Disappearing brothers. I've seen this in two sitcoms: Oh Baby! where, in the first season, the brother was a central character and then disappeared for the second season, and in Rude Awakening, where the brother with his wife and son were central at first, only to disappear a season later and never be heard from again. They were never main characters, but they were central secondary characters, so to speak. And in both shows, the mother remained in an important role, so you'd think she at least mentions the brother sometimes.

They have lots of characters like this on Seinfeld. Jerry has a new gf in virtually every episode, and we don't really get to see what happened to the girl from previous ep. He's such a slut. Also, we've had appearances by the others' parents, but Elaine's are mysteriously absent. We've met her father once - and his grim outlook on life perhaps explains why we don't see him more often - but where is her mother? How come she never mentions her parents, and has no interaction with them whatsoever? It seems odd. Not to mention that none of them have any siblings!

Friends has been mentioned a couple of times. I think Phoebe's family should have had more appearances, especially since she carried those babies. I think Phoebe's role on the show has always been kind of an outsider. On the other side, Joey's family often gets mentioned, but for all their Italian closeness and many siblings, we've only ever met one of his sisters and never his parents. I also hate how Carol and Susan have disappeared after a fairly central role in the beginning - we even saw their wedding! - and nowadays when Ben is on the show (also rather rarely!), he's always alone.

I've never seen Family Matters, but my American friend told me about a show where a sister disappeared, and "they didn't even have her picture on the wall in later seasons!" Is this the same show?

Rocco on The Bold and the Beautiful is a good example of a disappeared character. He had a central storyline on season 1 - engaged to both of Brooke's sisters - and then, one day, he went into the store room and never returned. What's more, no one even mentioned him ever again. That's fairly normal in soap operas, of course, but usually we get some explanation - character dies or leaves for another country - and in this case, Rocco simply ceased to be.

Ralph's son Kevin on "Greatest American Hero". In the first season they occasionally discussed custody issues with the ex-wife, and then they seemed to drop the character of Kevin completely. I don't recall that he was ever mentioned again in later seasons.

Not from what I saw. They never said he won (unless someone made some off the cuff remark in a later episode. I stopped watching after he left). In fact, the last episode he was in, they didn't give the results of the election at all, but it was very firmly hinted (hint=practically flat out stating it) that he was going to lose. No, his exit was left with a big question mark.

And, if they did throw in some half assed, last minute mention of a win, after RL had left the show, way to screw his character out of a triumphant exit (and him out of being able to play it) and his fans from seeing his last appearance in that light.

Didn't we meet all of Joey's sisters in ‘The One Where Chandler Can't Remember Which Sister’? And their grandmother.

And we see Joey's parents when he meets Dad's mistress.

Just found this thread and have read the whole thing. To catch up on a couple of things from way, way back:

The duck and the chick on Friends did disappear, but in one of the later episodes Joey and Phoebe were talking and Joey mentioned the farm where the duck and chick had gone to live. This apparently is a very special farm where they can frolic all day in sunshine with other duck and chick buddies, but where people can never, never visit. Coincidentally, this is very similar to the farm where Ross and Monica's dog went to live when they were children (as Ross discovers to his dismay, having never realized the truth before). Joey, of course, remained blissfully unaware.

On The Cosby Show, in one of the first few episodes, Cosby makes a joke that the reason they have 4 kids is because they didn't want to have 5. It may have been the very first episode, which was mostly ripped straight from his stand-up routine, as was this specific joke (just like Roseanne's pilot episode was just her stand-up routine with other peope feeding her straight lines). But when it came time to do their Thanksgiving episode, there was something he wanted to do that would be best served with a college-aged daughter, so Sondra appeared (it may have been that he wanted to create the Elvin character; I dont remember exactly what the issue was). I remember this from an interview Cosby did during the first season, when the show became a hit.

Speaking of Roseanne, Crystal never disappeared. She was around the whole time- she was having a secret fling with Dan's dad, played by Ned Beatty. They got married and had two kids. Her other friends kind of disappeared, but mostly because they were all people she worked with at the plastics factory, and they all quit. They would occasionally reappear, but just like in life, you don't tend to maintain friendships with former coworkers, even those you ate lunch with every day for years.

Crystal may have disappeared during the last season, but it's best to completely ignore that last "We won the lottery!" season.

Also, when David first appeared on the show, his name was Kevin.

