10 Best Actor Replacements On TV Shows
9. Rose McGowan Replaced Shannen Doherty - Charmed
Hit fantasy drama series Charmed faced a major challenge when one of its three leads, Shannen Doherty, decided to depart the show after its third season due to an apparent overabundance of "drama" on the set.
After toying with replacing Doherty with the likes of Soleil Moon Frye, Denise Richards, Tiffani Thiessen, and Jennifer Love Hewitt, the decision was made to kill Doherty's character, Prue Haliwell, at the start of season four.
At this point, she was replaced with a long-lost younger half-sister character, Paige Matthews, played by Rose McGowan.
On paper it certainly seemed like anything but a smooth transition, and even accepting that the show was simply never as good as in its first three seasons, McGowan made for an impressively seamless casting replacement.
A big part of the reason that Paige's introduction works is that the showrunners didn't simply attempt to make her Prue 2.0, but develop her as a character with her own personality and agency.
Furthermore, her arrival ended up reshuffling the dynamic between the three sisters, what with Piper (Holly Marie Combs) now nudged into the oldest sister role.
Plus, given how frosty the interplay between Doherty and screen sister Alyssa Milano was throughout those first three seasons, McGowan certainly helped make things a little warmer.
All in all, for a personnel change that sounds laughably desperate on paper, it actually ended up working out fantastically well under the circumstances.