{"id":499179,"date":"2026-05-23T14:41:15","date_gmt":"2026-05-23T14:41:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/499179\/"},"modified":"2026-05-23T14:41:15","modified_gmt":"2026-05-23T14:41:15","slug":"tom-hardys-mobland-exit-how-should-the-show-deal-with-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/499179\/","title":{"rendered":"Tom Hardy’s MobLand Exit: How Should the Show Deal With It?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tWhen last we left Tom Hardy<\/a> in the season one finale<\/a> of MobLand<\/a>, he was slumped in a chair with a butcher knife sticking out of his chest.<\/p>\n

\n\tTurns out, more than a few people on that show may have had reason to leave it there.<\/p>\n

\n\tHardy, of course, plays Harry Da Souza, the reluctant fixer for mob boss couple Conrad and Maeve Harrigan \u2014 Pierce Brosnan and Helen Mirren \u2014 in Paramount+\u2019s gritty London underworld drama. Or at least he did. Reportedly, Hardy exited the series<\/a> shortly after it wrapped its upcoming second season, following long-simmering friction with the showrunners over lateness, script disputes and clashes over the series\u2019 shift toward a more ensemble approach. He will not be appearing in a third season, assuming there is one.<\/p>\n

\n\tThat leaves MobLand\u2019s makers with a problem \u2014 what to do with the body.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s an awkward spot, but television has been here before, plenty of times. Usually when an actor in a major role skedaddles a series in mid-stream \u2014 because of firings, feuds, contract fights, health crises or creative flameouts \u2014 the show finds a way to go on. Sometimes they simply kill off the character by pushing him in front of a train (take a bow, Charlie Sheen), sometimes they pull a Darrin (looking at you, Dick Sargent), sometimes they just send them upstairs never to be heard from again (remember Gavan O\u2019Herlihy?).<\/p>\n

\n\tBelow, a brief history of emergency exits.<\/p>\n

\n\tKILL \u2018EM AND CARRY ON<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tWhen a star becomes too much trouble, television\u2019s most time-honored solution is also its most satisfying: kill them. On\u00a0Two and a Half Men, Charlie Sheen\u2019s Charlie Harper got pushed in front of a Paris train by his stalker girlfriend. On\u00a0Valerie, Valerie Harper\u2019s character was killed in a car crash \u2014 and then, just to rub it in, the show was renamed\u00a0The Hogan Family\u00a0and Sandy Duncan moved into her house. On\u00a0The Conners, Roseanne Barr\u2019s Roseanne Conner died of an opioid overdose \u2014 about five minutes after Barr fired off a racist tweet. And when McLean Stevenson decided he was too big for\u00a0M*A*S*H\u00a0after season three, Colonel Henry Blake\u2019s helicopter was shot down over the Sea of Japan on the way home from the war. Stevenson went on to star in a string of failed sitcoms. The show ran eight more seasons.<\/p>\n

\n\tMEET THE NEW DARRIN<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tThen again, murder isn\u2019t for everyone. The gentler option: keep the character, swap out the actor, and trust that the audience won\u2019t notice \u2014 or won\u2019t care. Dick York spent five seasons as Darrin Stephens on\u00a0Bewitched\u00a0before a spinal injury and a painkiller dependency took him off the set; Dick Sargent stepped in without a word of explanation, a move so brazenly unacknowledged it coined its own TV phrase \u2014 \u201cpulling a Darrin.\u201d\u00a0The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air\u00a0tried the same thing when Aunt Viv went from Janet Hubert to Daphne Maxwell Reid mid-run.<\/p>\n

\n\tTHEY WENT UPSTAIRS<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tRemember Chuck Cunningham? Nobody else does either. That\u2019s because during a season two episode of\u00a0Happy Days, Richie\u2019s older brother \u2014 played by Gavan O\u2019Herlihy \u2014 walked upstairs and was never heard from again. No explanation, no farewell episode, no acknowledgment that a human being had just evaporated from the cast. Even Henry Winkler, asked about it fifty years later, could only shrug: \u201cHe went upstairs and never came down\u2026a mystery.\u201d\u00a0Family Matters did the same to Judy Winslow, who disappeared after season three. And on\u00a0The West Wing, Moira Kelly\u2019s Mandy Hampton was a full series regular in season one and simply ceased to exist in season two.<\/p>\n

\n\tWHO NEEDS A STAR?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tDavid Caruso was so sure he was too big for television that he quit\u00a0NYPD Blue\u00a0after season one to become a movie star. His subsequent film career lasted two movies. Jimmy Smits stepped into the precinct and many viewers decided they preferred the new arrangement. The show ran eleven more seasons.\u00a0The Office\u00a0lost Steve Carell after season seven and kept going for two more, sustained by an ensemble that had been steadily doing the heavy lifting all along. And\u00a0Grey\u2019s Anatomy\u00a0has now outlasted so many of its leads \u2014 Patrick Dempsey was killed off in season 11, Sandra Oh gone a season earlier \u2014 that it has essentially become a different show that happens to share a name with the original. It is still on the air.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When last we left Tom Hardy in the season one finale of MobLand, he was slumped in a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":499180,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[265],"tags":[18,117,19,17,117898,120080,128],"class_list":["post-499179","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-eire","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-mobland","tag-tom-hardy","tag-tv"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/499179","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=499179"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/499179\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/499180"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=499179"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=499179"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=499179"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}