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Role Ending Misdemeanor / Live-Action TV

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There is a two-week waiting period (after the termination of a role) before an example can be added. This ensures the job loss is accurately reported, actually sticks and avoids knee-jerk reactions.


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    In General 
  • The Western Live-Action TV business certainly wasn't left untouched by the "Weinstein effect", with numerous actors and producers seeing themselves booted from prominent shows as a result of sexual misconduct allegations.
    • Netflix announced the cancellation of House of Cards shortly after it was revealed that Kevin Spacey, who played the Villain Protagonist Frank Underwood, had made sexual advances on a then-14-year-old Anthony Rapp in 1986. The initial subsequent plan was to finish production on the sixth season to give the show a proper Grand Finale, but more accusations against Spacey began to spill out, including multiple incidents during the production of the show. This led Netflix to suspend production indefinitely and fire Spacey, with the producers eventually reaching the decision to move forward with wrapping up the series without him, leaving Robin Wright as the sole lead for the final season.
    • PBS programs Charlie Rose and Charlie Rose: The Week ended after the eponymous host of both shows got caught up in his own sexual assault scandal on November 20, 2017 (the first scheduled airing since Rose's fall was replaced with a rerun of Antiques Roadshow). He also lost his gig with CBS as the co-host of CBS This Morning in the fallout, being officially fired by both networks the day after. Rose was ultimately replaced by PBS with Christiane Amanpour and on CBS with John Dickerson, effectively confirming that his 45-year long media career was over. His only appearance on PBS since then has been in an archive interview with RaĂşl Juliá which was shown briefly in a documentary on Juliá in 2019.
    • NBC News fired Today co-anchor Matt Lauer in November 2017 for an undisclosed event of sexual misconduct at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics. It would later be revealed in a book by The New Yorker's Ronan Farrow that the incident was actually an alleged rape of a colleague, Brooke Nevils. She had been working for one of the other Today co-anchors, Meredith Vieira, when it happened and finally felt comfortable enough telling Vieira after the Weinstein story broke. A distraught Vieira advised Nevils to go to HR and get a lawyer and Lauer was soon fired.
    • Andrew Kreisberg, creator of the television series Arrow, The Flash (2014), Supergirl (2015), Legends of Tomorrow was first suspended and then fired after several sexual harassment allegations were made against him. It was rumored that there were threats of a massive walkout from the cast and crew if he was allowed to return. The Supergirl crew went so far as to completely throw out his story outline for the second half of Season 3 and just made up a new ending on the fly, while years later, his idea for Eobard Thawne having a major role in Crisis on Infinite Earths (2019) was also scrapped because everyone was just that uncomfortable filming something that came out of his head.
    • Danny Masterson was fired from his role as supporting character Jameson "Rooster" Bennett on Netflix's The Ranch in December 2017 after accusations of rape against him began to surface. He also took Netflix exec Andy Yeatman with him in the fallout, when Yeatman bluntly said that neither he nor the company believed the accusations (to add insult to injury, he revealed this to one of the accusers, unaware of who she was). He was also not invited back to reprise his role as Steven Hyde on the That '70s Show Sequel Series That '90s Show. Masterson would be convicted of two counts of forcible rape in May 2023 (with the jury hanging 8-4 in favor of conviction on a third count) and was sentenced to 30 years to life in prison that September.
    • Celebrity chef Mario Batali quit ABC's The Chew after several women accused him of "inappropriate touching". Whatever impact the show would have had without Batali was minimized when the show was cancelled later that season.
    • Mere weeks after Charlie Rose lost his jobs, fellow PBS late-night stablemate Tavis Smiley was also fired by PBS following the investigation of multiple sexual misconduct allegations which were found to be credible enough to justify showing him and his program the door.
    • Mark Schwahn, creator of The CW's One Tree Hill and developer of E!'s The Royals, had allegations of sexual harassment made against him from cast and crew members of both shows - resulting in his being suspended from The Royals in November 2017 - and ultimately fired the following month.
    • Jeffrey Tambor faced accusations of sexual assault and was removed from his role as lead character Maura Pfefferman in Prime Video's Transparent. To work around Tambor no longer being involved with the production, the series instead reached its conclusion in a Finale Movie titled Transparent: Musicale Finale, which involved Maura being killed off and the rest of the family reacting to her death.
    • Les Moonves, the man who helped make CBS a prominent network again after it spent the 1990s as a joke in the entertainment industry, resigned from his post as CBS chairman in September 2018 after multiple women accused him of sexual harassment. This led to Julie Chen, Moonves' wife, leaving The Talk due to this conflict of interest (she remains as host of Big Brother for the time being, and even began using her married surname towards the end of Big Brother's 20th season). Moonves was later denied a reported $120 million in severance pay following his exit.
    • Eliza Dushku was fired from her role as J.P. Nunnelly on Bull after reporting that her co-star Michael Weatherly had sexually harassed her on set. The firing was pre-Weinstein but the ensuing legal battle was after the scandal broke. She had a video of him doing it as well as emails and texts showing that her firing was retaliatory in nature which is illegal. She and CBS eventually came to a $9.5 million settlement in mediation. Part of the deal was that she got to have a meeting with Steven Spielberg whose production company Amblin Entertainment made the show. Spielberg took her side and in May 2019, announced that he would be pulling funding from the show immediately. It, however, was renewed for three more seasons without Amblin.
    • Not even supposed #MeToo advocates were safe from it. Actress Asia Argento became a leader in the #MeToo movement after becoming one of the many celebrities who outed Harvey Weinstein as a sexual predator. On August 19, 2018, The New York Times published allegations by actor Jimmy Bennett claiming Argento had sexually assaulted him in 2013 when he was 17. Argento denied the allegations, but then things took a turn for the worse when bigger evidence of the assault surfaced, including text messages sent by Argento to model Rain Dove admitting to the encounter. The controversy led to her being fired from the Italian version of The X Factor and diminished her credibility as a #MeToo advocate.
  • Within the course of two years, Discovery Communications, the parent company of TLC and Discovery Channel, was hit with four child abuse controversies, leading to the cancellation of all four shows, along with one of the shows having a spin-off which was eventually canned as well:
    • TLC's reality show Here Comes Honey Boo Boo was promptly canceled after TMZ revealed that Alana "Honey Boo Boo" Thompson's mother June Shannon ("Mama June" in the series) was dating a man convicted of child molestation a decade before. What made things more shocking was the later revelation that the victim of the molestation was June's daughter, Anna, and that she was the one that blew the whistle.
    • Two months before, Discovery canceled Sons of Guns after star Will Hayden was arrested and charged with multiple child rape offenses. His firearms company promptly severed all ties with him in an attempt to clean their hands of the matter.
    • Josh Duggar nearly took his whole family with him after he confessed to molesting several girls, including his sisters, when he was a teenager. He resigned from his position at the Family Research Council and TLC pulled repeats of 19 Kids and Counting from their lineup, before finally re-tooling it as Counting On, with the entire Duggar family appearing without Josh.
    • Josh's sister Jill and her husband Derick Dillard got fired from the spin-off show Counting On because of Derick's offensive Twitter posts. He had publicly tweeted bigoted remarks about three fellow TLC personalities: Jazz Jennings, a trans woman (and a minor at the time) who he misgendered on purpose, and Nate Burkes and his husband Jeremiah Brent, who he not only insulted but also implied their two children would never be normal because they had two dads. He capped it all by claiming the network had a "liberal bias" for allowing such a family to be on television—at which point the showrunners had finally had enough. Counting On would be ultimately cancelled in 2021, following Josh Duggar's arrest and eventual conviction for possession of child pornography.
    • Finally in 2016, the series The Willis Family, focused on a family of 14 with the 12 children being part of the gospel/country group known as The Willis Clan that had advanced to the quarterfinals of Season 9 of America's Got Talent. That show ran for 2 seasons before it was dropped after the father, Toby Willis, was arrested in 2016 in Kentucky on a 2004 child rape case in Nashville, with Willis' departure making him a fugitive as well. Willis would eventually plead guilty to 4 counts of child rape, for which he was sentenced to two concurrent 25-year and two 40-year prison sentences; while six of the older children spoke out and attempted to revive the group with a 2018 album called "Speak My Mind". Making things harsher is that early publicity for The Willis Family suggested that TLC was hoping to make that show their new flagship series after 19 Kids and Counting imploded following the aforementioned Josh Duggar scandals.
  • Food Network examples:
    • Paula Deen's long-running show was canceled after audio of her using the "N-word" and making off-color jokes concerning minorities and Jews was discovered. After her admittance to using racial slurs with no regrets whatsoever and the resulting backlash against her, the network chose not to renew Paula Deen's contract and ceased any and all involvement with her. Shortly after, Deen's endorsement deals began to rapidly fall from the sky. At least one article has been written that suggests that the N-word incident was just the final nail in the coffin, and Food Network had already been trying to get rid of her anyway because she didn't draw the 18-49 crowd advertisers love. She has since made a comeback on YouTube.
    • Robert Irvine was temporarily suspended from his first series, Dinner: Impossible, after it was discovered that he had padded his resume rather outrageously (including claiming to have worked on Prince Charles and Princess Diana's wedding cake and having been a White House chef), and he was replaced by Iron Chef Michael Symon for the fifth season. Irvine was ultimately allowed to return to the show the next season and remained host until the show ended its run two years later.
    • Have you ever wondered why Lenny McNab, winner of The Next Food Network Star's tenth season, never wound up with his show? Shortly afterward, allegations of him being racist, sexist, and otherwise rude toward various Food Network personalities behind everyone's backs cropped up. As a result, Lenny became the only winner on the show to be denied his Food Network program.
  • RKO General was permanently banned from broadcasting in 1987 due to a wide variety of licensing misconducts dating back to 1965. The FCC vowed to reject any appeals on the decision; however, it gave RKO General the opportunity to wind down its operations peaceably, which it did by 1991, after which it went out of business. An epic case of a Company-Ending Misdemeanor if there ever was one. Meanwhile, RKO Pictures would merge with a company called Pavilion Communications in 1989, and started producing and distributing films again.
  • Three prominent media personalities were hit with this in the wake of the 2019 college admissions bribery scandal, a.k.a. "Operation Varsity Blues", in which dozens of wealthy parents were arrested and charged by the Feds for paying a total of $25 million in bribes to fake their children's SAT scores and get them into Ivy League-level colleges through illicit means:
    • Actress Lori Loughlin (best known for portraying Rebecca Donaldson-Katsopolis in Full House and Fuller House) and her second husband, fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli, paid a bribe of $500,000, disguised as a charitable donation, so that the University of Southern California's (USC) admissions committee would be led to believe that her two daughters, Olivia Jade and Isabella Rose Giannulli, would join the school's women's rowing program; in truth, they had never been involved in rowing and had no plans to join the program. The Hallmark Channel fired her from her role as recurring character Abigail Stanton in When Calls the Heart after the arrest and removed all of her scenes from the remaining episodes of the sixth season (although after serving her sentence, she reprised her role for the spinoff When Hope Callsnote ) and cancelled The Garage Sale Mysteries with one installment still to be completed. Netflix also fired Loughlin from her role as Rebecca on the final season of Fuller House. Loughlin and Giannulli, who were both looking at 50 years in prison if found guilty if they had gone to court, didn't endear themselves with what was widely seen as a ridiculously arrogant reaction to the scandal, signing autographs outside the courtroom before the initial hearing and then refusing to plead guilty even though they were offered a very fair plea deal.note  They fought the charges for about a year before taking a plea deal, and in August 2020, Loughlin received a two-month prison sentence, while Giannulli drew five, with proportionate fines and community service for the both of them. She reported for her sentence in October a few weeks ahead of the date given by the judge so she could be out by Christmas. As for Olivia and Isabella, both dropped out of USC, but not before speculation that the school would expel them just to save face. Olivia has since admitted in interviews her relationship with Lori was strained in the scandal's aftermath.
    • Felicity Huffman, best known for her work on Desperate Housewives and Transamerica, paid a $15,000 bribe, also disguised as a charitable donation, to have someone take the SAT in her daughter's place. A humbled Huffman, however, did not suffer the body blow to her career that Loughlin later would: she quickly pleaded guilty and was sentenced to two weeks in prison,note  though the prosecutor had recommended four to ten months in her case. While her involvement in the scandal hasn't cost Huffman any roles, her Netflix series Otherhood did get pushed back several months to August 2019. She officially completed her entire sentence in October 2020 — ironically the same month Loughlin's sentence began — and booked her first project since the scandal, a sitcom pilot at ABC, several weeks later.
