Huge Stars Who Refused To Return For Their Series Finale

It's almost an inevitable, if not the price of a successful long run for a TV show: Eventually, one or more cast members is going to leave the series well before its conclusion or cancellation. After all, if the sitcom, drama, or soap was popular enough, it made big stars out of the actors in its cast. And before long, they understandably want to stretch their creative muscles and pursue the opportunities suddenly afforded them — and so they depart, leaving writers to explain why their characters up and left this fictional world in which they were integral. That, or those same writers may find that they've gone as far as they can go, narratively, with their show's original characters, and they kill them off or abandon somebody, putting an actor out of a job.

But life goes on, and so do TV shows — although often, some of those actors who famously or prominently quit a series don't want to come back for their former employer's big, emotional send-off. Here are some big stars of the small screen who said no thanks to heading back to their old show to say goodbye.

In 2010, according to ET, Charlie Sheen earned $1.8 million an episode playing the proudly debased jingle writer, Charlie Harper, on "Two and a Half Men." In 2011, according to The Week, the actor departed the CBS smash after a dizzying series of events that included a days-long Las Vegas party with an adult film star, a stay in rehab, and some ill-advised public comments about the show's creator, Chuck Lorre. CBS ended the eighth season of "Two and a Half Men" early, firing Sheen and replacing him with Ashton Kutcher.

Four years later, when "Two and a Half Men" wrapped up its 12-season run, Lorre wanted Sheen back, and according to The Hollywood Reporter, invited the beleaguered actor to return for the series finale. In the production company vanity card at the end of the episode, Lorre described his plan. "Our idea was to have him walk up to the front door in the last scene, ring the doorbell, then turn, look directly into the camera and go off on a magical rant about the dangers of drug abuse," Lorre wrote. "And then we would drop a piano on him. We thought it was funny. He didn't." 

And so, the show hired a Sheen look-alike and shot him from behind as he was crushed to death by a piano (Lorre is later seen suffering the same fate on set while sitting in his director's chair).

The ABC family sitcom, "Home Improvement," dominated the TV ratings in the mid-1990s. Adults tuned in for the manly-macho and self-deprecating humor of stand-up comedian Tim Allen (as inept handyman TV show host Tim "The Toolman" Taylor), while a fair number of kids tuned in solely because of Jonathan Taylor Thomas, one of the era's most popular teen idols and pinups, who played the smart and sarcastic middle Taylor boy, Randy. However, Thomas certainly broke a few hearts when in 1998, he abruptly left "Home Improvement." 

"I'd been going nonstop since I was eight years old," Thomas later told People. "I wanted to go to school, to travel and have a bit of a break." While he did go on to do those things — Thomas enrolled at Harvard University and studied history and philosophy — he also went and shot a couple of movies, breaking the promise that he'd left acting behind. That really upset his former TV dad (and boss), Tim Allen. "He said it was about going to school, but then he did some films," Allen told TV Guide (via E!). "Did he want to do films? Did he want to go to school?" 

Thomas came back to "Home Improvement" as a guest star for a 1998 Christmas episode, and Allen confronted Thomas, which made things so uncomfortable for the young actor that he didn't show up for the "Home Improvement" finale episode a few months later.

Bill Cosby, long a popular stand-up comedian and TV star, returned to live-action television in 1984 for the first time in decades with "The Cosby Show," a warm and easy-going sitcom about the Huxtables, a well-off and voluminous New York City family presided over by Cliff (Cosby), an obstetrician, and Clair (Phylicia Rashad), a lawyer. While the draw for many of the show's tens of millions of viewers was Cosby, Lisa Bonet brought in her own sizable fanbase as the cool, bohemian, teenage Huxtable daughter, Denise. Bonet proved so popular with younger viewers that Cosby created a spinoff just for the actor in 1987: "A Different World," which sent the character off to school at the hip and happening Hillman College.

After just one season of the spinoff, Bonet left the series after announcing a pregnancy, according to The Museum of Broadcast Communications. She'd later return to "The Cosby Show," with Denise marrying a Marine and moving back into the family brownstone, only to depart the series again near the end of Season 7 in 1991. According to People, Bonet was fired for so-called "creative differences" and was simply not asked to come back for "The Cosby Show" finale in 1992.

When Cosby became embroiled in dozens of sexual assault allegations decades later, Bonet was not surprised. "There was no knowledge on my part about his specific actions, but ... There was just energy," she reflected to Net-A-Porter in 2018. "And that type of sinister, shadow energy cannot be concealed."

"Laverne & Shirley" was a delightful and successful sitcom, likely because of the dynamic between its two stars: Penny Marshall as Laverne DeFazio and Cindy Williams as Shirley Feeney, a pair of scrappy best friends, roommates, and brewery employees living in 1950s and '60s Milwaukee (and later Burbank, California). At one point the most-watched show on TV, ratings stayed high through the series' seventh season in 1982, but then dropped precipitously in the following season, likely because of the loss of interplay between Laverne and Shirley — because Williams departed the series.

According to Marley Brant's "Happier Days: Paramount's Classic Television Sitcoms, 1974-1984," Williams learned she was pregnant before Season 8 began production. She claimed that producers promised to work it into the show, but then decided against it, also reneging on some salary agreements, as well as a special, pregnancy-accommodating shooting schedule. "I thought I was going to come back and they'd hide [my baby bump] behind benches, couches, pillows, and that wasn't it," Williams explained to "Today" in 2015. "When it came time for me to sign my contract for that season, they had me working on my due date to have my baby. And I said, 'You know, I can't sign this.'"

This led Williams to walk off the set in August 1982 and to file a $20 million lawsuit against said producers, per Brant. With the actor and showrunners feuding, Williams never returned to "Laverne & Shirley" by the time it went off the air in the spring of 1983.

When it debuted on Showtime in 2005, "Weeds" was about Nancy Botwin (Mary-Louise Parker), a newly widowed mother of two who looked to keep her ritzy upper-middle-class lifestyle alive by operating an illegal marijuana distribution ring. Over the course of eight seasons, Nancy and her family move from the Los Angeles area to a San Diego suburb, Seattle, Michigan, New York, and Connecticut, necessarily but unceremoniously adding and dropping characters along the way as Nancy gets deeper into criminal enterprise. 

In the first five seasons, Elizabeth Perkins was a member of the regular cast, portraying Botwin's self-centered, unhappy, and downright mean neighbor, Celia Hodes. Then the actor left the show, and Celia's fate, beyond that she moved to Mexico, was never explained, according to ET.

"Weeds" concluded in 2012 with a time jump set 10 years in the future, at the bar mitzvah for Nancy's son, Stevie. Among the Botwins' assembled family and friends: not Celia Hodes. "They asked me to come back for the final episode, but it was, I think, just to sort of stand around at the bar mitzvah," Perkins told Yahoo! Entertainment. "I just felt like, no, Celia should die." She was also locked into production on a new TV series and couldn't get away, and added, "But, it just seemed like Celia deserved a better send-off."