"That Was A Mistake" — 21 Controversial Storylines TV Writers Regret Writing

Speaking of the final season, he said, "There was no way to answer all the open questions that existed across the prior 119 episodes of the show. We sort of tried a version of that with the episode that was a couple before the end, Across the Sea, which was this very mythological episode about the origins of Jacob and the Man in Black. That was sort of what answers look like. And I don’t think it was great.”

They'd already written his death into the script when they saw Shawn Ashmore in the role, but Kripke liked his performance so much he regretted the choice. "We, the writers, were sure that Lamplighter needed to die for what he did. You know, he burned a bunch of children alive. It's not awesome behaviour," he told TV Guide. "But once we cast Shawn and once I was watching his dailies I have to admit I regret [killing Lamplighter]... It was too late. At that point we were already deep in the scripts."

Failing that, "If Nina had never left, I would've loved to have been able to see if Stefan and Elena could've found their way back to each other," he added.

"When we killed Bob in Season 2, I didn’t want to do that. We had fallen in love with both the character and Sean Astin. And Sean didn’t want to die. Winona Ryder didn’t want him to die," Matt Duffer told TVLine. "But we’ll find something else to do with Grace, something else to do with Sean," he added. Hmmm...

The Duffer brothers claim they didn't expect the two characters to dazzle so much together on-screen. “We always have those moments [of ‘What have we done?’],” Matt Duffer told TVLine.

"We kept referring to her as Chandler's father, even though Chandler's father was trans," she told the BBC. "Pronouns were not yet something that I understood. So we didn't refer to that character as she. That was a mistake."

The show included a flashback to Jack, Kate's father, getting off the phone with his daughter before embarking on a seriously unsafe drive.  “That was a head fake on our part," he said. "While I thought it was like, ‘Oh, that’s cool, interesting timing,’ and people might think that’s coming, I didn’t realise the narrative around that moment would get so strong. If I could take back a moment, that’s the moment I’d take back, just to have slowed the spread of our story." 

"If I had to do it again, I wouldn’t have done the CDC episode," he told The Hollywood Reporter. "It possibly gave away too much information and was such a big change very early on in the series. I’ve been careful in the comic series to not say what’s happening in other parts of the world. It’s something that’s going to be fun to explore in the spinoff series. But the fact that France is mentioned in that episode and other things like that, I probably would have steered away from that stuff if I had to do it all over again." 

In a 2013 interview about characters she wishes she hadn't killed off, Rhimes said she "probably wouldn’t have blown up Kyle Chandler." Later, in 2017, she said that she didn't expect the "natural" Kyle Chandler to take the role, sharing that she "didn't want to explode him." 

He said that while the intention of the death "was to heighten the drama and underscore the universal fragility of life...  the end result became something else entirely  —  the perpetuation of the disturbing 'Bury Your Gays' trope. Our aggressive promotion of the episode, and of this relationship, only fueled a feeling of betrayal." 

He said he was asked to kill the character off by people more senior than him, as the "misogynist, narcissist, and psychopath" didn't "fit with the times." 

Speaking to Vulture, the showrunner said, "There were parts of season six where I feel we went too far. We pushed into some categories that almost felt sadistic and that Buffy was volunteering for things that were beyond just ‘bad choices’ and were almost irresponsible for the character. […] And I think that killing Tara was – in retrospect, of all the people, did she have to die?"

“She was a little too soulless,” the writer told hollywoodreporter.com. “There was something about that that doesn't ultimately speak to who that character really was and we were finding her and figuring out how to write for someone who was confident but had this dark side. So that's not something I watch with joy.”

The epsiode, in which we learn Seymour Skinner was actually Armin Tamzarian the whole time, made Groening say "By the time we finished the episode, we realised it was a mistake, and we had a judge say, 'We'll never speak of this matter again.' And we never did."

Speaking on Instagram live, Schwartz said "yes" when asked by a fan if he regretted the choice. "You know, it upset a lot of people in a way that the show was designed to bring pleasure,” he added. "And it was very final in the way that we could never resolve it. It was a decision that was made for a lot of reasons that seemed like informed reasons at the time and then over time you know…"

"I think, for a lot of us, the Johnny storyline was probably one we'd like to have a do-over on," he told HuffPost.

"It’s a small part of who Rory is... Sometimes I wish that the Dean and Jess thing weren’t so prominent because in the grand scheme of Rory’s life who her boyfriend was when she was 16 years old is such a small event," she told Time Magazine. "She picked certain boys for her depending on who she was at that moment. It was part of her character. It was part of her development," she added.

In a post written by Lorre and shared by actor Raegan Revord on Instagram, he said, "Eighteen years ago, when we were writing and producing The Big Bang Theory, it seemed like a good idea to imagine that Sheldon’s childhood was deeply disrupted by the loss of his father. No one could have thought that someday, we would regret that decision. That someday is now."

"It’s much harder for me to enjoy the good moments when there are moments in it where I’m going, ‘Oh my god, we let that happen? We did that,'" she told The Hollywood Reporter. 

She shared her regret in the same Hollywood Reporter interview.

"I wrote another ending, but it didn’t work. At the time, I thought it was the right choice, but I do actually regret it now," she later said at Hay Festival.