  • The 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, which sprung up after George Floyd was murdered by a police officer for allegedly using a fake $20 bill, managed to get both Paramount Network's COPS and A&E's Live PD cancelled and quietly swept under the rug. The former had long been accused of sensationalizing low level, victimless crimes (especially by Black and Latino men) like drug use and prostitution, and glorifying excessive force by police; while the latter was less controversial to a degree but still would get caught up in controversy from time to time. A Live PD camera crew recorded an unarmed Black man in Austin, Texas being killed in police custody after being pulled over for broken headlight and wiped it at the officers' request. This has extended itself to syndicated reruns of COPS as well, with WGN America dropping the show and various local stations pulling the show off their schedules. As of July 2020, Paramount Network's sister streaming service Pluto TV still airs COPS reruns. In October 2020, COPS started producing new episodes but solely for international broadcast. The series would ultimately return to American television in September 2021 when the new season began streaming on Fox Nation. In July 2022, Live PD would get it chance to return when it began airing a new season on Reelz under the new title On Patrol: Live.

    Creators 
  • Adrienne Bailon, along with her then-boyfriend Rob Kardashian and her manager, staged a fake nude photo controversy involving a stolen laptop in order to boost her fading career. The controversy caused a cancellation of The Cheetah Girls performance at the 2008 Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, and eventually led to the Cheetah Girls' dissolution. Previously, Bailon's recurring character Alana Rivera was also dropped from That's So Raven because of backstage fights with Raven-SymonĂ©. Raven eventually left the Cheetah Girls as well (she was never an official member and only worked with the group for their first two films). Fortunately, she was eventually allowed to return for Raven's Home, 18 years later.
  • It's no exaggeration to say that Michael Barrymore was the king of light entertainment in the UK during The '90s with a string of hit Game Shows and Chat Shows - he was essentially the UK equivalent of Regis Philbin in terms of his profile and popularity. It stopped abruptly in March 2001 when Stuart Lubbock was found dead in his swimming pool after a party. The British tabloids pounced and stories of drug-fuelled gay orgies and other lurid and salacious behaviour filled their pages. While Barrymore was never charged or convicted for any criminal offence, his contract with ITV (the UK's main commercial network) was terminated, his shows were all cancelled and his career went into freefall. Since then Barrymore's only real high profile work since was as a housemate on Celebrity Big Brother in the mid-2000s.
  • Japanese singer and television star Rebecca Eri Rabone, known mononymously as Becky, lost several of her hosting gigs and most of her sponsors in 2016 after it was revealed that she had an affair with Enon Kawatani, the frontman for the Math Rock band Gesu no Kiwami Otome. On the other hand, Kawatani's career was largely unaffected because of what Western observers have described as a double standard in Japanese celebrity culture. In this culture, the fallout from such an affair would be more harmful to the career of a girl-next-door TV host than to the male lead singer of an indie rock band. She has since married Yomiuri Giants infielder/coach Yasuyuki Kataoka.
    • Gesu No Kiwami Otome themselves lost out on only a single job due to the controversy: The opportunity to record a theme song for the latest Crayon Shin-chan film. Despite the news breaking shortly before the release of their second album RyĹŤseibai, the album still debuted at number one in the Japanese charts. In 2018, the band would release a scathingly satirical music video attacking Japanese tabloid culture and the public's obsession with celebrity scandals that had many parallels with what happened to Becky and Kawatani.
  • In June 2021, Drake Bell was arrested on charges related to child dangerment when a 19-year-old girl accused him of sexually assaulting her back in 2017 when she was 15. After pleading guilty, Bell was sentenced to two years probation and 200 hours of community service, which has caused plans for a planned revival of Drake & Josh to be nixed and it's safe to say that his career will never recover from this.
  • Russell Brand was dropped by his talent agent and had a tour postponed after an episode of Dispatches featured five women accusing him of sexual assault between 2006 and 2013. Shortly after, several more accusations came to light, leading YouTube to demonetize Brand's account and The BBC removing archived material of Brand.
  • Irish comedian and presenter Dara Ă“ Briain was briefly involved with a greyhound racing syndicate prior to December 2009, when one of their dogs—who'd been featured in an episode of Three Men in a Boat—was put down prior to its transmission. Ă“ Briain managed to invert the trope, however, as he was so devastated by the loss that he and his fellows immediately and permanently disbanded the syndicate. There were several demonstrations outside the venues where he performed in 2010 that called on him to publicly denounce the practice of greyhound racing, but aside from that, his career remained unaffected.
  • Jo Ann Castle, a pianist who performed on The Lawrence Welk Show from 1959 to 1969, was fired for her role in a Detroit bar brawl. While her offscreen behavior proved an embarrassment to Welk, the brawl appears to have been the last straw. Since then, Castle has wandered in and out of trouble with the law, culminating in a confession in 2013 to a child molestation coverup.
  • Mexican gossip show host Franco Clark (who until 2020 went as Mauricio Clark) was blacklisted by Televisa and TV Azteca following a series of statements promoting Cure Your Gays (he had become a born-again Christian in 2018 and claimed to have been "cured") and accusations that the LGBT community and equal rights movement were a front for a "communist, anti-Christian dictatorship" and that Pride Month was a celebration of "orgies, unprotected anal sex, corruption of the youth, and drug use", including an appearance at Televisa's morning show "Hoy" in which he was outright hostile to the show's hosts for not agreeing with his views and pointing them out as bigotry. In 2020, smaller network Multimedios gave him another chance, only to boot him two months later for using his role as host to promote his conspiracy theories again, this time also accusing his fellow co-workers and the network's owner of being pro-Communist and supporting "anti-Christian persecution" for fact-checking him, with him claiming he was fired due to his strident anti-abortion views. By the next year, it was reported that Clark was now employed as an Uber driver and had decided to keep a low profile away from media attention (including abandoning his social media accounts).
  • After Noel Clarke was accused of sexual harassment and bullying by over 20 women in April 2021, his membership to BAFTA was suspended (as was his special BAFTA for contributions to British cinema, which had been awarded to him less than a month before the allegations were made), ITV pulled the final episode of his series Viewpoint from broadcast hours before it was due to be aired - advertisers had been pulling their ads from the five-episode series that was airing on a daily basis that week, thus it aired on ITV's streaming service ITV Hub instead and removed him from a writer mentoring scheme, while Sky suspended work on all projects with him, cancelling Bulletproof.
  • Stephen Collins' career was already flagging following the cancellation of 7th Heaven (where he played Eric Camden), along with his highly-publicized separation from fellow actress Faye Grant. The straw that finally broke the camel's back, however, came in October 2014 when TMZ leaked an audio recording of Collins admitting to Grant during a therapy session that he had molested several underage girls for years. The massive media and public fallout directly resulted in multiple stations, TV Guide Network and Up TV pulling reruns of 7th Heaven from circulationnote  (CBS Drama in the UK also abruptly pulled the show from its schedule), Seth MacFarlane firing him from the production of Ted 2, being forced to resign from his post in the Screen Actors Guild Board, his Scandal character Reed Wallace getting killed off after announcing his intent to return in Season 4, and all of his agents dropping him. Collins was dropped from what was meant to be a recurring role in It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia as Dennis and Dee's biological father Bruce, after only two appearances; making this example especially uncomfortable is that the character is a paragon of virtue horrified at how badly his kids turned out, and is even specifically said to have not molested underage girls.
  • Jeff Conaway's drug problems led to his 1981 departure from Taxi after he was discovered in his trailer too strung out to work. His character Bobby Wheeler's lines were divided among other characters, causing the producers to realize they didn't need Conaway and the headaches he caused at all. His career had a slight bounce with his portrayal of Zack Allan, a recurring-then-permanent character in Babylon 5, but his habits kicked in harder after that series, with only bit parts in films and movies, including a Harsher in Hindsight stint on the first season of Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew, before his death in 2011.
  • Fanny Cradock was the doyenne of The BBC cookery shows from 1955 to 1976. Then came The Big Time, a show in which talented amateurs in various fields were given a shot at a major event, with professional advisors. Fanny was one of the advisors for the cookery episode, and soon enough she was pushing her weight around, showing total condescension towards the contestant (chosen because she had won the Cook of the Realm competition that same year), insisting that all her menu decisions weren't "proper", and at one point gagging at how "sickly" the food was. he also didn't endear herself with comments during the episode that "the English had never had a cuisine," and even erroneously claiming that Yorkshire pudding came from Burgundy, despite its origin being right there on its name. The public and press united in outrage, and Fanny never again appeared on a cookery show, although she did do the talk show and panel game circuit.
  • Portuguese television host Carlos Cruz had a very successful career, hosting shows as serving as program director in all four terrestrial channels including the Portuguese version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? on RTP1 before it was derailed in late 2003 after being charged with multiple counts of child sexual abuse that occurred a year ago at Casa Pia, a Portuguese state-run institution for the education and support of poor children and under-age orphans, and SIC terminated his contract in light of the allegations. After being convicted in 2010 that led to him serving six years in a seven-year sentence before being paroled in 2016, his title of the Order of Infante D. Henrique was revoked in 2015 as a result.
  • Angus Deayton was the presenter of Have I Got News for You until lurid tales of drugs and disguised prostitutes came to light in May 2002. He was mocked relentlessly on the show, then booted out. Panelist Paul Merton later claimed that it wasn't Deayton's behavior itself that led to his dismissal, but rather that it would make it near-impossible for him to fulfill his role on the show of skewering politicians and other public figures for the exact same behavior. The few episodes filmed immediately after the story broke suffer for that very reason: the format relied on Deayton playing the straight man, and he'd become the Butt-Monkey. He later hosted Would I Lie to You? for its first two series before being replaced there as well.
  • Perhaps the most famous example of a Career-Ending Misdemeanour in the British media came in 1970, on the part of former pirate radio DJ-turned-TV chat show host Simon Dee. It started when he was overheard making an off-colour guess as to how his line manager's daughter had secured a plum job at The BBC, involving the word "blow-job". Then, he attempted to spike a friend's pre-broadcast drink with LSD prior to going on air with the London Weekend Television programme he hosted; unfortunately, the drink was instead "snaffled" by his studio guest, James Bond actor George Lazenby, who consequently went before the cameras high as a kite, rambling incoherently about having a list of American Senators who were in on the conspiracy to kill John F. Kennedy, to the utter confusion of Dee and the recording's other guests, John Lennon and Yoko Ono. The episode was pre-recorded rather than broadcast live, but this incident led to LWT not renewing Dee's contract. Lazenby continued his acting career and eventually became a successful property developer after moving to California; Dee, on the other hand, was last seen washing buses for London Transport and making very occasional appearances on "Whatever happened to...?" programmes before dying of bone cancer in 2009.
  • Shannen Doherty, who played Brenda Walsh in Beverly Hills, 90210, had developed a reputation for being rude and confrontational on set - at one point coming to physical blows with Kelly Taylor's actress Jennie Garth. She was frequently late as well. Apparently, the last straw for the producers came midway through filming the fourth season finale when Doherty decided to get a major haircut that wreaked havoc with the continuity. She was fired and replaced with Tiffani Thiessen as Valerie Malone.
    • Then, by the third season of Charmed (1998) (ironically enough also produced by Aaron Spelling), the tension between Doherty (who played Prue Halliwell) and Alyssa Milano (who played Phoebe Halliwell) was so high that the actresses would only speak to each other to say their lines. There were also rumors that TW King, who played her Prue's love interest Andy Trudeau, was written out after Season 1 simply because she didn't like him. Conflicting reports say that Doherty was either fired after offering producers an ultimatum or asked to leave. Either way, she also denied them the right to use her image on the show again.
  • British actor Laurence Fox was dropped by Equity in 2020 following comments he made about the Black Lives Matter movement. He has since founded a far-right political party and stood for election as Mayor of London, receiving a negligible share of the vote.
  • In February 2018, Warner Bros. did not renew Full House and Fuller House creator Jeff Franklin's contract following accusations of abusive behavior both on the set as well as in the writer's room. Though Steve Baldikoski and Bryan Behar took over as the showrunners for Fuller House, Franklin would still be billed in the credits as the show's creator.
  • Craig Gore is a TV screenwriter for Chicago P.D. and SWAT and was slated to participate in Law & Order: Organized Crime. In June 2020, in the midst of nationwide unrest following the murder of George Floyd by police officers (including rioting near Gore's neighborhood in Los Angeles) Gore posted a picture on Twitter posing with an assault rifle, and promised to "light motherfuckers up who are trying to fuck with my property." Christopher Meloni distanced himself from Gore while L&O creator Dick Wolf immediately fired him, stating that he would "not tolerate this conduct, especially during our hour of national grief."
  • Kathy Griffin, previously no stranger to these type of situations,note  lost a large amount of her support and show appearances in 2017 after posting a picture of her holding something that resembled Donald Trump's severed head, complete with a knife and fake blood. It was meant to be a "shocking" image, but many people felt it was either too extreme of a joke, or a call to violence, resulting in her losing many supporters, shows, or agencies in response. She was even put on a Do Not Fly list and investigated by the FBI for the image. Her career after was badly hurt, and while she attempted to make a return, factors such as the COVID-19 Pandemic put the brakes on live stand-up comedy shows, and her career has largely grinded to a halt outside of that.