I hesitate to bring this up, since it means admitting that I've started watching The King of Queens (in syndication, dammit), but in the pilot episode, Carrie's sister is a key figure. She even lives with them, briefly. And now? Carrie is an only child.

There was a blond haired women that Roseanne used to work with at the
diner. I think she only appeared for one season but she appeared many times.
After that season she was never seen again. It is true that David was originally
introduced with the name Kevin but people thought David suited him better.

That was Bonnie Bramlett, I think. Blues singer, so she had a real career. I thought her appearance on Roseanne was just a bit of cameo casting but she was perfect for the role, not too central but really important.

(Bramlett's biggest claim to pop cult fame was the time she punched out Elvis Costello in a bar way back in the '80s, when he acted out and joked something snotty about Ray Charles.)

Boy Meets World had at least one other missing character. In season 1, in the epi where Topanga has a crush on Eric, she comes over to the Matthews' house with a video and talks to Eric for a while. Cory, thinking that he is Topanga's crush, has called Topanga's sister, Nebula Stop-the-War Lawrence, who comes over to get Topanga and is never seen or mentioned again. Thereafter, Topanga is an only child.

Maybe she killed herself when one too many kids teased her about her name.

Or she just ran away and changed her name to Mary Jane. And became a Republican, so her family would disown her anyway.


That was the series finale, wasn't it? I remember being really amused because I had just read about them being missing in this thread.

a fun little link about Jerry's sister, George's brother, and Elaine's sister, all of whom were mentioned at least once, but never seen.

Thank you so much for the link! Great site! And yeah, I now remember Elaine's nephew. Of cousre she'd have a sister to have a nephew. It's just that I meet my brothers at least every two months or so, but I guess in America with all those long distances, relatives would not meet as often.

Um, hello, 70's peeps! Chuck, the older brother on Happy Days is the real owner of this category. All dissppearing characters owe a big debt to him!

All of him, actually. There were three or four different actors who played Chuck, and they all disappeared. My theory is that between the first and second seasons of Happy Days, when the Cunningham's house was reversed (the front door changes from one side of the house to the other, but the kitchen and the staircase stay in the same place), Chuck got stuck in the walls, and he's still in there somewhere, bouncing a basketball and wearing a letterman's sweater.

That's how I remember it. In fact, TPTB went to great lengths right after Bartlet's re-election when Sam was debating whether or not to honor his promise to the dead congressman's widow that there was no way in hell that a democrat would ever win in the California 47th. The only thing I remember ever being alluded to was when Toby had Will made his new deputy (right after Bartlet's inauguration), it was with the understanding that if/when Sam came back that he'd be given a promotion to Senior Counsellor.

As for Rob Lowe's exit, that was plain shitty. Then again, from stuff I've read in TV Guide, etc., it sounds like Rob Lowe had sort of become persona non-gratta the last season and a half or so due to conflicts with his salary and his supposedly not working/playing well with his co-workers. Face it, when the show originally started, he was supposed to have been the big draw but then Martin Sheen became the break-out star which left RL in the wings. When MS got a large raise, I don't think RL was very excited about it--especially when he wasn't given a match.

ROTFLMAO!! I was just talking about this with somebody the other day.

Well I'm going to nominate Alex (Colin Hanks) from Roswell. The poor guy never caught a break on that show but hey he's going to be in Peter Jackson's King Kong so I doubt he's crying over it.

Also what about Marcy's first husband in Married with Children and Elden in Murphy Brown. They were both great and just disappeared.

But my favorite mentioned but never seen characters have to be Vera from Cheers and Niles wife on Fraser.

Both of those exits were actually explained. Marcy's first husband left her and his yuppie job to fulfill a boyhood dream and become a forest ranger [he came back in a late episode after she'd married Jefferson Darcy, her boy-toy]. And Eldin was offered a chance to study with a great Italian artist and turned it down because he thought Murphy and Avery needed him, so Murphy, after an impassioned plea from Eldin's mother [Anne Meara] fired him so he could take this marvelous opportunity. Eldin came back in the very last episode and started re-muralizing Murphy's house...

Alias' Anna Espenosia. She took a Rambaldi...thing in S1, then vanished.

I had hoped that FauxFrancie would turn out to be Ana Espinosa, but alas no. They simply forgot that they never killed her, so now she works for Joss Whedon.

