Best and Worst Replacement Characters

[RJDiogenes]

Let's see, off the top of my head:

For the Best:

Peter Graves on Mission: Impossible
Lori Saunders on Petticoat Junction
Diana Rigg on The Avengers
All the replacements on M*A*S*H
Cheryl Ladd on Charlie's Angels
Jenilee Harrison on Three's Company
Roddy McDowall on Tales of the Gold Monkey

For the Worst:

All the other (TV) Angels
Lawrence on Fantasy Island
The new guy on Friday the 13th: The Series

 

[Marc]

Let's see, off the top of my head:

For the Best:
Diana Rigg on The Avengers

Though her replacement - Linda thorson would head towards one of the worst though it seems she appeared in The Avengers for 3 years.

 

[cultcross]

Best for me was Alexis Denisof replacing Glenn Quinn on Angel - replacing an almost superfluous character with one who really made the show work. But then, Angel was generally very clever with its post-pilot casting decisions. Its original cast was mediocre; by the end of its run it had one of the strongest on TV imho.

Middle of the road - ER's gradual replacement of its entire cast. Realistic given the staffing changes one would expect in a hospital over ten years, but decidedly changeable in quality. Some excellent new characters (Corday, Abbey, Mike Gallant) and some boring/terrible ones.

Worst - Ben Browder, Beau Bridges and Claudia Black on Stargate SG-1. In fairness, Black was not a 'replacement' in the strictest sense, but Browder was a direct O'Neill replacement and I never really bought into him as a character. I would have had SG-1 continue as a three piece for the last two years, or added a more junior cast member and put Sam in charge. Bridges wasn't bad per se, he was just nothing noteworthy after Hammond and O'Neill in charge. Adding Black as if her and Browder came as a two-for-one deal post Farscape was a terrible idea and soured the last two seasons for me as it kind of marked the end of the show taking itself at all seriously.
In almost direct contrast to Angel, I felt SG-1 introduced great characters early on and got steadily worse at it. The first two years gave us almost all the noteworthy recurring cast, too.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

Ben Browder was wooden on Stargate. It's all a matter of perspective, he was used to his emotional range being compared to puppets. The issue with Claudia Black was more that they tried to write a very sexualized character and it didn't fit the show. She could have worked if they toned that down.

Either of them could have come off better though if they hadn't spent the last several years introducing too much Trek tech into the show. They wrote themselves into a corner where in order for the enemy to be strong enough to be a threat it had to be so strong only a god-artifact could possibly kill it.

 

[kirk55555]

I loved Bowder and Black on Stargate, and thought Bowder put on a much better performance there than he did in Farscape (although it helped that the writing was better with SG-1). Black's character on Farscape was a bit better than Vala, but I still thought Black did a great job, and I enjoyed Vala a lot. Bridges was ok. He wasn't as good as the man he was replacing, but I thought he did fine.

 

[RJDiogenes]

^^ Same here. I never got into Farscape, but I liked them both on SG-1

Let's see, off the top of my head:

For the Best:
Diana Rigg on The Avengers

Though her replacement - Linda thorson would head towards one of the worst though it seems she appeared in The Avengers for 3 years.

I liked Linda Thorson fine, but Diana Rigg was fantastic. And certainly better than her predecessor.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

Browder and Black didn't harm the show nearly as much as the Ori. You might say the Ori were the worst replacement villains of all time. It was kind of like Babylon 5 season 5. The main battle was won so they had to reach and unfinish a finished story.

It would be like, if they had a season 8 of DS9 after the Dominion was beaten with a new captain and security officer.

And I don't recall that well. But their reason for the Asgard not just coming in and God-moding the gu'ald was the replicators. The replicators were gone. So why didn't the Asgard help against the Ori? Seasons 9 and 10 were just poorly conceived.

 

[Captain Shaw]

I could never really see Dr Jennifer Keller as head of the medical department on Stargate Atlantis.
And best would be changing most of the cast from the start trek pilot.

 

[tharpdevenport]

The 1966 "Batman"

That one-time replacement for the Riddler. Terrible. Frank Gorshin owned that character. Bad replacement.


Another bad replacement: anybody other than Otto Preminger as Mr. Freeze. He did that character well. It's a shame reports were he worked so poorly with the cast they wouldn't have him back.



I don't think Max on "Newsradio" was bad, it's just that it took him like four or five episodes to find his character and become comfortable performing him, then he hit his own groove. The problems were that Dave no longer had the inveterate back-stabbing liar always working against him and driving the station personal sometimes into revolt. And the dynamic Bill created amongst the other people, including using Matthew as his pawn, and purposefully anoying Lisa, among others.

 

[Danny99]

Every time I saw Vala, I cringed. I never got what was so great about her.

 

[Gary Mitchell]

Every time I saw Vala, I cringed. I never got what was so great about her.

Claudia Black was what was great about her.

 

[Sto-Vo-Kory]

Browder and Black didn't harm the show nearly as much as the Ori. You might say the Ori were the worst replacement villains of all time. It was kind of like Babylon 5 season 5. The main battle was won so they had to reach and unfinish a finished story.

"Unfinish a finished story." I like that.

 

[Silvercrest]

I would have liked Browder less under other circumstances. As it was, RDA was phoning in his performances so badly that Browder and Black were a much-needed breath of fresh air.

Totally agree about the Ori and the Trek tech.

Funny thing about Otto Preminger as Mr. Freeze: Preminger later voiced Thranduil in the Rankin-Bass animated "The Hobbit." Watching the movie in the 1990s, I didn't know who Preminger was, so I always referred to the voice actor as "that guy who sounds like Arnold Schwarzenegger."

To be fair, Preminger doesn't sound that much like Arnold, but he could be taken for doing an Arnold impression if you don't know any better.

A couple of years later, guess who played Mr. Freeze?

 

[JirinPanthosa]

Also, I think the whole team fishing together for the first time was the perfect final scene for SG1. Again, why did they mess with that?

Claudia Black did a good job with Vala but the character was poorly written. They conceived her as the mischievous smart-alecky picaresque sexual aggressor to counterpoint Daniel, and it just didn't work.

 

[apollo1984]

And I don't recall that well. But their reason for the Asgard not just coming in and God-moding the gu'ald was the replicators. The replicators were gone. So why didn't the Asgard help against the Ori? Seasons 9 and 10 were just poorly conceived.

After the defeat of the Replicators they basically made the Asgard a dying race as they were all clones and could no longer properly have children. The SG1 season finale basically was the asgard giving humanity all of their secrets as I assume there were not many left as they started to die out it was sort of a last gesture and them becoming the "5th race".

 

[JirinPanthosa]

I stopped watching the series at some point in the 10th season, was that in the season 10 finale? That's interesting. So Heimdall officially failed in his experiments?