  • Thames Television presenter Bill Grundy was suspended and then eventually let go after his infamous interview with the Sex Pistols on the Today programme in December 1976. The then-new and already controversial punk band were booked to appear when Queen dropped out of the show, and guitarist Steve Jones swearing live on television helped increase their notoriety and popularity in the UK. Grundy, however, managed to be much less well-behaved than his punk guests, announcing at the top of the show that he was drunk - again, on live television - and he spent much of the interview trying to provoke the band members into saying something controversial. When Jones swore, it was because he had lost his temper with Grundy after the host made a sexually explicit pass at the band's friend Siouxsie Sioux, who was sitting in the audience. After the broadcast, Thames suspended Grundy for two weeks and Today was canceled two months later. While Grundy continued his TV work, his career was never the same. In 1980, his alcoholism cost him a hosting gig for The BBC's Great Railway Journeys of the World. After that, he mostly only appeared on regional television until his fatal heart attack in 1993.
  • English television personality Stuart Hall, best known for presenting It's a Knockout for 17 years, had his career ended after he was convicted of child sexual abuse in June 2013 as part of Operation Yewtree, for which he served over two years in prison. This was a Career Vaporising Felony; none of his stuff could air again.
  • Dan Harmon was fired from Community in 2012 following the end of the third season. It was publicly stated to be Executive Meddling from NBC who wanted to make the show more popular by making it a more grounded traditional sitcom, but was later revealed to be because of his behavior toward female writer Megan Ganz. This turned out to be a Role-Interrupting Misdemeanor, however, rather than a Role-Ending one, as Harmon was reinstated as Showrunner for seasons 5 and 6.
  • Comedian Herman JosĂ© almost had his career derailed after being accused of the child sex abuse from the same year as the above-mentioned Carlos Cruz, though in JosĂ©'s case he was acquitted after it was discovered that he was in Brazil, covering the Rio de Janeiro Carnival for SIC at the time of the crimes happening.
  • German television presenter Andrea Kiewel, better known by her nickname Kiwi, was suspended from ZDF in December 2007, after accusations were made that Kiwi had misused the network to operate paid surreptitious advertising for Weight Watchers. She then admitted to having untruthfully denied a contractual relationship with said company while as a guest on Johannes B. Kerner's daytime show. Kiwi returned to ZDF in October 2008, as a participant on a celebrity quiz show. The next year, she returned to presenting the weekly variety show ZDF Fernsehgarten.
  • Artie Lange was fired from the original cast of MADtv after Season 2 due to his cocaine addiction (ironically Fox did allow Lange to do a cameo on a later episode, where they make fun of the reason he was kicked off). Lange became a regular on Howard Stern's radio show in 2001, but lost that job in 2009 for his drug and alcohol problems. Lange was clean for several years following his 2010 suicide attempt, but his bad behavior and poor work ethic have continued; in 2014, he was banned from appearing on ESPN programming after a string of racist, sexual tweets that he made about First Take host Cari Champion. He was arrested for drug possession in 2017, but the incident did not result in him losing his role on the HBO sitcom Crashing (US).
  • Showrunner Peter M. Lenkov helmed three of CBS's rebooted dramas during the 2010s – Hawaii Five-0, MacGyver (2016), and Magnum, P.I. (2018) – until he was fired from the network in July 2020. Soon afterward came a troubling Vanity Fair article which reported that Lenkov was fired for being an emotionally abusive tyrant who created a hostile work environment for his writers and actors. Among Lenkov's many accusers was Lucas Till, who claimed that Lenkov's body-shaming caused him to be suicidal during his first year as the lead star of MacGyver. Till also accused Lenkov of pressuring dwarf actor Meredith Eaton to return to work when she was in recovery for an on-set injury, reducing her to tears. The article also revived allegations of racism against Lenkov from 2017, when Daniel Dae Kim and Grace Park (both Asian-Americans) left Hawaii Five-0 over pay disparities (given the fact that both Kim and Park were more established actors yet were still being paid less than the white actors, and that as its title indicates the series is set in Hawaiʻi, known for its heavy AAPI population, yet still chose to let go their Asian-American actors), after which Lenkov reportedly castigated Kim for "bringing 'equality' into it" instead of taking the "classy" route into resolving the dispute. (For his part, Lenkov denied all of the allegations in the Vanity Fair article.)
  • Gugu Liberato was a famous TV host in his native Brazil known for his variety show Domingo Legal (Cool Sunday) on SBT in the 1990s and early 2000s. He was the biggest competitor to Fausto Silva and his similar show DomingĂŁo do FaustĂŁo (Big Fausto's Big Sunday) on Rede Globo, but his career derailed in 2003 when he aired an interview with the Brazilian criminal organization PCC. Not only was this interview completely staged, but the fake criminals also issued threats to Brazilian politicians and celebrities, resulting in massive legal trouble; Domingo Legal was taken off air for some time, and ratings plummeted. His claim that he had nothing to do with it went nowhere, and years later Liberato was replaced and left for another network to do a similar show, which didn't work out for him either. He died in November 2019 after suffering a fall at his Orlando, Florida home.
  • Graham Linehan, writer and creator of Britcom sensations Father Ted, Black Books and The IT Crowd was banned from social media and lost employment in the entertainment industry after his serial, targeted harassment of trans women, trans support groups, and inclusive activist groups resulted in multiple police interventions and the break-up of his marriage to Helen Serafinowicz (Linehan and Serafinowicz had also been among the co-writers on Motherland - she remained on the writing team and Linehan left). Linehan has stated that producers cancelled a stage adaptation of Father Ted due to his ongoing behavior.
  • Danny Masterson, famous for starring as Steven Hyde in That '70s Show and Jameson "Rooster" Bennett in The Ranch, was fired from the latter series after four women came forth with rape allegations (he was later arrested and charged in connection with three of these allegations in June 2020), resulting in Rooster being written off the show. And when the Sequel Series to That '70s Show, That '90s Show was announced in 2021, it was stated that Masterson wouldn't reprise his role as Hyde, making him the only regular not slated to return, something to be cemented following him being found guilty of two of the three counts in May 2023.
  • After Mitchel Musso's DUI bust in October 2011, his Pair of Kings character King Brady moved to Chicago and was replaced by King Boz, a Suspiciously Similar Substitute played by Adam Hicks, as Disney has a rather hardline stance toward reckless behavior. His hidden camera show PrankStars was similarly killed four episodes into its run, with the remainder of the episodes that had not aired burned off in the United Kingdom solely to get copyright protection. On a side note, he did not lose his other Disney job, voicing Jeremy on Phineas and Ferb; it helped his case that it's one of their most popular shows and that the creators spoke on his behalf to let him stay.
  • After coming out in 2020 as a Conspiracy Theorist who, among other things, believes the COVID-19 Pandemic is an invention to implement a communist world government, that vaccines are "the mark of the beast", and supported Donald Trump's unsuccessful re-election despite his many controversies and derogatory comments about Mexico, Mexican actress/singer Patricia "Paty" Navidad was all but vetoed by the major Spanish-language networks. She would also later be booted from Twitter for the same reasons in January 2021.
  • Brett Ratner resigned from producing the 2012 Oscars under public pressure after he made a gay slur and bragged about his alleged sexual encounters with Olivia Munn and Lindsay Lohan. This led to the scheduled host, Eddie Murphy, resigning as well because he didn't want to perform without Ratner. Longtime host Billy Crystal replaced Murphy as host, with Brian Grazer and Don Mischer succeeding Ratner as producers.
  • Peter Rees, the creator and original executive producer of Mythbusters, was booted from his own show in the middle of season 2 after pulling a prank on host Adam Savage which involved tricking Savage into grabbing a live electric fence (something that was caught on camera and became a part of the "Baghdad Battery" episode). Rees already built up animosity behind the scenes for being abusive and openly antagonistic towards the show's hosts (especially Savage), and this incident was seen as the last straw.
  • Producer, writer and actor Dan Schneider was involved in over 20 years of live-action comedies on Nickelodeon including All That, The Amanda Show, Drake & Josh, Zoey 101, iCarly, Sam & Cat, Game Shakers, and Henry Danger. In 2018, Schneider and Nickelodeon decided not to extend their production deal. The network had received complaints about Schneider being verbally abusive toward crew members during a stressful period of shooting upward of 50 episodes of his shows a year, crossing lines with staff that included requesting massages and contacting actors outside of work hours. He was also accused of having a sexual fetish for feet and drew controversy when he asked for child-age fans to shows their excitement for Sam & Cat premiering by painting messages on their feet and tweeting out pictures. It would ultimately come to ahead when iCarly actress Jennette McCurdy's autobiography released in August 2022 where she accused himnote  of creating a sexually hostile work environment on the sets of all his shows. He would have no involvement in the Henry Danger Sequel Series Danger Force and the 2021 Paramount+ revival of iCarly, but would still be billed in the credits as the creator of the shows.
  • During the late 2017 Hollywood Sexual Harassment Scandal, Mark Schwahn - Creator and showrunner of One Tree Hill and The Royals - was accused of sexual harassment and assault in an open letter signed by the majority of the female cast and crew of One Tree Hill, with Hilarie Burton and Danneel Ackles specifically citing the harassment they received as the reason they left the show and offering specifics about Schwahn's behaviour in an interview with Variety, whilst a second open letter signed by twenty five female members of the cast and crew of The Royals corroborated the initial accusations. Schwahn was subsequently fired from The Royals and has not worked in television since.
  • In August 2020, Greg Spottiswood, a co-showrunner for the CBS series All Rise, was accused in a New York Times article of presiding over a toxic writers' room where people who objected to his depictions of people of color were forced out. After an internal investigation, Spottiswood was forced out in the middle of the second season and Dee Harris-Lawrence remained as the sole showrunner.
  • Kurt Sutter was fired as showrunner of Mayans M.C. after multiple complaints about his behavior behind the scenes. For his part, Sutter had been planning on stepping aside from the series for some time, handing the reins over to co-creator Elgin James, and admitted to being an "abrasive dick" in a statement he made after his termination.
  • Japanese television personality and singer Masashi Tashiro's career was virtually destroyed after his sexual harassment and drug use scandals in the early 2000s. Even his former associate Takeshi Kitano, no stranger to controversy himself, thought Tashiro went too far.
  • Yusuke Tomoi, better known for playing Ryou Asihara/Kamen Rider Gills in Kamen Rider Agito and as a former member of Junretsu, retired from the entertainment industry in January 2019 after he admitted to allegations of domestic violence, adultery and theft. Tomoi has since been working as a manager of Kamui, a yakiniku restaurant located in his native Osaka.
  • Rip Torn's character on 30 Rock, Don Geiss, died of a heart attack between seasons after Torn's increasingly bizarre behaviour culminated in him breaking into a bank in 2010. His character in the Men in Black franchise was similarly killed off in Men in Black 3 for the same reasons.
  • Anthea Turner's prominent UK television presenting career never recovered after she began an affair with a married man with three daughters in the late 1990s, who subsequently left his wife for her. Having always been marketed as a wholesome and family-friendly presenter, the British tabloids branded her a "homewrecker" and her popularity nose-dived. When the two of them later divorced after the man had another affair many were quick to label this "karma" and "poetic justice".
  • Spanish Paranormal Investigation journalist Santiago Vázquez Jr had a history of problems which eventually derailed his career forever. His national radio show La Sexta DimensiĂłn was cancelled in 2008 among rumors that he was difficult to work with, which may be true given that he spent the last episode openly criticizing the producers while on air. In 2014, when he seemed to have refloated his career in the popular TV show Cuarto Milenio (whose directors had rumoredly even tried to intervene to save his radio show years earlier), he was fired due to a highly embarrassing scene where he tried to summon Jesus in a haunted house (Makes Just as Much Sense in Context) and faked noises supposedly made by ghosts, and this was followed by an internet podcast interview, now considered stuff of legend, where he showed up completely drunk to complain about his fate. Although he tried to come back with a new podcast project years after, from there his career just spiraled down until fading into obscurity.
  • Joss Whedon suddenly stepped down from working on The Nevers in the wake of an investigation by WarnerMedia about abusive behavior on the set of Justice League (2017). While officially, the reason for his departure was that the COVID-19 Pandemic made it too challenging for him to continue as a showrunner, it later came out that the Justice League investigation had included testimony from Charisma Carpenter that he'd repeatedly mistreated her on the set of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, causing many to believe that Warner had intended to fire him but allowed him to step down voluntarily to save face.

    Shows 
  • Jessica Biel did a racy photoshoot specifically to get out of wholesome family drama 7th Heaven because she felt her squeaky-clean image was making her miss out on serious dramatic roles. It didn't quite get her fired, but it did drastically reduce her screen time.
  • In The Adventures of Superboy, Superboy's first actor John Haymes Newton was fired and replaced by Gerard Christopher after a DUI arrest and because Newton demanded a 20% pay raise.
  • All My Children:
    • Actor Jim Fitzpatrick, who played Pierce Riley, was fired abruptly in early 1996 after an incident in a New York City bar which involved him assaulting a woman—groping her and trying to drag her off into an empty hallway where he would no doubt have likely raped her had other bar patrons not intervened.
