The show will go on.
Despite the sudden death of star John Ritter last week, ABC will continue production of his popular comedy, “8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter,” network officials said Tuesday.
“After much introspection and discussion, we decided we’re going forward with the show,” ABC Entertainment Television Group chairman Lloyd Braun told reporters in a conference call.
Ritter died Thursday of an undetected heart ailment. He was 54.
The final three episodes completed by Ritter will air in order, beginning with the second-season premiere at 8 p.m. Tuesday. Each segment will open with a special introduction by cast members.
The series will then go on hiatus for at least three weeks while writers retool story lines, Braun said. Ritter’s death will be addressed in the first new episode. His character, Paul Hennessy, will not be recast.
“John’s irreplaceable,” Braun said. “This will make it a different show. It will be telling a very important story. This kind of thing hits real families. It hit the Ritter family. We’ll deal with these issues head-on.”
The title will not change. The role of Katey Sagal, who plays Ritter’s wife, will be expanded, and new characters will be introduced during the season, said ABC Entertainment chief Susan Lyne.
ABC’s first instinct was to cancel “Rules,” Braun said. “But the more we talked about it, and the more we saw the impact of his death on families across the country, we saw there was another way to go here.”
The revised shows will be “more dramatic and emotional” than what viewers are accustomed to with sitcoms, Braun said. “We recognize we’re in uncharted territory. We don’t have all the answers.”
After the unexpected death of a star, networks usually decide to keep series going, but they rarely succeed. The 1974-78 hit “Chico and the Man” and “NewsRadio” in the late ’90s both survived only one season after the deaths of stars.
“Chico’s” Freddie Prinze committed suicide. In the show, his character left to start his own business. “NewsRadio’s” Phil Hartman, slain by his wife in a murder-suicide, was replaced in the ensemble cast by Jon Lovitz.
Despite TV’s track record in that area, “this feels like the right way to go, and we’re committed to it,” Lyne said.
Crafting the post-Ritter episodes will be a difficult challenge for comedy writers, however.
“We may bring in some dramatic help,” said Stephen McPherson, president of Disney’s Touchstone Television, which produces “8 Simple Rules.”
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