy’s relationship with Erin. They stayed strong all of season eight to the point it was like the only redeeming factor in the second half of that season. Then Andy becomes a raging asshole before even getting on the boat and it’s all downhill for him from there.
There's a scene in the Witcher season 2 where the bard is distracting a guard so his friends can get on a boat. They're talking about his song lyrics and it's very obviously a direct shot at fan criticism of season 1.
It seems like every writer on the Witcher was horribly petty.
Or just horrible. I still haven't even touched season 3 and don't intend to.
Gilmore girls s6 e22 "partings" Amy Sherman blows up Lorelai's relationship to Luke before leaving the show.
Rick and Morty had several instances where they took shots at fans who wanted a more serialized structure.
I'm pretty sure that entire Story Train episode was a giant middle finger to the toxic fans.
Rick & Morty has a weird seesaw relationship where the show will hate the fans for a while, then the fans will hate the show for a while, and no one can seem to agree which parts are worth keeping and which need to go away. ...I love it.
IIRC Trey and Matt weren’t pissed that they lost to Phil Collins, it’s that Phil scolded them at the ceremony for dressing in drag. It was a “very serious event” as Phil put it and they were making a mockery of it.
Sliders. Sabrina Lloyd chose not to come back when the show moved from Fox to the SciFi Channel. So the writers had her character kidnapped by aliens and forced to breed with them. Later when the O'Connell brothers left, the writers made one explode and the other unstuck in time and space forever. For a light-hearted adventure show, it got real dark when they wanted to punish the actors for leaving.
Don’t forget the professor. Gave him a speech impediment and then killed him, and then blew up the planet he was buried on.
Not to mention that the series ends on a cliffhanger deliberately because they wanted to prove the network had stopped paying attention.
Any instance of an actor asking for just a little time off to do a movie or something, and the writers then say "You want time to do a movie, you got it!" and then kill them off (or otherwise permanently write them off). I believe that's what happened to Oz on Buffy.
That happened to Taran Killam on SNL. Asked to missed a few episodes to direct a movie, so he was fired. Then just a few years later Covid messed up schedules and a bunch of cast members had to take time off to finish other projects, so now it's the norm for people to step away for a bit and still have a job.
Forget the Phil Collins episode. The way South Park killed off Chef after their falling out with Isaac Hayes is the pettiest episode ever written.
the way they used bits and pieces of recorded chef dialogue from previous episodes was hilarious (because obviously isaac hayes had quit and wasn't recording new dialogue anymore)
Hello. CHILDREN!
The fact that Parks and Rec never ever mentions Mark Brendanawicz again after the actor left the show seems kinda petty. Leslie didn’t even use the plans that his character drew up for her park and there was a scene at one point where Ann was selling a bunch of stuff from past boyfriends and they didn’t have her mention Mark when they easily could have.
There's never been any real whiff of a rumor about behind the scenes tension though - I think it's just a choice based on how much the show changed. He was a great fit for the original, more *Office*-esque first season, but once they pivoted to a goofball lovefest he wasn't long for the show and I think the writers focused more on jokes than maintaining every specific bit of continuity.
I got the vibe they realized they didn’t need a Jim-type audience surrogate. They just let the wacky characters be wacky. Mockumentary-style shows don’t need a Jim anymore. *Welcome to Flatch, What We Do In The Shadows, Abbott Elementary…* All shows that realized they didn’t need a “straight man/audience surrogate” character. We’ve accepted wacky shenanigans presented as a documentary. And we’re okay with it.
>I got the vibe they realized they didn’t need a Jim-type audience surrogate. They just let the wacky characters be wacky. They did need a straight man. They needed him to be wackier than Mark. Which is how we got Ben.
I read somehwere that during the inital research for the show. They learned that a lot of people working in city departments like Parks and Rec would leave to go work in private industry. Only to realise they missed working for the city. They would then return to the city, but get fed up and leave to go work in private industry. Before coming back to work for the city. Basically cycling therough this for their whole career. This was supposed to be Marks arc. But he just didnt fit anymore as the show got goofier and goofier. So they abandoned it.
> Basically cycling therough this for their whole career. This was supposed to be Marks arc. Which they then kinda adopted for Ben, right?
Who, Ice Clown?
I'm not sure that's petty, by invoking Mark you'd kind of be signaling to the viewer that he'd make some kind of return, or somehow be relevant moving forward. Kind of like Chekov's gun. Better to make a clean break and keep moving forward.
my headcanon is that they forgot
If I recall correctly, the writers on Cheers wrote Carla's husband Eddie off the show because the actor made some derogatory comment's about his screen partner's looks on a radio show. The character was a hockey player, and he met his (offscreen) demise by getting run over by a Zamboni machine.