I just remembered this one: The blonde guy in love with Laura Holt during the first season of Remington Steele. Wasn't he a partner, or at least, another investigator in the firm Laura fronted/fronted with the imaginary Mr. Steele?

Also, wasn't there a couple of other office folk before Doris Roberts joined the cast? It started out as a potentially realistic bitty PI shop, then it was just Remington, Laura, and Doris' character. Not that I'm upset with what we had, just that I don't remember disliking the supporting cast. Why have them in the first place if you aren't going to use them?

I saw in the very earliest posts on this thread something about Xander in later seasons of Buffy, and I agree he was certainly pushed aside horribly. OTOH, there are two characters I think were treated even more shamefully on that show...and I'm not even getting into what was done to the titular character!

After mid-season three, Giles was more and more marginalized on the show. Not only did he become a recurring rather than a regular character in the final two seasons (and considering how little they did with him when he was there it was almost more of a relief than the tragedy I thought it was going to be), he spent the two seasons before that being shoved further and further to the sidelines. He was one of the core four and they couldn't come up with anything interesting for him to do other than tapdance about leaving the country???

That was bad enough, but what was done to Anya in S7 is in some ways the absolute worst. She was in the opening credits, but there were at least two episodes of the season she not only didn't appear in, but wasn't mentioned either. And in all but one or two of her appearences for the season, her lines could have just as easily - and perhaps more logically - been spoken by any of the hordes of Potential Slayers overflowing Buffy's house. Anya was a great character. They could have done a lot more with her. And her death fell into the: eh, it happened, but let's not think about it category. Anya deserved better than that.

My all time favorite disappearence story, however, remains Annie, Jeff, and their infant quadruplets on As The World Turns some twenty-odd years ago. One day, they were central to myriad plots and local celebreties because of the plethora of babies Annie managed to have at once after multiple miscarriages left her certain she would never be a mother. The next, they were simply gone without a trace or a single word...even from her parents and sister!

How did this thread get so long with no mention of how The Facts of Life managed to misplace a dorm full of uniformed schoolgirls and their Headmaster between the first and second seasons? What school pays a housemother to look after only four girls?

Actually, they had a pretty good explanation for what happened to the rest of the dorm. At the beginning of season 2 Mrs. Garrett became school dietician. blair, Jo Natalie and Tootie went joyriding in the school delivery van, iirc, and got caught at a bar with fake ids. As punishment instead of expulsion, they had to work in the kitchen and lived in a room over the kitchen under Mrs. garrett's direct supervision.

Regarding the Facts of Life, there was also an episode during Cloris Leachman's time when all the other girls returned for a visit, and Jo felt left out.

I'll add my vote to Xander for marginalized and I'll add that Giles, Willow and Buffy (the real ones) went missing after "The Gift" and have never been seen since then.

A-freakin'-men, ruken!

Somehow it stopped being Buffy the Vampire Slayer and became the It's All About Spike Hour. I wouldn't have minded nearly so much if it had at least been the real Spike instead of Brad and his magical soul that redeems him with no effort or change of behavior on his part.

But to bring this back on topic, what really became of Buffy's father? We saw him a couple times in the first three seasons, and he seemed to be a decent guy who loved his daughter and did his best to keep some sort of communication going with his ex. Then Buffy turns eighteen, and he decides for no apparent reason not to communicate with his family anymore. He didn't even show up to Joyce's funeral. Oh, and in the S6 opener (the last time we actually hear anything about him that's in the real world, as opposed to a hallucination on Buffy's part), he seems to be calling once in a while, at any rate, but he still hasn't figured out that his younger, non-existant daughter is living with a pair of unemployed, twenty-one-year-old witches and a robot, or that Buffy is dead.

I say that long before we got the Buffybot, her dad was replaced with the Hankbot.

This was mentioned about a month ago (on page 7), but I bring it up because it's always the first Missing Character instance that comes to mind. One day Laura and Eddie Winslow's little sister, She Whose Name I Cannot Recall, goes upstairs and never comes back down.

On Family Matters, the youngest sister was named Judy, before she went upstairs.

But what about Shawn's siblings from Boy Meets World? In one of the first seasons he has a sister that he and Cory call when they want to straighten Cory's hair, and in one of the middle seasons he has a brother Cory films stealing TVs or something. He was pretty willing to fight Cory to protect his brother for awhile. And they both are just gone after the one episode, and he ends up with a completely different brother in the last seasons.

