9 TV Shows That Survived Death Of The Main Character

5. Two And A Half Men - Charlie Harper

Charlie Sheen wasn't just the star of Two And A Half Men, he was the sitcom star of the entire era, with a reported salary of around $2m per episode. Three - well, 2.5 - people might've made up the title, but he was the real face of it for its first eight seasons.

And then Sheen went and made some derogatory comments about showrunner Chuck Lorre, followed by a very public meltdown. Production of the show had initially gone on hiatus in January 2011 so Sheen could undergo rehab for substance addiction, before Sheen's comments, where he called Lorre a "stupid little man" and spoke of violently hating him, alongside remarks tinged with anti-semitism.

The final few episodes of Season 8 were cancelled and Sheen dismissed from the series, which definitely could've been the end of things, but Lorre decided to press ahead with Season 9, which killed Charlie Harper off and brought in Ashton Kutcher's Walden Schmidt as a replacement. While Walden wasn't a like-for-like replacement for Charlie, the show didn't suffer dramatically, with Kutcher starring for four seasons (some of them with more viewers than Sheen's final year), before the show ended - although not before it revealed that Charlie hadn't died after all, brought him back for the finale, and then dropped a piano on his head. And to think Sheen was the one raving about tiger blood.