    • Actor Michael Nader was fired from his role as Dimitri Marick in early 2001 after a second arrest for drug use. Producers had bought his excuses for a previous arrest for drunk driving and had attempted to make allowances for him to attend rehab, but his second arrest was the last straw for them.
    • In 2003, five years before his first role on film, Chadwick Boseman played a disaffected teen called Reggie. His stint lasted only a week before he started complaining about how Reggie had been written as little more than a thug, and the producers quickly fired him. In an amusing twist, the actor who replaced Boseman as Reggie went on to star alongside him fifteen years later.
  • After boosting viewer figures for Ally McBeal, Robert Downey Jr. was fired from the show (and his character Larry Paul written out) after being arrested for violating his parole. It soon became apparent that this was actually worse than just a Role-Ending Misdemeanor as ratings went back down again and the show was cancelled at the end of the fifth season, making the parole violation a Show-Ending Misdemeanor in the process. Series regular Lisa Nicole Carson, who played Renee Raddick, was also fired at the same time for her substance abuse problems.
  • American Bandstand was initially a local Philadelphia show on WFIL hosted by Bob Horn under the name Bandstand. In 1956, Horn was arrested on a DUI, at a time when WFIL was running a series on drunk-driving. He was fired and replaced by Dick Clark, a year before the show went national on ABC. As for Horn, he moved to Houston and worked as a disc jockey for KILT before suffering a fatal heart attack in 1966.
  • American Idol:
    • When racy (though not nude) pictures of Frenchie Davis emerged, she was dismissed from the show.
    • Both Corey Clark and Jermaine Jones were also removed for having criminal records that they lied about.
  • Actor Chris Noth was accused of sexual assault by four women shortly after his Sex and the City character Mr. Big was killed by Sudden Sequel Death Syndrome on the 2021 Aftershow And Just Like That.... After the accusations were made public, Peloton dropped him from the popular ad campaign they had just concocted in response to Big's death on one of its machines, he was fired from his supporting role as William Bishop on The Equalizer (2021) (his character was eventually killed off by way of plane crash), and he was dropped by A3 Artists Agency. Not only that, the allegations also threatened to become a Franchise Killer after discussions for a second season of AJLT were reportedly put on hold. (On a side note, Noth had filmed a non-integral cameo for the finale, and while the allegations played a role in the cameo being scrapped, the producers confirmed it wasn't the only reason.)
  • Stoney Westmoreland was fired from his role as Ham Mack on Andi Mack after being arrested in April 2018 for attempting to solicit a minor for sex over the Internet.
  • Angel:
    • Lots of rumors swirl around regarding Doyle's death and Glenn Quinn's drug problems, which resulted in his death a few years later. Joss Whedon says his death in the first season was intended from the start, but some say the timeline was sped up out of fear his drug habit would rub off on his castmates, as both David Boreanaz and Charisma Carpenter were good friends with him.
    • Carpenter's pregnancy in Season 4 led to Cordelia being written out and then brought back for the next season, only to be killed off.
  • After the Two and a Half Men fiasco went down, Charlie Sheen went on to star in FX's Anger Management. While he's pulled some prima donna behavior there as well, he was able to get Selma Blair fired for complaining about it, so he seems to be invulnerable for now. Although...
  • The Bachelor:
    • Chris Harrison resigned from his long-running role as host of the show and its spinoffs in 2021, after he defended contestant Rachel Kirkconnell after she was discovered to have participated in a racist "Old South Party" in college, accusing anyone upset about it of being the "woke police." Numerous other people involved with the show were quick to denounce the statement, and he was briefly said to be taking a temporary leave of absence before it was confirmed to be permanent, replaced by various prior contestants and comedy actors.
    • Chad Johnson had a long-standing reputation on the show for being a villain in various iterations, which has certainly gotten him into trouble, but the final straw seems to have been in February of 2020 when he was arrested for domestic and assault charges, intimidating a witness, and vandalism. Since that time, his television appearances were cancelled.
  • Ruby Rose was allegedly fired from Batwoman in 2021 because of "multiple complaints about her workplace behavior". Rose has contested this, claiming that she quit the show because of a toxic and unsafe work environment (admittedly, Rose did receive a serious back injury during a stunt that required emergency surgery to prevent paralysis, while production assistant Amanda Smith was paralysed from the waist down due to an on-set injury). There were reports of Rose frequently clashing with other cast and crew members, though accounts differ on who was the instigator.
  • Bob Todd was fired from The Benny Hill Show by Benny Hill himself in 1976 after Todd failed to show up for a concert at the London Palladium due to a "drinking episode" so bad that Todd woke up in a Dublin hospital a few days later with no memory of how he had gotten there. The producer of the show persuaded Hill to rehire Todd, in part because of Todd's importance to the show and because his drunkenness rarely affected his work.
  • Big Brother:
    • The US version of the show has seen five contestants expelled from the house for misbehavior.
      • Perhaps the most notorious incident to ever happen on any version of the show came in Season 2, when Justin Sebik drunkenly held a knife to the throat of his fellow contestant Krista Stegall while casually talking about killing her, after repeatedly threatening violence against various other contestants, such that the other houseguests were legitimately afraid of him. When he was called to the diary room (where he was promptly booted from the show) shortly after, he even said to Krista "I think it might've been that knife to your neck." This incident is the reason why the Big Brother house no longer has any proper silverware or other sharp objects that can be used as weapons.
      • In Season 4, Scott Weintraub was expelled from the house after the "X-Factor" twist saw his ex-girlfriend Amanda Craig brought in as a contestant, which led him to throw a tantrum and refuse to go to the diary room when asked, telling the producers to come and get him themselves.
      • Chima Simone was expelled from Season 11 after accusing the producers of rigging the show against her and openly violating the rules just to spite them, including refusing to put on her microphone and later just throwing it in the hot tub.
      • Willie Hantz was expelled from Season 14 after starting a physical fight with Joe Arvin.
      • Luke Valentine was expelled from Season 25 after he (a white man) said the N-word during a conversation.
    • From the UK version:
      • Duane "Dog" Chapman's 1976 murder conviction (which was basically for being in the wrong place at the wrong time) scuttled his plans to appear on Celebrity Big Brother. The UK routinely denies travel visas to those with a murder conviction on their record, and did so in Chapman's case, making it impossible for him to take part.
      • Jim Davidson was to be a contestant on the 2013 series but got arrested following the Jimmy Savile scandal over allegations of historic sex offenses. He was cleared of any wrong-doing and went on to win the 2014 series. His book and live show No Further Action goes into more detail.
      • Singer and model Tila Tequila appeared on the 2015 series. However, she was ejected after two days in the house after making posts on Twitter sympathizing with Adolf Hitler and the Nazis (including a Hitler-themed photoshoot in front of a concentration camp).
    • Season 8 of the Canadian version saw a rare double expulsion. First, Jamar Lee was expelled after Kyle Rozendal and Vanessa Clements accused him of making a threatening Finger Gun hand gesture to Kyle. Fans were outraged over Jamar's removal, with many feeling that it was racially motivated (Jamar being Black), that Kyle himself had been acting in a threatening manner beforehand, and that Kyle and Vanessa got Jamar removed in order to advance their game. In response to the controversy, Kyle wound up expelled right alongside Jamar two days later. Oddly enough, only a few weeks after that, the whole season would be cancelled due to the pandemic.
  • Kevin Lloyd played the very popular Tosh Lines in The Bill from 1988 to 1998. He was known as a drinker, but sadly, throughout this period, his drinking gave way to full-blown alcoholism. It affected his professionalism, and the series dropped him after it caused him to arrive late for work one time too many. If the decision to fire him was intended to help him, it backfired tragically: Lloyd's drinking problem cost him his life a mere week after he was sacked.
  • In 1998, Richard Bacon became the first host of the long-running British children's show Blue Peter to be fired from the show after he confessed to taking cocaine after a tabloid expose. He had been on for only 18 months and had to give his Blue Peter badge in. Luckily, he would prove himself to be no Pete Best as he would clean up and has since been a successful presenter for other grown-up based shows.
  • Anonymous reports from crew members suggest Paz de la Huerta was written off of Boardwalk Empire for prima donna behavior on the set, with her character being Put on a Bus. Similar reports stated this was also the reason why Michael Pitt's character was Killed Off for Real, though showrunner Terence Winter strongly denied that this was the case.note 
  • After a participant on Buckwild died during production of Season 2, MTV executed the show by canceling it and clamping down hard on the rights, to the point that they outright refused to allow its producers to shop the series elsewhere.
  • Julie Benz was dropped as recurring character Darla on Buffy the Vampire Slayer in part due to tensions on set during Season 1. Alyson Hannigan, who played Willow Rosenberg, has hinted in interviews that Benz was very mean towards her in particular. The incident prompted Benz to clean up her act, and she returned to play Darla in the spinoff Angel as well as a few more Buffy episodes. Years later, she was regarded by the cast and crew of Dexter as one of the nicest and most agreeable cast members.
  • Jay Thomas was fired from his role as Eddie LeBec in Cheers in 1989 after someone called him on his radio show asking what it was like working there and he replied "Ugh, it's horrible. For one thing, I have to kiss Rhea Perlman." While Perlman happened to be listening, no less.
  • Coronation Street:
    • Two key characters were in limbo after being caught up in the fall-out from the Jimmy Savile business. Actors Michael LeVell (Kevin Webster) and Bill Roache (Ken Barlow) were temporarily written out of the show pending resolution of alleged under-age sex offences. LeVell's character came back, after spending a very long time visiting family. Roache's character is now back as well. Les Battersby was also Put on a Bus after his actor was overheard drunkenly complaining about the show in a pub. More recently, Todd Grimshaw went on the run in 2017 after his actor Bruno Langley was alleged to have sexually assaulted a woman in a nightclub. The character returned to the show in 2020, but played by Gareth Pierce.
    • There had been other examples of actors losing their parts in Coronation Street, but the one that people still remember was the late Lynne Perrie who played Ivy Tilsley. In February 1994, she had plastic surgery resulting in her lips being fuller, but unsuitable for the character which the press believed caused Perrie's firing from the show and the character's killed off. However Perrie always denied this claiming that the character had run its course, which evidence can back.
  • The Cosby Show:
    • Carl Anthony Payne II was allegedly fired from The Cosby Show for refusing to cut his hair.
    • Some sources say that Lisa Bonet was exiled from the show to its Spin-Off A Different World after participating in an explicit sex scene in the movie Angel Heart. Others say Bonet (who apparently is an even bigger Cloudcuckoolander than her character, Denise) constantly butted heads with Bill Cosby, who used Angel Heart as a "last straw" excuse.
    • Cosby himself would suffer this fate decades later; in 2014, he'd planned to return to NBC with a new sitcom. But once the project seemed to be heading to the greenlight stage, over a dozen women accused Cosby of having raped them years ago, and later a deposition from 2005 was unearthed where Cosby admitted under oath to procuring drugs so he could have sex with women who had taken them. The number of women who came forward kept going up, with about 60 cases documented in the media. To say the entire fiasco destroyed Cosby's career would be an understatement: NBC, overwhelmed by public pressure, canceled his sitcom project before it could even reach the development stage; local stations and TV Land began pulling reruns of The Cosby Show from the airwaves in response to the allegations, with the latter going as far as removing any mention of the show from their website, and Cosby was stripped of many of his honors, including his AMPAS membership, his Kennedy Center Honor, and his Mark Twain Prize for Humor. Nearly every college that gave him an honorary degree — at one point, he was the most popular commencement speaker in the US — took those away from him too, and a Netflix comedy special was shelved despite it already being filmed. The fall from grace concluded on April 26, 2018, when the man once fondly known as "America's Dad" was finally convicted of his crimes; he was sentenced to prison in his native Philadelphia that September and declared a sexually violent predator. Cosby was released on June 30, 2021, after serving three-and-a-half years of what was intended as a ten-year sentence before his conviction was overturned on a technicality.
  • English television chef Fanny Cradock saw her TV career ruined in 1976 when Gwen Troake, a housewife living in Devon, won the Cook of the Realm competition, leading to The BBC selecting her to organise a banquet to be attended by Edward Heath, Earl Mountbatten of Burma and other notables. The BBC filmed the result as a part of a series called The Big Time, and asked Fanny, by then a tax exile in Ireland, as one of a number of experts who would advise Troake as to the menu.
    • Troake went through her menu of seafood cocktail, duckling with bramble sauce and coffee cream dessert. Fanny, grimacing and acting as if on the verge of retching, claimed not to know what a bramble was, told Troake that her menu was too rich, and, though accepting that the dessert was delicious, insisted that it was not suitable. "You're among professionals now, dear," she declared. She scorned Troake's use of an ingredient for being too "English", and insisted that the English have never had their own cuisine, and erroneously claimed that "even the good old Yorkshire pudding comes from Burgundy".
    • Fanny suggested that Troake use a small pastry boat filled with fruit sorbet and covered with spun sugar, decorated with an orange slice and a cocktail stick through a cherry to give the dish the look of a small boat, suitable, Fanny thought, for the naval guests. In the event, the dessert was a disaster and could not be served properly. Robert Morley had also been consulted on the menu and said he felt that Troake's original coffee pudding was perfect.
