So Kevin James rose to fame mostly for The King of Queens on CBS. It was your standard "ugly dumb guy with hot wife" sitcom, co-starring Leah Remini as the hot wife. That show went off the air in 2007. Then he did movies for a while. Then in 2016 he returned to CBS to play essentially the same character. Only this time he was a retired police officer instead of a delivery truck driver. But he was still an ugly dumb guy with a hot wife.
This time, the hot wife was played by relatively unknown Taylor Spreitler. Kevin James' character was older too, this time old enough to have an adult daughter and a son-in-law he didn't like. But no Leah Remini..... until the end of the first season.
In the last two episodes of the first season, she played as a still active cop, and he came out of retirement to help her catch some people running an art forgery ring. It was a 2 episode guest spot. The episode was advertised and they threw in some corny callback jokes to the earlier show. The two characters (Vanessa Sarlucci and Kevin Gable) are undercover as husband and wife.
So that would have been the end of it. I nice callback, a team up of this comedy duo that had worked so well together for all those years in the past.
Except, it appears, CBS executives had a different idea. They decided, I guess because maybe ratings were not as great as they wanted, that they wanted Remini as a regular. Put the old band back together! They couldn't be husband and wife again, because the Kevin Gable character was already married. So.... they decided to fire Taylor Spreitler by killing the character offscreen between seasons and make the Leah Remini character (Vanessa) a regular. Oh and now Kevin James and Leah Remini are front and center on the posters for the show.
I wanted to share this story because it's such a perfect example of bland TV making. Middling ratings, so CBS decides to butt in and basically try to re-make King of Queens.
Topic: TV News Thread (Read 161869 times)