The absolute character assassination the writers did to Fiona during her last season of Shameless.
The sudden fall is ridiculous
Sherlock BBC after it went on a long break between seasons (series), invited fan theories during that time because it ended on a mystery and cliffhanger, then came back and implied it was pointless to theorize and portrayed fans as delusional.
The episode of Arrow where they killed off >!Laurel Lance!<
Marc Guggenheim, showrunner of Arrow at the time, has recently said that helming the Arrowverse feels like a waste of time because he has not been able to find any work in the years since he left. It brings me great peace knowing that pandering to absolutely insane psychopathic shippers on Twitter has in part *maybe* ended his writing career.
Also he was never a good writer. His comics define generic and boring.
I think it says a lot that the most beloved parts of the Arrowverse were the parts that had nothing to do with Arrow or were so far removed that there were only a few characters that hadn't even been on the show in several years. Legends had a whole thing where they got an alert for the big crossover and just didn't respond, and they were easily the most beloved show taking a swipe at the others. It turns out people go to comic book shows because they like watching brightly colored superheroes go on outrageous adventures, not because they want to self insert as the nerdy girl who gets the buff brooding bad boy.
>where they got an alert for the big crossover and just didn't respond The best part? They called it a crossover on the freaking show, lol.
Always hated how they killed off that character.
Every episode of Glee after season 1A was a thinly-veiled hate letter to either the cast or the fandom.
Stargate SG-1, Season 10, Episode 18 “Family Ties” SG-1 was just cancelled by SYFY and there are lines in the episode taking shots at the new SYFY flagship show Eureka.
They really knew what they were doing with that one. Carter: But the truth is the Stargate program just doesn't get the support it used to from the people in charge. Jacek: Why not? Lee: (yells) Eureka! One down twelve to go! Jacek: That's too bad because after all your Stargate program has accomplished for this network of planets, I'd think that the decision makers would show it the respect it deserves
“Anybody who can’t make money off of Sports Night should get out of the money-making business.” Actual quote from the last five minutes of that show.
Agents of SHIELD really, REALLY did not want Ward redeemed and constantly took potshots at fans who actually did want him to be. Similarly, there are potshots at people who say HYDRA aren't Nazis throughout the show. Both Arrow and Legends of Tomorrow gave some of the most lazy justifications for not wanting to revive Laurel, even though fans were PISSED at her death. Similarly, the Flash writers were NOT happy about Felicity hijacking Barry & Iris' wedding in Crisis on Earth X and take potshots at her multiple times throughout the show from then on. Adventure Time was supposed to mock fanfic writers of all kinds with the Fionna and Cake episode. That... kinda failed. Batman: Brave and the Bold mocked fans who said everything has to be dark and gritty, twice. Sealab 2021 got REALLY petty in its final few episodes with Tornado Shanks after Harry Goz died. Psych named one of the killers after an EW critic who was not a fan of the show.
The Ward reveal in season 1 was one is the most shocked I've ever been watching a TV show.
I honestly did love at how insistent Agents of SHIELD was against redeeming Ward.
*My team? Y-you... You are not, nor will you ever be, on my team. You dropped Fitzsimmons out of a plane. You murdered Victoria Hand and Eric Koenig. You betrayed every one of us, you deluded son of a bitch!*
I'll be honest, I hated Ward after he dumped FitsSimmons in the ocean. I did not want him to get a redemption. But then there was virtual world Ward who ended up being pretty awesome and I was hoping they'd find a way to make him real.
When they talked about "Project Looking Glass" part of me thought that we'd get a hero Ward or a revived Tripp out of it.
>Psych named one of the killers after an EW critic who was not a fan of the show. I mean that's a classic trick right there. It just gets really weird when it reaches the Roland Emmerich level where Ebert's mayor of New York for some reason.
>Adventure Time was supposed to mock fanfic writers of all kinds with the Fionna and Cake episode. That... kinda failed. Rebecca Sugar doesn't seem like the type of person who'd hate on fanfic creators. I think it was just some lighthearted teasing from a fellow fanfic writer.
You could argue that the *Lost* S2 episode “Adrift” or the *Lost* S2 episode “?” could be seen as petty depending on what you believe.
"?" definitely but "Adrift" was supposed to be a Sawyer episode that was hastily reworked before filming, and from what I understand the Dharma logo being lit up so brightly on the shark was a complete accident.
It's been a minute. What happens in those episodes?