    • When the dessert failed to impress, the public was annoyed that Fanny Cradock had seemingly ruined Troake's special day. Fanny wrote a letter of apology to Troake, but the BBC terminated her contract two weeks after the broadcast of the program. She would never again present a cookery program for the BBC, although she did make frequent appearances on the chat show circuit before her fatal stroke in 1994. (Troake, by contrast, published A Country Cookbook the following year.)
  • Thomas Gibson (Agent Aaron "Hotch" Hotchner) saw his contract terminated in Criminal Minds after allegedly attacking a writer over creative differences in an episode he was directing.
  • CSI:
    • Gary Dourdan, who had been hinting that he might leave the series, was finally written out of the show due to his personal problems; rumors that his drug charges were a direct cause are untrue.
    • Another time, Jorja Fox was fired for skipping an episode due to a pay dispute. This proved unfortunate for George Eads who overslept that day and was also fired because they thought he was doing the same thing. Fox was later rehired when she worked out her dispute with the production company as was Eads when they realized it was a misunderstanding.
  • The Daily Show: Hasan Minhaj was announced in August 2023 in Variety as on the verge of being chosen as the new permanent host pending its return from the WGA strike, but in the interim, on September 15, 2023, the New Yorker released a bombshell exposĂ© revealing that many of his personal anecdotes about experiencing racism and Islamophobia were totally fabricated, and that he repeatedly justified this by claiming that "emotional truth" was more important than "factual truth". He was also said to show consistent disdain for the rigors of proper research and fact-checking on his previous political news series, Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj. The strike ended mere weeks later and The Daily Show announced that it would be resuming its previously-established schedule of rotating guest hosts, before eventually luring Jon Stewart back as (part-time) permanent host in 2024.
  • Rebecca Gayheart's involvement in a 2001 vehicular manslaughter may have contributed to her departure from Dead Like Me after 5 episodes. In that series, she played the role of a "Grim Reaper", helping the dead pass on to the afterlife. According to this, Gayheart's character Betty was written out by the fifth episode intentionally, though the series creator, Bryan Fuller, had to fight with studio execs to prevent Gayheart from being replaced by another actress. If Fuller hadn't left the series early in the first season, Betty would have returned by the beginning of the second season, which is what he had intended. Once he left, the studio execs changed the plotline for the second season so that Betty would never return.
  • Deutschland sucht den Superstar:
    • Xavier Naidoo was fired from the jury of the show's seventeenth season in March 2020 after filming for the call backs wrapped production, following videos of him singing one of his songs in the aftermath of the anti-migrant 2018 Chemnitz protests with altered lyrics containing racially insensitive content circulated online and thus was replaced by Florian Silbereisen for the remaining episodes. In fact, this wasn't the first time he fell into this due to his bigoted views as in November 2015, his participation as the German representative at the Eurovision Song Contest in Stockholm was revoked for the same reason.
    • Michael Wendler was dropped from the jury in January 2021 after filming for the auditions wrapped, following his conspiracy theories on the COVID-19 Pandemic as well as comparing the German state to a concentration camp.
  • The short-lived reality TV series Dr. Steve-O got canned as a result of the titular host and producer — Stephen "Steve-O" Glover — getting fired after USA Network caught wind of him regularly sending hundreds of emails to friends and coworkers trashing the network executives.
  • Doctor Who:
    • Philip Hinchcliffe produced the show from 1975-77, a period that saw the series enter Darker and Edgier territory that was often criticised for being too scary and violent for children (and often considered the Golden Age of the series). The final straw came the notorious cliffhanger to episode three of "The Deadly Assassin", which saw the Doctor's head being held underwater. This was seen as going too far by Moral Guardians (most notably Mary Whitehouse) and, while The BBC publicly defended the programme, after three seasons Hinchcliffe was moved onto the adult police thriller series Target in 1977, and his replacement Graham Williams, who had created Target, was specifically instructed to lighten the tone of the storylines and reduce violence.
    • Writer Gareth Roberts was fired from the series due to numerous social media posts in 2017 in which he was openly transphobic. The last straw came when he was assigned to a book anthology of Who stories in 2019, and several of the other writers involved said they wanted nothing to do with him and would quit unless he was removed. Gareth's attempts to critique this, making a post in which he denied transgender people existed, was regarded as Digging Yourself Deeper. Prior to this, he got into a confrontation with Peter Capaldi while filming season eight's "The Caretaker" in 2014, thus ensuring that he wasn't invited back for the rest of his tenure.
    • John Barrowman returned to the franchise as Captain Jack Harkness after several years in the 2020s episodes "Fugitive of the Judoon" and "Revolution of the Daleks", but hasn't been seen since the latter. It's been reputed that he was blacklisted due to online controversy regarding his exhibitionism and sexualised behaviour on set during his regular-cast run, which was openly discussed and treated as a joke by the others at the time, but was retrospectively seen in a much darker light in the post-#MeToo era. It's theorised that the character Vinder, introduced in Flux, was a Suspiciously Similar Substitute for Jack as a result of this.
  • Drag Race:
    • RuPaul's Drag Race: Season 12 saw the first instance of a contestant being disqualified due to outside factors when, after the first episode aired, several people came forward to accuse contestant Sherry Pie of catfishing them and demanding sexual favors in exchange for alleged parts in theatre productions. This led to her being UnPersoned through editing (in American broadcasts at least) and the show banning her from attending the reunion, with no chance of winning regardless of overall placement. She reached the top four but as promised, was not present at the Reunion. Effectively, there were only three finalists.
    • RuPaul's Drag Race UK: One drag queen, contestant Crystal Lubrikant, was disqualified and entirely edited out of the show due to unspecified allegations unrelated to the contest itself. Crystal's removal was early enough that she's not even mentioned in official promotion for the season, and only news coverage acknowledges she was ever part of the show.
  • EastEnders:
    • Melissa Suffield (Lucy Beale) got sacked after being caught going into London nightclubs while underage and getting unruly drunk. Her rather colorful social network sites might also have had something to do with it. The character was eventually reinstated with a new actress.
    • Rob Kazinsky (Sean Slater) got a temporary ban from EE for sending photos of his nude self around.
    • Leslie Grantham ("Dirty" Den Watts) narrowly evaded this at the start when it was revealed that the actor had served a "life" sentence (paroled after ten years) for murder. The BBC stood by him, arguing that he'd learnt his lesson and every former criminal deserves rehabilitation, and he lasted several years on the show before leaving of his own volition. (The fact that he was playing a villainous, semi-criminal character rather than any kind of role model also may have helped.) It is popularly claimed that his second stint as a regular character on the show ended when he was forced to quit after Internet footage was released of him performing indecent acts in front of a webcam for what he thought was a single-person audience, but this is a myth; it was the intention from the beginning that his return would only be for 18 months.
    • Zigzagged by Danniella Westbrook. In 1996 her character Sam Mitchell was axed from the show due to the controversy surrounding Westbrook's cocaine addiction. However, she returned to the role in 1999... only to be axed again the following year after a photo of her at a party showed that her continued addiction completely eroded her nasal septum. Sam was brought back again in 2002, with Kim Medcalf in the role, then written out in 2005. When the character returned briefly in 2009 and 2010, Westbrook, who had by now cleaned up her act and had reconstructive surgery on her nose, was handed the role back.
  • In the summer of 2020, executive producer Ed Glavin stepped down from his position on Ellen DeGeneres's eponymous daytime talk show after allegations exploded in the press of Glavin and others perpetuating a toxic work environment behind the scenes, including instances of sexual misconduct and racism. The scandal would culminate in a Show-Ending Misdemeanor. In May 2021, Ellen announced that the show would end the following year.
  • Jussie Smollett was suspended from his role on Empire after allegations came out that he faked a hate crime against himself in February 2019 due to apparently being unhappy with his salary. The controversy hit the show badly enough that his character wound up being Put on a Bus and he was later reported to be fired from his role in a Broadway musical. In June, Smollett was officially fired from the series and was later indicted on six counts of disorderly conduct by a grand jury convened by a special prosecutor the following February. In December 2021 he was convicted on five of the six counts, leaving the future of his career in serious doubt.
  • Cas Anvar was fired from The Expanse in 2020 after dozens of allegations of harassment and sexual assault were raised by women in the fan community and on Anvar's other projects. His character, Alex Kamal, was abruptly killed off in the season 5 finale.
  • Two of the Eurovision Song Contest's participating countries were dropped from the contest over the course of a year:
    • Belarus had regularly participated in the Eurovision Song Contest since 2004, with a spotty track record of results, but in spite of their government becoming increasingly more totalitarian, they still fully intended to compete in the 2021 contest. However, when the state broadcaster, the Belarusian Television and Radio Company (BTRC), revealed their entry, "Ya nauchu tebya" (I'll Teach You) by the band Galasy ZMesta, it was clearly a thinly-veiled attack on the Belarusian citizens protesting the Lukaschenko regime. The European Broadcasting Union has a strict rule against songs of any political nature competing at Eurovision (although the broadcaster and the band both tried to act as though there was nothing political about it), and while many fans asked for the country to be expelled from the competition entirely, the EBU still gave them one more chance to send a non-political entry. Their subsequent submission traded in the protester-bashing for homophobia, leading the EBU to disqualify Belarus from that year's contest. Following it, they also voted to expel BTRC from the EBU, in light of their increasingly rigid standards toward free speech and obtaining confessions from leaders of the opposition under duress.
    • This was repeated towards Russia in 2022, who were initially planning to compete but were banned in light of the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, which had led a number of national broadcasters (most vocally those of the Nordic and Baltic countries, The Netherlands, Poland, and - to no great surprise - Ukraine) to demand the EBU expel Russia's broadcasters, with some even threatening to withdraw were Russia allowed to remain.
  • Midway through production of The Fall of the House of Usher (2023) (an adaptation of the Edgar Allan Poe short story of the same name by Mike Flanagan), Frank Langella was fired from his role of lead character Roderick Usher and recast with Bruce Greenwood after being accused of and investigated for misconduct on-set. Reportedly, Langella made many cast and crew members uncomfortable due to frequently making crass and insensitive jokes and remarks (especially of a sexual nature) and touching people without their consent; one of the main incidents that led to the investigation and Langella's subsequent removal was him touching the leg of his co-star Ruth Codd (an amputee who wears a prosthetic leg) during a sex scene, which wasn't scripted nor agreed upon by Codd and the intimacy coordinator beforehand, upsetting Codd enough that she left the set.
  • Before production began on the seventh and final season of Fantasy Island, HervĂ© Villechaize was involved in a salary dispute. One big reason for this was that Villechaize not only felt under-appreciated by his co-stars, but his wife Camille Hagen had divorced him; he, therefore, requested a salary on par with lead Ricardo Montalbán. Unfortunately for Villechaize, he was dropped from the series, which permanently stunted his career; offers besides Fantasy Island dried up for him. This, combined with the chronic pain and health problems stemming from his congenital dwarfism, led to his tragic suicide in 1993. Twenty-five years later, the last few days of Villechaize's life would be turned into the film My Dinner with HervĂ©, starring Peter Dinklage.
  • In the French sitcom Les Filles d'Ă  cĂ´tĂ©, the role-ending misdemeanor for one actress wasn't asking for more money or being excessively difficult to work with on set (opinions vary). CĂ©cile Auclert (Fanny) was exhausted by the workload, and after pleading for a let-up in the insane production schedule, she was straight-up dropped from the show. She was followed very quickly by HĂ©lène le Moignic (Magalie) who had simply enough and walked out. While the door was held open for Auclert to return - she did so, briefly, before the end of the show's run - le Moignic was never offered the chance to return; her account is that the show completely severed its association with her after the last paycheck and even those of her former co-stars who were sympathetic to her were ordered not to make contact. note 
  • Actor Hartley Sawyer, who played Ralph Dibney/The Elongated Man in The Flash (2014), was quickly fired from the show in June 2020, after fans dug up allegedly misogynist and racist tweets that he made years before his role on the show were discovered during the Black Lives Matter protests of that year.
  • Twins David and Jason Benham were set to host Flip It Forward on HGTV in 2014, but during production, their virulently anti-gay beliefs were uncovered and reported. HGTV pulled the series shortly thereafter.
  • The Maine Fox affiliate WPXT used to have a pair of spokespeople for their kids' lineup (entitled the Fox Kids Club): a human and a guy in a fox costume. The first human, Andrew Campbell, was fired on charges of pedophilia... then, eventually, so was his replacement.
  • The Frugal Gourmet's slot on PBS's Saturday afternoon schedulenote  was given to other shows (most recently, reruns of This Old House) after the former's host, Jeff Smith, got caught up in sexual abuse allegations; though he was able to settle out of court, the damage had been done, and his television career was in ruins.
  • Most of the The Full Monty cast returned to The Full Monty (2023), a sequel series. However, Guy (Hugo Speer) was written out after four episodes. Disney fired him in May 2022 after investigating allegations of "inappropriate conduct" on the set. Speer denied the accusations in a June 2023 interview with the Daily Mail.
