10 Ditched TV Storylines That Thankfully Never Happened
4. Elaine Points A Gun At Herself - Seinfeld
Though Seinfeld was widely praised for its ambitious and boundary-pushing take on the sitcom formula, there's one planned plot that was simply too challenging for the writers to crack.
"The Bet" was an ultimately unproduced season two episode in which Elaine (Julia-Louis Dreyfus) buys a gun on the black market and then mockingly points it at herself while goading Jerry (Jerry Seinfeld).
Worse still, the script had Elaine make distasteful remarks about two assassinated American Presidents, pointing the gun at her head and calling it a "Kennedy," before aiming at the stomach and dubbing it a "McKinley."
Julia Louis-Dreyfus and the episode's hired director, Tom Cherones, both objected to Larry Charles' script, resulting in the entire episode ultimately being scrapped despite sets already being built and supporting actors being cast.
Charles later said of the episode's failure, "You know, it would have been an interesting show, but...we couldn't solve the funny problem of it. It never seemed to quite be as funny as it should be and, because of that, the balance was off and the darkness kind of enveloped it. So, it was disappointing but also understandable."
The episode was eventually replaced with the acclaimed "The Phone Message," which Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld wrote in just two days.