10 TV Moments That Were Almost WAY Darker

Harper’s Island was a strange and hard-to-classify beast when it arrived on our screens in 2009. A limited run murder mystery set entirely on the eponymous island where a blue blooded family congregated for the lavish wedding of one of their junior members, the show was essentially a slasher series before the likes of MTV’s Scream, Scream Queens, and Slasher popularised the format a few years later.

Sure, there was a central mystery technically, but there were scarcely sufficient clues for eager viewers to guess at the murderer’s identity, meaning the elaborately crafted death scenes and tense chases made up the meat of the show. Unfortunately our final girl Abby Mills was something of a personality-free damp squib (and with scream queen Katie Cassidy right there as the bride-to-be! Unforgivable).

But where the show really struggled was its decision to cast, er, former Ugly Betty love interest Christopher Gorman as the surprise killer. The quirky character actor looked more at home with a ukulele than a machete, and the twist stretched the little credulity remaining by the show’s denouement.

However, things were almost even worse, and a lot darker—originally Gorman’s Henry Dunn was supposed to get away with the spate of murders totally undetected and end up winning the heart of the final girl to boot!