  • Actor Jean-François Harrisson was fired from the French-Canadian sitcom Une grenade avec ça?, his character was written out and all episodes featuring him taken out of circulation following his arrest on child pornography ownership charges in 2011.
  • The Goldbergs was hit by two of these in November and December 2021:
    • First, actor Bryan Callen (who played PE coach Rick Mellor) was dropped after allegations of rape and underage sex were made against him. His character would not return for the rest of the series.
    • Jeff Garlin (who plays patriarch Murray Goldberg) was then removed from the series a month later after a series of HR investigations prompted by reports of him being abusive towards the show's crew. He would eventually be killed off during the Time Skip between Seasons 9 and 10.
  • Kirk Cameron's conversion to born-again Christianity became this for Growing Pains—from roles on the show, to production staff, and finally the show itself:
    • The influence Cameron had on the set caused both Julie McCullough and Matthew Perry to be sacked from the show: McCullough for posing in a Playboy shoot, and Perry for being, in Cameron's mind, a so-called "agent of Satan". In fairness, he did later apologise to McCullough.
    • But this same influence proved a Show-Ending Misdemeanor; Cameron's objections to the least bit of suggestive humour and themes that went against his evangelist views made him near-impossible to work with, turning the show into a Troubled Production. The final straw came when Cameron called ABC Entertainment president Bob Iger (who would eventually become the CEO of ABC's owner, Disney, in 2005) to chew out the show's then-executive producers Dan Guntzelman, Steve Marshall and Michael Sullivan as "pornographers" for simply wanting to go against his decisions, which led to them quitting and the show being quietly cancelled a year later. Cameron's own career was never the same, either; since the show folded, he has mostly been relegated to starring in evangelical Christian works.
  • Isaiah Washington's contract to the show Grey's Anatomy was not renewed for the show's fourth season as a result of some offensive homophobic remarks he made to TR Knight, along with the cast's embarrassment over his remarks, including denying it (while using the exact word, which really didn't help) in a post-awards show press conference. He returned in an episode near the end of the tenth season as part of Sandra Oh's departure from the series.
  • While Barry Howard's drunken antics on set had been a problem for the production of Hi-de-Hi! since at least Series 5, the final straw came during the filming of Series 7, when Howard pushed one of the Yellowcoat girls into the pool. Guest star Ben Aris was brought back full time in Series 8 and 9 to replace him.
  • Devon Anderson, who played the original Sonny Valentine on Hollyoaks, was dismissed for "time-keeping issues". Sonny was hastily written out and not seen again until the character was re-cast seven years later.
  • Vine star Curtis Lepore was dropped from Rainn Wilson's TV show, Hollywood and Vine after Lepore was accused of raping his girlfriend in early 2014. He remained active on Vine, however.
  • Allegedly happened twice in Homicide: Life on the Street. First, Brody was allegedly written out because Max Perlich had drug and arrest issues. Then, more controversially, it's been rumored that Howard was dropped because of press stories about unpleasant events involving Melissa Leo and her then ex-partner, despite the fact that she was most likely the victimized party in the situation. Notably, Max Perlich played Whistler from the above Buffy example, and was not carried over to Angel because of his issues.
  • In the Heat of the Night series co-star Howard Rollins was eventually dropped from the show after repeated legal problems, including cocaine possession and a DUI.
  • Jackass star Bam Margera had been in a downward spiral since his friend and Jackass co-star Ryan Dunn was killed in a car accident in 2011. The rest of the crew would have allowed him to participate the fourth Jackass movie provided he attend rehab and abstain from booze and using Adderall. However, a relapse caused him to be removed from the film in early 2021.
    • Margera's late uncle, Vincent "Don Vito", who became a star on Viva La Bam, also fell victim to this in 2007. The previous year, while at a Colorado mall, an apparently intoxicated Uncle Vito groped teenagers at an autograph session. He was found guilty of two counts of sexual assault of a minor and sentenced to ten years of probation. One of the terms of his probation was to no longer play his "Don Vito" character.
  • After longtime Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek passed away from pancreatic cancer on November 8, 2020, a series of rotating celebrity guest hosts moderated the rest of the 2020-2021 season as a means of auditioning a replacement. Almost a year later, Sony Pictures Television revealed the replacement was Mike Richards, who not only was a non-entity compared to the other prospective hosts (having had almost no on-camera experience, mainly working as executive producer for Jeopardy! as well as The Price Is Right, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, and Let's Make a Deal), but had initially been involved in organizing the audition process as Jeopardy!'s EP. That conflict-of-interest, along with the fact that Trebek did not list Richards among those he wanted to succeed him should he pass on before his contract expired, led many fans and critics to speculate that Richards had seized the hosting spot through shady means. A past lawsuit for sexual harassment didn't exactly endear him to those naysayers either. But the final nail in Richards' coffin came when this article from The Ringer (posted the same day Richards taped his first episode as official host) unearthed years-old podcast clips in which he made sexist, racist, ableist, and anti-Semitic comments. Facing growing backlash, Richards stepped down as host of Jeopardy! a couple days later. He was fired as executive producer of both Jeopardy! and Sony stablemate Wheel of Fortune as well when it became clear the fallout would continue to plague both as long as he remained in charge; Michael Davies and Bellamie Blackstone respectively took over his position for both shows, while famous Jeopardy! contestant Ken Jennings and Mayim Bialik would both alternate as the new hosts of Jeopardy!.
    • Two years later, Bialik would be dropped from the show after walking off in solidarity with the 2023 Writer's Guild strike, despite SAG-AFTRA rules explicitly advising members like her against such actions. Sony was already eager to move the show back to a single-host model, and they were furious when her decision to step away led to fans wrongfully accusing Jennings of being a scab for continuing to film episodes, and thus when her contract came up for renewel, they decided not to renew it.
  • Robert Kilroy-Silk's daytime talk show on BBC One was axed in January 2004 after he made insensitive comments about Arabs in his article for the Sunday Express.
  • Jeremy Kyle's eponymous talk show ended midway through May 2019, after a man who'd appeared on the show the week before, Steve Dymond, was found dead in his flat from suicide. The initial decision had just been to halt filming, but eventually, ITV chose to take all planned episodes off the air, and make sure any footage of the unfortunate guest's episode would never be screened. Following revelations made in the 2022 two-part documentary Death on Daytime, it became even more apparent that the show had a direct role to play in Dymond's suicide and potentially those of several other guests who appeared on the show, with its producers and staff regularly engaging in actions deliberately intended to traumatise participants and exacerbate already-hostile situations for the sake of ratings and drama to play out on screen. The documentary also found that the staff weren't exactly treated much better by their higher-ups, having been effectively abandoned without any support when the show came to an abrupt end, with a further suicide of a woman who worked for the show being connected to its cancellation.
  • Renard Spivey was the bailiff for two of Cristina Perez's court shows; Cristina's Court and Justice for All with Judge Cristina Perez. He was let go from the latter show in July 2019, when he was arrested for killing his wife. Even so, Justice for All taped so far in advance that while Renard was in prison, new episodes with him were airing as late as November 2020. He was replaced with Cinder Eller-Kimbell when the series resumed production in 2022.
  • Kongen Befaler (the Norwegian version of Taskmaster): the Taskmaster, Atle Antonsen, was fired after being investigated by police over a racist outburst in a bar. He was replaced as Taskmaster by former contestant BĂĄrd YlvisĂĄker starting Series 7, and an already completed Christmas special featuring Antonsen was cancelled.
  • The Late Show with David Letterman:
    • Bill Wendell, the long-time announcer for David Letterman (first on NBC's Late Night, then on CBS's The Late Show), officially retired in 1995 and was replaced by Alan Kalter. Appearing on a podcast in 2018, former Late Show producer Robert Morton revealed that Wendell had actually been fired for habitually stealing bottled water intended for the production staff.
    • Tony Mendez, known to viewers as "the cue-card boy" and host of the Worldwide Pants-produced webcast The Tony Mendez Show, was fired in 2014 after he assaulted staff writer Bill Scheft during an argument.
    • Letterman's assistant Stephanie Birkitt started appearing on the show in 1996 and became a very frequent presence over the next decade, at one point even co-hosting the aforementioned Tony Mendez Show. In October of 2009 she was placed on leave of absence after it was revealed that a former lover of hers had tried to blackmail Letterman, with the related revelation that Letterman and Birkitt had been in a secret relationship. Birkitt had essentially stopped making appearances in 2008, and never appeared again after the scandal.
  • Michael Moriarty claims that he was written off of Law & Order because of his open criticism of then-Attorney General Janet Reno, who had cited Law & Order as offensively violent, which Moriarty considered meant that she would attempt to censor the show. Dick Wolf for his part claims that his reaction to Reno was just the latest and most public example of Moriarty's "erratic behavior", which included Moriarty basically bungling a meeting he, Wolf, and other television executives had with Reno to dissuade her from supporting any law that would censor the show when Moriarty overreacted to any effect the law was likely to have on the show, as well as his on-set behavior (which included the filming of an episode during which Moriarty was unable to deliver any of his lines with a straight face). He later fled to Canada and publicly declared himself a "political exile" (over an acting gig?). In addition, Moriarty wasn't fired from the show; he left on his own terms. NBC asked Moriarty back, but he wouldn't budge unless Wolf was fired. The network decided not to compromise the show's quality over the demands of one actor, so NBC rejected Moriarty's decision. Ultimately, his character was killed offscreen on an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit in 2018.
  • Clayne Crawford, who played lead character Martin Riggs on the Lethal Weapon TV series, was dropped from the show shortly after the second season finale in 2018. Fox and the producers of the show had gotten tired of his bad behavior on set, and incidents involving him led to the rest of the cast threatening to quit if Crawford continued with the show. Riggs was recast with Seann William Scott for the third and final season, with the show being cancelled a year later, the last straw being Crawford's behavior was a decisive factor in Fox's decision to not renew the series for a fourth season (it didn't help the ratings were still good for the third season's final episode).
  • Timothy Hutton was excluded from Leverage: Redemption, the Freedive sequel of Leverage, after being accused of sexual assault. He is notably the only member of the original cast not to reprise his role.
  • Erica Mena was fired from Love & Hip Hop: Atlanta after a Season 11 episode showed her directing a racial slur at castmate Spice during an argument they were having.
  • Julie McCoy was written out of The Love Boat after Lauren Tewes's cocaine addiction made it impossible to perform her job. It didn't help that she started making very bizarre claims to reporters, such as the claim that she could tie knots with her toes.
  • A series-ending one: HBO had agreed to give Luck (2011) a second season very early in its run, but then quickly cancelled it after the public relations nightmare of three horses being killed on set. However, all three deaths were purely accidental, and something HBO was trying much harder to prevent than other producers of horse-riding TV shows.
  • Disney dismissed Gina Carano from her role as Cara Dune in the Star Wars series The Mandalorian, on February 10, 2021, after Carano shared an Image Macro comparing being a conservative in the United States to being Jewish in Europe during The Holocaust. Her agent United Talent Agency dropped her shortly after, and the upcoming Spin-Off Disney+ series Rangers of the New Republic, which was set to feature Cara prominently, was scrapped in development, with Lucasfilm later stating they had no intention of recasting her. Cara Dune ended up being Put on a Bus on The Mandalorian Season 3.
  • Actor and comedian Fred Willard lost his job as the narrator of PBS show Market Warriors in 2012 after being arrested for lewd acts in a pornography theatre. His ABC game show Trust Us with Your Life was also yanked off the air prematurely, resulting in a pair of Missing Episodes. Willard later apologized, and apart from losing those two jobs, his career was otherwise unaffected and he continued to work until his death in 2020.
  • Actor Kene Holliday was fired from Matlock due to his substance abuse, and he was replaced by Clarence Gilyard as the titular character's private investigator.
  • VH1's short-lived reality show Megan Wants a Millionaire was short-lived for a very grisly reason: one of the contestants, Ryan Jenkins, had not only been convicted of assaulting a woman in 2007, unbeknownst to the producers, but was also wanted for questioning—and later charged outright—in the murder of his wife, Jasmine Fiore. Only three episodes were aired in August 2009, before VH1 cancelled the show and scrubbed all mention of it from the airwaves and the Internet in light of the events. Jenkins would hang himself in a hotel room three days later while on the run from the law.
    • Jenkins had also been a contestant on another VH1 reality show, I Love Money, and was the winner of its third season. But the accusations against him and his subsequent suicide led to that season being cancelled the next day—with its fourth and final season only escaping a similar fate due to viewer demand.
  • CBS was forced to drop the initial 1980s run of Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer when series star Stacy Keach was arrested in London on charges of cocaine possession; to which Keach eventually decided to plead guilty to and serve a six-month prison sentence.
  • E4 have tried to deny it, but it's widely believed that Kelly being Put on a Bus between two seasons of Misfits with no proper farewell scene was due to Lauren Socha's conviction for racially aggravated assault on a cab driver in 2012.
