8 Beloved TV Characters Who Were Almost Written Out of Their Shows

When NBC rejected Gene Roddenberry’s first Star Trek pilot in early 1965, the network had a list of complaints. The show was too cerebral, too slow—but the feedback that cut deepest was aimed at a half-Vulcan science officer with pointed ears. Executives worried those ears made Spock look satanic, and they told Roddenberry the character had no place in a second pilot. One promotional brochure reportedly had the pointed tips airbrushed out entirely. Roddenberry refused to proceed without Spock, arguing he was the constant visual reminder that the show took place in outer space. NBC finally relented, grudgingly, agreeing that Spock could appear as a background figure in “Where No Man Has Gone Before.” He stole scene after scene, and the character who was nearly cut went on to become one of the most recognizable faces in television history.

Norman Lear brought his American adaptation of the British sitcom Till Death Us Do Part to ABC in 1968 and filmed two separate pilots. ABC passed on both. The problem was the same each time: a loud, bigoted, wrong-about-everything working man named Archie whose opinions were sure to bring the sponsors running for the exits. CBS eventually agreed to take a chance, but even then the network held its breath. When All in the Family premiered in January 1971, roughly 50 million people a week tuned in to watch Archie argue at the dinner table, and the show sat at number one in the Nielsen ratings for five straight years. The chair Archie Bunker occupied in that Queens living room now lives at the Smithsonian Institution—which is where things end up when everyone agrees they mattered.

When Happy Days launched in 1974, the show revolved around Richie Cunningham. The Fonz—Arthur Fonzarelli, played by Henry Winkler—hovered at the edges in a windbreaker. ABC thought a leather jacket made the character look like a hoodlum, so network policy restricted the look to scenes where Fonzie was standing next to his motorcycle. Without that jacket and without a real storyline, he was just a guy in the background. Producer Garry Marshall saw what audiences were noticing every time the Fonz walked into frame, and he pushed until ABC relented. The storylines shifted, the leather jacket stayed on, and by the late ’70s the show had effectively become Fonzie’s. That original brown jacket—which only photographed as black—eventually landed at the Smithsonian, company for Archie Bunker’s chair just a few galleries away.

John Ratzenberger came in to audition for Cheers in 1982, read badly for one of the existing ensemble roles, and felt the room go cold. His headshot was apparently already headed for the trash. As he turned to leave, he paused and asked the producers a question: “Do you have a bar know-it-all?” Every neighborhood bar had one, he explained—then launched into an improvisation on the spot. The producers hired him. The character of Cliff Clavin—postal worker, amateur expert on everything, owner of exactly zero reliable facts—did not exist before that audition room pivot. Ratzenberger had agreed to seven episodes; he appeared in every one of Cheers’ eleven seasons. The show that almost didn’t have a bar know-it-all turned out to be impossible to imagine without one.

Kelsey Grammer walked into Cheers in the fall of 1984 as a plot device—a stuffy psychiatrist brought in as Diane Chambers’s love interest to complicate a storyline and then quietly disappear. The original plan was three to seven episodes, depending on which account you read. Grammer was one of several recurring actors hired for a limited run. Then the producers watched him work. Director James Burrows would later put it plainly: “When we saw him, we all started laughing.” Frasier Crane became a full series regular by the fifth season. By 1993 he had his own spinoff, and Kelsey Grammer’s run as the same character stretched to twenty years across two series—a record for a primetime live-action character in American television history.

NBC test audiences in 1989 had opinions about the Seinfeld pilot, and none of them were good. Comment cards called the show “weak.” No one wanted to watch it again. A former NBC executive would later describe it as the lowest-rated pilot in the network’s history—high praise it was not. NBC passed on ordering a first season and parked the show in a summer time slot that one network insider later called the “garbage dump.”

What rescued George Costanza—and Jerry, Elaine, and Kramer alongside him—was a repeat airing in July 1990 that quietly delivered strong numbers. NBC ordered a second season on the strength of those summer ratings. The George Costanza you spent a decade watching lose jobs, botch relationships, and career straight into one self-inflicted disaster after another nearly ended as a single summer program nobody was supposed to remember. He is probably fine with that story.

The character of Steve Urkel was written into Family Matters for a single 1989 episode—one appearance, one storyline, then gone. Executive producer Michael Warren has confirmed it: Urkel was a one-off. Jaleel White was twelve years old at his second audition and apparently arrived announcing himself simply as “Steve.” He played the suspender-wearing, cheese-loving neighbor with the kind of unblinking commitment that makes everyone in the room pay attention. Audiences did the same thing. The response to that single episode was so strong that producers immediately began rewriting already-planned episodes to bring Urkel back. By the time Family Matters concluded in 1998, Steve Urkel had become, for most viewers, the show itself. The one-episode guest had gradually become the main character, to the extent that the show’s opening credits were eventually recut to feature him front and center.

The pilot episode of ER aired in September 1994 and introduced emergency room nurse Carol Hathaway arriving by gurney after a drug overdose. That scene was supposed to be her only one. In the original script, Carol died—a dramatic opening meant to establish the stakes of the show’s world and then move on to the rest of the story. Julianna Margulies’s part was a memorable exit, not a career.

Test audiences had something else in mind. Carol’s connection to Dr. Doug Ross, played by George Clooney, registered so powerfully onscreen that the producers rewrote her survival into the story and made her a series regular. Margulies would earn an Emmy Award for the role. The woman who was scripted to die in the first episode became one of the defining faces of a show that ran for fifteen seasons, and her eventual reunion with Clooney’s character—filmed in secret and kept from the press until it aired—was one of the most-watched moments in the series’ entire run.