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‘Kevin Can Wait’ Spawns Fury As Comedies Don’t Kill Off Wives: ‘Bewitched’ Switcheroo Called For

By Roz Zurko
Published on: 12:30 PST, Sep 26, 2017

Brian Kilmeade of Fox & Friends was dumbfounded over the way Kevin Can’t Wait removed his wife to make room for Leah Remini’s character on the show. He couldn’t understand why a comedy would kill off one of the main characters of a show.

Kilmeade wasn’t alone in his confusion and angst as fans of the hit show starring Kevin James weren’t happy as the show just picked up a year after his wife Donna happened to die. Donna was played by Erin Hayes and her surprise exit was announced after Season 1 had finished up.

The announcement of Hayes departure was followed by an announcement that Leah Remini would become a regular on the show, according to Fox News. Fans of the show had waited for this episode to see how they’d write Donna or Erin Hayes out, and Leah Remini in, according to Fox. The outrage online today seemed to indicate the fans weren’t thrilled with the finality of it all being worked into a few lines on the show.

The Huffington Post suggests Kevin Can’t Wait “botches wife Erin Hayes’ death in the season premiere.” They have droves of folks agreeing with them spouting their outrage on social media sites.

When it was first announced that Hayes was off the show, CBS said at the time that “the decision to get rid of Hayes was the result of the show going in a different direction.” With Donna gone, Remini did appear in the episode, but as much as fans love her from her previous show King of Queens with Kevin, there was still no excusing the way they felt Donna’s death was handled.

Kilmeade thought that Kevin Can’t Wait should have just replaced Donna With Leah Remini’s character, having her be the new Donna. He claimed that it worked well for Bewitched when Dick York was replaced by Dick Sargent and nobody asked any questions.

Sargent played Darrin Stevens and never missed a beat. York walked off and Sargent walked in. It didn’t take long for fans to get acclimated to the new Darrin and Bewitched seemingly continued on without so much as a small hitch, conveyed the Fox & Friends host.

Back when Bewitched made the switcheroo with York and Sargent, apparently they knew you couldn’t kill someone off a comedy show and keep the laughs going at the same time, which is what Kilmeade conveyed. The show that ran from 1964 to 1972 made the odd transition, but from all appearances, no one seemed to care, or did they?

There wasn’t an online world to go to and ask the question — “Why the two Darrins?” According to Neatorama this was a question that remained in the minds of fans of Bewitched for a very long time. Would Bewitched have angered fans, prompting them to voice their opinions online if the internet was available back then? Would they be peeved over the attempt to dupe them by replacing one Darrin with the other?

According to Kilmeade, that’s the way they should have played Erin Hayes leaving the show: say nothing and make Leah Remini the new Donna. The executive producer and showrunner Rob Long explained why they did it this way, “The goal was to give Kevin’s character a real drive and a real predicament [involving] how a family comes back together [after tragedy].”

Fans saw it differently and they hopped on the social media sites to spill their words of outrage online, while Brian Kilmeade saw the Bewitched scenario as something that would have worked better. You can see a few of the comments from Twitter below.

[Featured Image by Richard Shotwell/AP Images]

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