10 Ditched TV Storylines That Thankfully Never Happened

It's little surprise that so many TV shows end up going off the rails creatively at one point or another, considering the sheer hours of content which must be produced, and the huge number of creative collaborators who typically work on a given series.

And while there are countless stories of once-great TV shows dive-bombing in their later years, there are also those series which sidestepped some potentially fanbase-annihilating subplots and storylines that nobody actually wanted to see.

These 10 TV series, while hardly perfect in of themselves, all at least had the good sense to throw out these extremely risky, unwanted, and downright wrong storylines, whether for practical reasons or because it just didn't suit the type of story the showrunners were trying to tell.

Each of these subplots would've undeniably cast a dark cloud over their respective series, rather than allowing fans to simply soak in the escapism, be it comedic or dramatic.

Had these stories been allowed to play out, all of these TV shows would've been forever changed for the worse...

The U.S. version of The Office is in many ways defined by the series-long love story between Jim (John Krasinski) and Pam (Jenna Fischer), which climaxes with the happily married couple finally moving on from Dunder Mifflin in the series finale.

But the recently released book The Office: The Untold Story of the Greatest Sitcom of the 2000s reveals that the call was almost made to have the pair break up in the show's ninth and final season, albeit only temporarily.

Showrunner Greg Daniels clearly sewed the seeds for the split with Jim's commute to Philadelphia straining their marriage and Pam growing closer to documentary boom mic operator Brian (Chris Diamantopoulos), though ultimately opted not to pull the two apart mid-season as he initially planned, ahead of a reunion in the series finale.

Curiously, one of the cheerleaders for the subplot was John Krasinski himself, who said, "It would be really interesting to see how that split will affect two people that you know so well."

But executive producer Brent Forrester ultimately explained that it would be too "painful" for fans of the show.

Considering how this would've just felt like a desperate attempt to prolong the series' sense of drama and needlessly throw a last-minute soap opera wrench into Jim and Pam's relationship, it was definitely the right decision not to go ahead with it.