  • Australian celebrity chef Pete Evans already had made some controversy during his time as co-host and judge of My Kitchen Rules for his views on vaccinations, his promotion for alternative medicines and telling parents to have their infants drink bone broth instead of baby formula. However, his career took a nosedive in April 2020 when he tried to sell a lamp known as a "subtle energy revitalisation platform" to his fans as a cure for COVID-19 and began to promote conspiracy theories about the pandemic and the disease, which resulted in his departure from the show (although it was unrelated to the incident itself) and him being fined by the TGA for $25,000 AUD. His already falling career plunged even further into the abyss seven months later when he posted a cartoon on his Instagram account containing the black sun, a symbol long associated with the neo-Nazi movement and it led to his removal from the lineup of the Australian version of I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here!. Shortly after that, his cookbooks and merchandise with his name on it were pulled from shelves in many stores, and several of his social media accounts were removed.
  • Diane Neal began appearing on NCIS as CGIS Special Agent Abigail Borin starting in Season 7, and rapidly became a very popular character. As such, Neal made once-a-year appearances until Season 12—and those guest stints stopped abruptly after she made allegations on Twitter ranting about how unsafe the working conditions were on the set of its Spin-Off NCIS: New Orleans, where she also made several appearances.
  • In the wake of her cookware line being dropped by Macy's, Target, and Bloomingdale's, Chrissy Teigen stepped down from her planned voice role in the second season of Netflix series Never Have I Ever when old tweets from 2011 resurfaced and revealed that she had engaged in vicious cyberbullying towards model Courtney Stodden on Twitter, following the latter's marriage to 51-year-old Doug Hutchinson at the age of 16. Considering how Teigen used to be praised for being outspoken on social media, her outspoken personality has become a lot Harsher in Hindsight as more old tweets, where she targeted other celebrities like former Teen Mom star Farrah Abraham and Lindsay Lohan, were also uncovered.
  • The original announcer of The Newlywed Game was Scott Beach. During commercial breaks, he would entertain the audience by singing war protest songs which supposedly didn't fly with the producers. Beach was fired and replaced by Johnny Jacobs, who would go on to have a lasting career for Chuck Barris.
  • While it had already ended production, Pee-wee's Playhouse had its reruns cut short by CBS, thanks to Paul Reubens' indecent exposure. Kinda hard to reconcile that fact with Pee-Wee Herman, no matter the protests to the contrary. The rumors that circulated at the time that Reubens had done it deliberately to invoke this trope and finally get rid of his career-starting but then career-limiting character didn't help matters.
  • Alastair Stewart, British newsreader and host of documentary series Police, Camera, Action! had his contract terminated in 2003 for a drink-driving offense (his second one, he'd referred to the first one previously in a November 1994 episode, the show's second episode) and was relegated to intro and outros in the rebooted version of it, which was now presented by Alastair Stewart and Adrian Simpson, as of September 2007. Surprisingly, he was allowed to present the special edition episode Ultimate Pursuits in September 2007.
  • Before he began hosting Real Time on HBO, Bill Maher had Politically Incorrect, a politically centered late-night talk show exploring controversial topics and subjects that were unusual for a typical talk show. It was so successful on Comedy Central that after five years at that network it moved to ABC, where it gained even higher ratings. However, it all came to an end in an episode airing just six days after 9/11, in which Maher agreed with conservative activist Dinesh D'Souza over disputing then-U.S. President George W. Bush's claim that the 9/11 hijackers were "cowards", stating "We have been the cowards, lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away." The massive public outcry ignited by the offending comments led to the show bleeding sponsors and viewers, enough that ABC canceled the series in July 2002 due to continued loss of advertiser supportnote . However, HBO, who co-produced and co-owned Politically Incorrect, stood by Maher's side and offered him another go on their own channel with Real Time, a similar talkshow that years later would prove to be more successful than Politically Incorrect ever was.
  • It's not entirely clear why Rich Fields, The Announcer on The Price Is Right, left the show in September 2010 after six years on the job. The producers claimed that they wanted to find an announcer with skill in improv comedy to play off Drew Carey (who took over hosting from Bob Barker in 2007), and got such an announcer in George Gray a few months later. Other sources claim that Rich had personal problems, including identity theft, that made him unable to continue on the show (though he did follow Drew over to Drew Carey's Improv-A-Ganza a year later, and filled in for a short time on Wheel of Fortune following the death of their longtime announcer, Charlie O'Donnell). Around the same time, The Price Is Right lost many of its behind-the-scenes staff, including a producer and director, under equally mysterious circumstances.
  • Japan's famous quiz show Quiz Hexagon II ended in September 2011, one month after host Shinsuke Shimada confessed he had connections to the Yakuza and retired from showbusiness not long after.
  • Despite playing one-third of the show's Power Trio, Orlando Brown did not return for Raven's Home, the Sequel Series to That's So Raven due to a series of run-ins with the law and drug addictions, which led Disney to cut ties with him, and his character doesn’t get so much as a mention. The Proud Family: Louder and Prouder, a Revival of The Proud Family for Disney+, notes that the original cast would be returning... except for Brown's character Sticky, who is conspicuous by his absence. Even if Orlando had gotten his life together a good 5 years before production of the latter, the damage is too gravely done for him to return.
  • Romeo and Juliet: The first episode of The Shakespeare Plays garnered some controversy when Rebecca Saire, who played Juliet in this production, criticized director Alvin Rakoff for the way he made her portray the character onscreen, resulting in Cedric Messina and The BBC cancelling several interviews she was scheduled for.
  • The Paraguayan version of Long Runner Edutainment Show Romper Room ran for only 17 shows due to an odd example of this. The original host was ousted after 9 days when it was discovered she had connections to pro-Nazi groups. After using an accordion player who played spirituals on the 10th day as a stopgap; a third host was hired—only for the producers to find out that she'd appeared in two pornographic films, at which point they simply threw in the towel.
    • One of the American versionsnote  lost their host in 1962; Sherri Finkbine had come under fire for seeking an abortion in Sweden, out of fear that the thalidomide she had been taking was affecting her unborn child. Her fears, tragically, turned out to be true—although, on a much happier note, she would deliver a healthy girl a few years later. Sissy Spacek would portray her in the 1992 made-for-TV movie A Private Matter.
  • Roseanne Barr, no stranger to controversy on Twitter, torpedoed the 2018 revival of her eponymous sitcom after making a racist tweet towards Barack Obama's former adviser Valerie Jarrett. ABC canceled the show just a few hours later despite it being initially renewed for an 11th season. It only took a few more hours for the three networks airing reruns of the original series (including CMT, who'd earlier saved the above-mentioned Nashville) to drop them, plus Hulu eliminating the show from its library, despite that show still being extremely popular.note  She later went on another Twitter tirade against members of the show's cast and crew and continuing to tweet out conspiracy theories about other entertainers, which led to many believing she isn't truly sorry about her racist comment, and evaporated any chance of ABC reconsidering their decision. That fall, ABC premiered The Conners, a continuation of the series starring the rest of the Conner family without Roseanne; her character was killed off in the new show's first episode.
  • Actor and stand-up comedian Mike Reid had a brief stint as Roger Moore's underwater stunt double on The Saint until he was sacked for making fun of the star's thinning hair.
  • Saturday Night Live has had this happen:
    • Nora Dunn was fired after boycotting the show following Andrew "Dice" Clay's 1990 appearance. Jon Lovitz discussed her boycott of the show in detail during an episode of the podcast The ABC's of SNL with director Kevin Smith:
      Anyway, it's the second to last episode of the season, and Nora, uh, you know, she caused a lot of trouble and she was very hard to get along with, so [SNL] wasn't going to ask her back, anyway. And it's the [second to] last show, and she goes to the press and says, I'm not doing this show. He's against women, and I'm not doing it. And this is how the press works, and I'm telling you, I'm on the inside of this. They don't know this story. They don't know she's just doing it to get press. It's her last hurrah. They're not asking her back on the show.
    • Comedy writer Katie Rich was fired from SNL in 2017 after Tweeting a joke that President Donald Trump's son Barron would become "the world's first homeschool shooter." Rich later deleted the tweet and apologized, but the backlash from Trump supporters and opposers alike forced NBC to fire her. Rich would later return to the show for the Weekend Update: Summer Edition spin-off.
    • Damon Wayans, tired of the minor roles he was getting, was fired for playing a cop as gay in one sketch without prior approval.
    • Probably the most infamous example - Charles Rocket saying "fuck" in a sketch parodying Dallas led to not only him being fired, but the entire cast and most of the writing staff, save for a select few, including Eddie Murphy.
    • Shane Gillis (a stand-up comic who was hired alongside Chloe Fineman and Bowen Yang) was fired just one week after being chosen as a new cast member for Season 45, when a clip of him making horribly racist and sexist statements on a podcast a few years earlier was unearthed, and he didn't help at all by defending it as being edgy. He did further develop his stand-up career and got a cult fandom for it, even hosting an episode of SNL four years after his firing — and the first line of his monologue had him implore the audience not to look up why he wasn't cast.
    • Jay Mohr's time on the show was cut short in 1995 after he plagiarized an Irish bartender sketch he had written and appeared in from comedian Rick Shapiro. Mohr initially denied he had stolen the bit, but admitted to doing so after Shapiro sued SNL and Lorne Michaels confronted Mohr with a tape of Shapiro's original sketch. The sketch was pulled from the reruns of the episode, and Shapiro was given a cash settlement from NBC. Mohr, who was a featured player, claimed he had quit at the end of the season because he had been denied repertory status for the next season, likely because of the incident. His claim that he voluntarily left has been disputed.
  • On Scandal, Columbus Short's Harrison Wright was Killed Off for Real after his last appearance in the third season finale after continual domestic violence allegations made it untenable for Shonda Rhimes to keep him on the series further.
  • A stagehand was fired from The Shirley Temple Show in 1958 after Shirley caught him swearing during a rehearsal of their "Mother Goose" episode. Shirley told the cast she fired the crewmember because it was improper language for a children's show, even though no children were present at the time of the incident.
  • Rumor has it that Orlando Jones' character on Sleepy Hollow was written out in season 2 because the actor openly criticized the new showrunners.
  • Yeoman Rand from Star Trek: The Original Series, if William Shatner is to be believed. While Grace Lee Whitney did have alcohol/drug issues, others say Rand was transferred to another starship due to the writers not wanting a love interest for Kirk on the ship, while others claim that she was fired after threatening to expose her sexual assault by a studio executive. However, Whitney did get to reprise her role as Rand in two of the Star Trek movies (Star Trek: The Motion Picture as the transporter operator and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country as a member of the Excelsior's crew) and returned for the Star Trek: Voyager episode "Flashback", taking place during VI.
  • Sasha Mitchell's character Cody from Step by Step was Put on a Bus because of real-life domestic abuse allegations from Mitchell's wife, Jeannette Robbins. The worst part is that it turns out SHE was actually the violent one and he was trying to protect the kids. After the reveal, he was allowed to return for one episode of the last season. He would end up divorcing Robbins one year after the incident.
  • Dan Spilo became the first Survivor contestant ever to be kicked off the show when he was removed from the Island of the Idols season in 2019 after he was reported to have inappropriately touched a female crew member while he was getting on a boat. Spilo's behavior around female contestants had been an issue for most of the season, especially after Kellee Kim had accused him of touching her inappropriately. Spilo was given a formal warning by the producers after Kim aired her concerns about him to the rest of the tribe, but he was allowed to remain on the show, a decision that proved to be controversial for the rest of the season. The incident with the crew member was ultimately the final straw, and Dan was removed from the game on Day 36. The remaining five castaways were informed of the decision by host Jeff Probst that morning—no goodbyes, no placement on the jury, no final words, and no invite to the aftershow.
  • Chris Langham was written out of The Thick of It, despite playing main character Hugh Abbott. Being arrested for downloading child pornography will do that to you. Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi) became the de facto main character from the 2007 specials onward. His conviction also led to the episode of The Muppet Show on which he was the featured guest becoming a Banned Episode.
  • Bob Vila, the host of the PBS series This Old House, was a real pain in the neck for the show's construction crew to deal with. Among other things, he ended up hogging the spotlight. However, the last straw was when, before the 1989 season, he appeared in ads for Rickel Home Centers, a competitor to Home Depot, a local sponsor for the series on numerous stations. He was shortly fired for endangering the series as Home Depot and national sponsor Weyerhauser had dropped their sponsorships as a direct result of the ads.
  • In what ended up as a show-ending event, Christopher Titus admitted that he was the one responsible for Titus getting canceled, outlined in one of his comedy specials. He had spent three seasons fighting the Executive Meddling at every turn, not helped that the Fox network had a short turnover for its president during this period. In a meeting for Season 3, the new network president offered a direction the show could go, which he opposed on a fundamental level. But instead of playing nice, he tried calling out her out for the stupid suggestion and he expected Braveheart-esque support behind him. Instead, the season contract finished out, and he was told at the last possible legal moment that they were not renewed. He admits now that if you call your boss an idiot enough times, they will fire you.
