Trend of killing off characters in the name of ratings

Perhaps the watershed moment was in June 2011 when in the ninth episode of the first season of Game of Thrones, Sean Bean’s Ned Stark had his head chopped off. Or maybe it all goes back further to 1960 when Alfred Hitchcock, after using the appearance of star Janet Leigh to promote his film Psycho, killed her off dramatically and early and left his audience shocked to their core — uncertain as to how one was supposed to navigate a film that had broken a cardinal rule of Hollywood.

The truth is that it’s probably, like all things drama-creation related — a mix of both. Hitchcock may have pioneered the idea that on screen, as in life, a star was as expendable and as subject to the cruel whims of fate as any of us are in the real world, but it took cinema’s younger, more mild-mannered and less disruptive sister, television, decades to get to the point where it would lead the kill fest that has become the norm over the past two decades.

Stark’s death may still mark a pivotal moment in the recent history of blockbuster television but it’s also had the effect of making the early killing off of stars and beloved characters so commonplace that it’s less and less hard to care about these deaths; now death is an expected threat to most TV drama characters and not a surprising exception.

Everyone on everything from network medical dramas to family sitcoms and light-touch dramas seemed to be at inordinate risk of dying from the moment they appeared on-screen.

As with many things — colonialism, tea drinking, polo, fry-up breakfasts and prime ministerial pig-porking — the Brits will tell you that they were the first to adopt the early kill-off TV trend. In 2000, blonde lad mag favourite, actress Lisa Faulkner, made a much publicised appearance on the second episode of the first season of hit spy show Spooks, only to induce a national heart attack when she was spectacularly killed off by having her head shoved into a deep-fat fryer by a vicious far-right leader. Viewers were outraged, furiously flooding the BBC’s call centre with complaints at the injustice of Faulkner’s early exit and the gruesome manner of her demise.

Line of Duty and The Bodyguard creator Jed Mercurio soon took up the, “anyone can die at any time” mantel to the extent that when a new show he’s involved in appears, the first bets that are taken are on who will die and when. His most recent show, the ITV bomb disposal thriller Trigger Point, proved no exception when this week in its debut episode a key character was blown up in the cliffhanger.

By the time this callous culling approach to characters made it across the pond, American showrunners were initially a little more circumspect in their adoption of the trend. Shows like The Sopranos, The Wire and Boardwalk Empire took their time before killing off members of their core cast, spending many hours and much energy in slowly laying the narrative pipe that would help to justify the death of a main cast character.

Game of Thrones changed all of that and killing off characters soon became as much a feature of the show as dragons, incest and devious eunuchs. The attendant Twitter traffic and ratings spikes that greeted the show’s increasingly bloody body count only served to encourage the writers to keep on killing — and worse — they made every other writers room in the television universe follow suit.

In 2016 — a particularly deadly year for television killings — the website Vox.com conducted a basic headcount of that year’s on-screen fictional deaths and estimated it to be in excess of 230. Five years after Ned Stark’s head was lopped off, things had got out of hand.

It wasn’t just shows like AMC’s The Walking Dead — which involves thousands of bloodthirsty zombies and could be expected to have a higher than average body count within the rules of its fictional universe — that were bringing out the bodies. Everyone on everything from network medical dramas to family sitcoms and light-touch dramas seemed to be at inordinate risk of dying from the moment they appeared on-screen. If you were a main cast member on a television show, you should take it for granted that at some stage, the ratings would necessitate that the bell tolled for you.

Over the past six years the kill-off has steadily continued to become a predictable weapon in the writers’ room’s arsenal of cheap trickery both because the number of shows has continued to mushroom and because, while the deaths of favourite characters has become commonplace, they still get plenty of Twitter time.

You could argue that in the wake of the millions of deaths that have resulted from the Covid-19 pandemic, and which have brought home to many of us the senseless and arbitrary nature of death, the random acts of killing on television now have even more of a real-world relatability than they ever did.

This all seems to indicate that, like it or not, killing in the name of shock value and ratings is here to stay, so it’s best not to get too invested in any television character’s narrative arc for, as the stats and experience show, it’s highly likely to all end in tears.