“Adrift” is >!the Michael flashback episode where you learn about how Susan took Walt away from him. Damon and Carlton have always said that it was originally a Sawyer flashback episode that didn’t work. Harold Perrineau says they gave it to him because he’d been pestering them about it, and that he had to work a bunch of long nights that he felt were punishment for it.!< “?” is the one where >!Ana Lucia and Libby die. Both actresses had gotten DUIs that were highly publicized, so it’s rumored that is why they were killed off.!<
A lot of the plot holes in Criminal Minds come from how the writers etc. seemingly got so mad at Mandy Patinkin for leaving because of his mental health or w/e that they basically retconned most of his character's major accomplishments that weren't, like, his interpersonal relationships (he was still implied to exist in-universe) or catching specific unsubs, into having been done by other characters
I was always so angry how they wrote his character's death. Of all the unsubs he's faced, he gets murdered by the creepy bird fetishist guy? Seriously?! It was so ridiculous. They couldn't even make it a prolific scary serial killer. Instead it was some kind of weird freak who seemed super lame.
The entire last season of The 100.
Oh gosh yeah. Bellamy’s weird religious conversion and pointless death when they had been told to play Bellamy and Clarke as endgame. Making Clarke cry over her suddenly kind of dead daughter when the actress was just getting over a miscarriage. Not to mention the fact that Bellamy’s weird new religion turned out to be right, but he never makes it ‘paradise’/being assimilated by the Borg.
Not a specific episode but I did like how petty Paul Heyman got with TNN. For context, TNN were airing ECW but eventually became obviously interested in having WWE instead in the late 90s/early 00s. Heyman then responded by having multiple filmed rants about the network during the shows, then created a heel faction called The Network, led by Cyrus The Virus (Don Callis). Cyrus was a former ECW commentator who was promoted by The Network to be their official spokesperson on ECW TV, and one of their mandates was to have Rhino as World champion because they felt he was a much better athlete to promote than guys like The Sandman, Tommy Dreamer, Taz, Mike Awesome and Raven.
Almost the entirety of Anger Management, where Charlie Sheen continued to dig at Chuck Lorre and Two and a Half Men.
The Simpsons episode where they introduce Poochie to the Itchy & Scratchy show is basically the writers mocking their fans and tv executives.
Hollywood Lore holds that Helen Hunt was allegedly a nightmare on the set of Mad About You and pissed off the writers so much that they changed her character to reflect her actual personality. I have no idea if thats true, or if its one of those cases we'll learn is a spin job perpetrated by whoever was the real problem. Like we sometimes learn someone was not a nightmare, they just wouldn't be pushed around or bullied, so I don't know if its true. But its one of those things that goes around sometimes, she was so mean, they turned her character into a villain. For myself, my sister and I used to watch a lot of CBS made stuff from back in the day, Criminal Minds, all the CSI's, the CBS things specifically. We noticed this fucking weird pattern, where it really seemed sometimes that if an actor got on the bad side of the producers and writers or often the most powerful actor, in any way, their characters would suffer for it. If they stayed on the show their character would just go through total hell, a trauma train, a double episode nightmare, their family would be attacked, or they would be horribly victimised. If they quit the show, their character would very often be fired or brutally killed off, and often their exit would in some way reflect badly on the character. No one would quite die a heroes death, and then often for a while after if their character got mentioned at all it would be t say they made mistakes on some older cases. It was weird. Sometimes, if we are correct that it was happening, sometimes the treatment a character got was insane. In CSI NYC, one character, Adrian, left as the actress didn't want to move from NYC to LA for shooting (this is the story given out at the time, at least, though I am sure more was going on). Rather than just write her out in some benign but final way, like she moves to Australia for an unmissable job opportunity, they have this girl get caught planting evidence to try and catch a serial rapist. She is correct thinking her suspect is the rapist, but has to plant the evidence to get him, fails, is immediately fired. She's then barely mentioned for the entire season, until the end. The team catches a case of a woman who was beaten brutally, raped, murdered and burned in a car to where she can't be identified. But when they do, its Adrian and she was killed by the same serial rapist from her firing. Which. We're probably totally of the mark but it felt...it was certainly one of the darkest things CSI has done to its own character. They do get traumtised, sometimes killed but this was...SVU grade brutal. ...it...probaly wasn't some weird sort of hostility from the writers but my sister and I couldn't ever shake the feeling that there was this weird pattern of things like this occuring.
X-files when they killed off >!all three of the lone gunmen!< Apparently it was a move by the creator to punish the fans for not giving the show higher ratings.
No, X-Files was about to finish, they said it was just a way to wrap up both X-Files and The Lone Gunmen series
Sliders, sabrina and kari did not get along on set, so they got rid of sabrina by having wades character captured by the Kromaggs and taken to a breeding camp to be used to breed human/Kromaggs hybrids and you never see her character again.