  • The BBC did not renew Top Gear host Jeremy Clarkson's contract after he got into an offstage argument over catering arrangements with assistant producer Oisin Tymon that eventually resulted in Clarkson punching Tymon in the face. He was initially suspended after the highly-publicized incident, but when a BBC investigation concluded that he indeed did punch Tymonnote , the hammer was ultimately dropped; his contract, which was up for renewal, would not be picked up.note  Co-presenters James May and Richard Hammond, also looking at contract renewals, decided not to go on without Clarkson and left the series as well, although they have continued to present BBC programmes here and there. The BBC decided to continue Top Gear without them, hiring several new presenters to replace them. Meanwhile, Clarkson, Hammond, and May (along with long-time friend and producer Andy Wilman), negotiated with Amazon to create The Grand Tour, a Spiritual Successor to their version of Top Gear.
  • The Tribe: The teenage actors playing Ved and Chloe in season 4 reportedly held up production by going AWOL for a whole day during scheduled filming hours. This annoyed the producers enough that both characters ended up getting killed off.
  • Channel 4 canceled the popular music show The Tube in 1987 after presenter Jools Holland uttered the phrase "Be there or be ungroovy fuckers" during a promo for the show that was aired live on ITV during the late afternoon and well before the watershed. The show was immediately taken off the air for three weeks, and Holland was suspended from the show for six weeks. While the show's fifth series was allowed to resume, producer Malcolm Gerrie and Tyne Tees Television director of programmes Andrea Wonfor both resigned in March. Although The Tube incident was the end of Holland's time with Channel 4 and ITV, he later had considerable success with his BBC show Later... with Jools Holland, which began in 1992 and airs to this day.
  • Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy, where do we begin with Charlie Sheen? Allegations of domestic abuse didn't cut it. An arrest and jail time in Aspen for violating a restraining order didn't cut it. No, this is what it took for Sheen to get kicked off Two and a Half Men: first, he was hospitalized for a hernia suffered in the middle of what was, by all accounts, a cocaine-fueled orgy; then he took a leave of absence to go into rehab, putting the show on hiatus in the process; then he called up Alex Jones and complained about everyone from the show's co-creator and executive producer, Chuck Lorre, to his co-stars and the higher-ups at CBS; and finally promptly demanding $3 million per episodenote  upon his return, at which point the show dropped him, killing his character (and making sure Sheen himself could never, ever come back to the show), and replaced him with Ashton Kutcher. It should be noted that Lorre had repeatedly tried to fire Sheen long before the grand event happened, and only didn't succeed because CBS always thwarted his attempts out of fear that his absence would severely damage the show's ratings base. Sheen was eventually invited back for the Grand Finale, but he instead insisted on a hook for a Sequel Series, which was rejected.
  • By some accounts, Lindsay Lohan's stint on Ugly Betty was cut short due to outrageous diva behavior on her part. Other sources claim it was due to Creative Differences (if this is true, we might presume Lohan was upset that her character was set up as a Fallen Princess only to be turned into a jerk for no reason).
  • In a sort of amusing irony, Watchdog and Rogue Traders co-host Dan Penteado was apparently fired after being arrested for benefit fraud and jailed. Considering the shows are meant to be about rip-offs and con artists, this ended up being mentioned by one of the rogues confronted on the show afterwards.
  • After four great seasons writing and producing The West Wing, Aaron Sorkin was asked to leave his position as Executive Producer after his drug scandal leaked out.
  • A case of one person's role costing another person their job occurred early in June 2019 with Netflix's Mini Series When They See Us. Actress Felicity Huffman's portrayal of Linda Fairstein, the prosecutor of the controversial Central Park Fivenote  proved a headache for the real Fairstein, who found herself facing a large enough wave of backlash that she resigned her membership in a number of organizations she was involved with, including her position on Vassar College's board of trustees—while a second prosecutor, Elizabeth Lederer (portrayed by Vera Farmiga) left her teaching post at Columbia Law School later that month for much the same reasons.
  • ViacomCBS fired Nick Cannon as host of VH1's Wild 'N Out over a podcast interview with rapper Professor Griff in which Cannon perpetuated anti-Semitic conspiracy theories note  , insinuated that black Africans were the only "true" Semitic people, and cited the pseudoscientific Melanin Theory as "proof" that "[the] only way that they [white people] can act is evil". The company's statement mentioned that they initially reached out to him but that he failed to apologize or acknowledge that he was spreading hate speech. The incident, however, did not cost Cannon his hosting job on Fox's The Masked Singer, though the network did condemn his comments. Lionsgate also shelved their upcoming talk show with him for a year, possibly with more to come, since as one article put it, "it might be a good idea to not immediately launch a TV series predicated entirely on the universal likability of Nick Cannon." Sure enough, when his talk show finally debuted in September 2021, it fizzled and died after just one season of dismal ratings.
  • Yancy Butler had to leave Witchblade because of her alcoholism. Since she played the title character Det. Sara Pezzini, the show left with her.
  • The X Factor has had numerous controversies which have led to contestants and even judges being forced to withdraw from the competition, leaving the show as a result:
    • During Season 3, Avenue, one of the groups, was booted from the show by their mentor Louie Walsh after it was discovered they were already in a contract with a record label whose boss tried to exploit the show for publicity. Luckily they weren't far enough that another band couldn't be brought in to replace them.
    • Emily Nakanda, one of Season 4's contestants, was kicked out on the second episode of the live shows after a video of her Happy Slappingnote  a teenage girl was discovered on YouTube.
    • Frankie Cocozza was booted from the show during Season 8 after boasting about doing cocaine in the house where contestants stayed for the competition.
    • Brooks Way, a group participating in Season 13, was put on suspension mere hours before the first live show and kicked out before the results shownote  after it emerged that one of them had violently assaulted his ex-girlfriend as well as evidence that he regularly beat up his own brother, the other half of the band.
    • Tulisa Contostavlos was forced to step down as a judge from the competition before the auditions for the tenth series began filming and was replaced by original judge Sharon Osbourne after an exposĂ© was published about her dealing cocaine, but the legal case against her collapsed after the reporter was caught lying in court. She would return to the show as a guest judge two years later.
    • Willy Moon and his wife Natalia Kills, both judges for Season 2 of the New Zealand show, were fired after the two accused contestant Joe Irvine of supposedly copying Moon and made several scathing comments about him. The fallout resulting in Natalia changing her stage name to Teddy Sinclair, while both her and Moon's roles in the show were given to Natalie Bassingthwaighte and Shelton Woolright.
  • Paul "Des" Ballard, from GMTV's Disney Club and Diggit blocks in the UK. After he left Diggit when it rebranded as Diggin' It in 2003, he seemingly disappeared from the face of the Earth, with family and even friends like his former co-presenter Fearne Cotton not knowing his whereabouts, or if he was even still alive. Fearne herself said that she was interested in finding his whereabouts and would love to reunite with him. The anonymity went as far as for Facebook groups to be created to find his whereabouts.
    • In 2021, Des would end up resurfacing in the public, and it was all the wrong reasons.
      • The Sun reported a few years prior in 2017 that he had been arrested and sentenced to nine years in prison for causing a car pile-up that led to two deaths while driving intoxicated with his son in the back, and another year added for attempting to rape and assault a woman in a hotel room. It was also revealed that he smuggled illegal cocaine as well.
      • It was also revealed that in 2014, he operated an illegal self-storage business on green-belt land in Bulphan, England and had been ordered to repay the profits from it.
  • This Morning:
    • John Leslie, who presented on the show since 1999, was fired in October 2002 after The Wright Stuff presenter Matthew Wright named him as the person who allegedly raped Ulrika Jonsson, after the latter's autobiography made mention that "an acquaintance" had raped her when she was 19. Although Leslie was cleared of the charges, several other controversies led to his demise in the TV industry. Phillip Schofield, who was already presenting on Fridays, took over as the Monday-Thursday presenter with Fern Britton.
    • Phillip Schofield himself ended up getting into this as well. After reports were made that he had fallen out with his co-presenter Holly Willoughby, he resigned from the show in May 2023 but was still committed to working with ITV. The following week, Schofield revealed that in 2020 he had an extramarital affair with a young male employee (who was only 15 when they first met, although Schofield stated the affair only began when the employee turned 20) he worked with on the show, which he had lied about to everyone else. ITV terminated his contract, and following other companies and charity organizations dropping him, it's likely that he will never see a TV career as he did again.

    Local Television 
  • Jackson, Mississippi's NBC affiliate WLBT was taken off the air in 1969 due to them having a clear bias against the Civil Rights Movement, opting to air pro-segregationist content instead of NBC's live coverage of certain events tied to said movement. NBC themselves had been complaining about the station as far back as 1955, when station manager Fred Beard sabotaged the local broadcast of a Today segment featuring Thurgood Marshall, who would later become the first African-American Justice of the Supreme Court. Additionally, the station had also cut reporting on the Civil Rights Movement from NBC's national news programming and pre-empted any network show that featured African-American actors or personalities, blaming the interference on technical issues. After the FCC considered these actions as a violation of their Fairness Doctrine, they stripped the station of their license and granted it to a trusted station group. This new version of WLBT became a pioneer in racial equity in Southern U.S. broadcasting, and their local newsmagazine program won a Peabody Award in 1976. As of 2019, the station retains its WLBT call letters and NBC affiliation but is otherwise a separate station to the one that existed prior to 1969.
  • Harold F. Gross, whose company Gross Telecasting was the owner of Lansing, Michigan's CBS affiliate, then known as WJIM, sold the station off and went out of business in 1984, undone by years of mismanagement, which dated back to the 1960s into the early 1970s, where the station frequently manipulated and even blacked out news items that went against Gross's opinions, up to and including preemptions of network shows, which eventually led to the American Civil Liberties Union challenging the station's license in 1973 following reports that the company blacklisted several prominent political figures from appearing on the station. An FCC judge caught wind of these allegations and ordered that the station's license be revoked in 1981, though WJIM remained on the air, and the revokation order was reversed the following year. Under new ownership, the station became WLNS, call letters that the station retains as of 2022, along with its CBS affiliation.
  • A third case of a TV station being stripped of its license was WPST, the ABC affiliate in Miami. A few years after signing on in 1957, it was found out that its owner Public Service Television Inc. (a subsidary of National Airlines) had bribed an FCC official to get its license. WPST's license was revoked in 1961; of the three others who had applied for channel 10 in Miami in 1957, the FCC picked a group led by L. B. Wilson as it was the only one who didn't try to influence them. The FCC had WPST sell their non-license assets to the new group, then gave the latter a new license as WLBW. As of 2022, it's still on the air as WPLG, and while its current license technically only dates back to 1961, it still claims the 1957-61 WPST era as part of its own history.

    Puppet Shows 
  • The Christian Television Network pulled their 1990s series Joy Junction from re-runs on their channel in 2013 after series puppeteer and cast member Ronald William Brown was given a 20-year prison sentence for possessing child pornography along with plotting to murder and eat a child he knew from his local church.
  • There are multiple conflicting accounts explaining why Steve Whitmire, the successor to the late Jim Henson as the performer of Kermit the Frog, was fired from The Muppets after almost 40 years with the troupe. In a statement given to The Hollywood Reporter, Whitmire claimed he was terminated over Creative Differences: Disney (the current owner of The Muppets) wanted to radically alter the behavior of Kermit for the short-lived ABC series, but Whitmire felt the changes were short-sighted and an insult to Henson's legacynote . However, in their own statement for the Reporter, Disney claimed that Whitmire was fired over many years of backstage egotism, claiming that his behavior on-set caused production delays and was becoming increasingly difficult to work with. Brian Henson, Jim's son, supports this theory, adding that Whitmire was making "outrageous demands" while also admitting that creative differences did play a role.note  Regardless, this applies to both scenarios since the termination wasn't voluntary.
  • Sesame Street:
    • Kevin Clash, who had performed Elmo since 1984, went on a leave of absence in 2012 after allegations arose that he had sex with a 16-year-old. The allegations were soon disproven, though just as it looked like he'd recover from that incident, a new allegation of the same kind from another party led him to quit the show and have Ryan Dillon take over the role of Elmo. Fortunately, he would eventually be cleared of all sex abuse charges in 2014, and while Clash has never returned to Sesame Street, the rest of his puppeteering career at The Jim Henson Company remains unaffected.
    • Northern Calloway, who played David since 1971, began to suffer a decline in both physical and mental health in the 1980s. He suffered a nervous breakdown leading to him getting jailed for a September 1980 rampage in Nashville. However, he still returned to playing David and promised to take his prescribed lithium. By 1987, however, then-executive producer Dulcy Singer was skeptical of how long he would last, so the writers gradually ended David's relationship with Maria and eventually had him take over Hooper's Store when Mr. Hooper died. His behavior would remain erratic and in 1989, after reportedly biting music coordinator Danny Epstein in a scuffle and intruding into the high school of Alison Bartlett, who played Gina, and proposing to her, Calloway was dismissed by Singer, and David was written out of the show. Calloway was shortly thereafter institutionalized and died after a scuffle with medical staff in January 1990.


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