Hee, I wondered what happened to Judy - I didn't watch Family Matters consistently.

This happened to be one of the few threads I hadn't checked through, and my first instinct was to write Xander. It really started in S4 already, but they still allowed him to be funny, so I didn't see it coming. But ever since S5 they ignored him more and more. And in S6 - when Marti kinda took over and got to play with her favourite toy (i.e. Spike) as much as she wanted - Xander was completely marginalized. While we got heavyhanded expostion of Willow's stupid magic addiction and Buffy's stupid boinking of Spike in almost every episode, we never got to see much of Xander's insecureties and how his parents marrige had affacted his view of relationships (aside from slightly in Once More with Feeling), so when he left Anya at the alter he came out looking like a jerk. I don't think that was the intention of the writers, but if you ignore a character for two seasons and then have him doing something like that, what the hell were you expecting? And then there's S7. *sigh* Poor Xander. He should have been the one going to L.A. so his character could be rectified - not the Bleeched Wonder. Even though, I have to say, I kind of like Spike.

Minkus disappeared after their high school graduation. He and Topanga were in competition for who would be valedictorian. Then Minkas re-materialized at their college graduation with some lame "I was here all along" line. That was funny.

Corey and Shawn were totally doing it. Poor Topanga. She didn't have a clue.

They had two actresses playing the kid sister. There was no explanation given about that.

Shawn's father died, then the actor would re-appear in flashback/dream episodes. Very strange.

TGIF was really bad about this...and another show it happened on was Step By Step. They had people disappear and come back (Cody), disappear with no mention (Brendan, Carol's mom and sister), and one of those magic babies that goes from three months to five years when you put it in water.

Life With Bonnie recently pulled the missing child stint. She had three kids (a boy, girl and baby of whatever gender) during the first season. And when the second season returned, the daughter was gone, with no mention of where she went.

Well, at least the kid who played Minkus survived the trip out west by the Torkelson family. When they moved from The South to Seattle (and changed the name to Almost Home), two of the Torkelson kids were left behind at truck stops or something. Maybe sold for gas money -- who knows, they never said.

If we really want to take the thread title literally, then I nominate Daphne Moon. Who was there in body but without explanation everything that gave her character went missing around 7th season. Her earthchild outfits, her wacky family stories, a lot of her hair and most of her accent all went the way of Chuck Cunningham.

How about Phantom Dennis from Angel? It's assumed (but never spoken outright) that Cordelia moved out of that apartment and into the Hyperion or somewhere else and we just never get any mention of him again. He was an awesome (non-existent) character.

I believe we saw the Gunn/Wes/Fred/Conner group move Cordelia's stuff to the Hyperion while she was missing in early season 4. And that was the last that was spoken of Dennis. During the 4th season I kept hoping that it would be revealed that Dennis moved to the Hyperion to haunt it. It's not like they had to pay an actor if they wanted him around.

Early on in the thread someone mentioned Teri Stivers being marginalized on the later seasons of Homicide. Unfortunately she followed in the worthy footsteps of Det. Kay Howard (Melissa Leo) whose fascinating character--still one of the most unconventional, believable, tough, and smart female cops ever on TV, I think--was never adequately showcased. And in fact during the later period when Stivers was unjustly overshadowed by Jon Seda, Giancarlo Esposito, and Michael Michelle's less compelling characters, especially, so too were other Homicide mainstays like Munch and especially Lewis, in an even greater injustice (those actors had paid their dues and deserved the spotlight more after Andre Braugher's departure.)

PhantomChic, now that I think about how the rest of S4 played out, it was probably deliberate on the part of the writers because otherwise Phantom Dennis would have "known" that something was "wrong" with Cordelia (possessed or whatever she was when she was the Beast's Master, etc.) He will always be missed, though!

An earlier poster mentioned Carrie's sister disappearing on The King Of Queens after appearing in a few episodes in season one -- even living with them at one point. Well, at least she started a tradition on the show because you never see or hear about Richie anymore ( Dumb hunky fireman friend of Doug's, in the Tribiani mold ) and Doug's sister, as played by Ricki Lake , appeared in a much-hyped bit of casting a few seasons back. Hey, maybe Richie and Doug's sister ran off together -- I smell spin-off !

Donna had a sister for one episode of That 70's Show

Mike Douglas (the oldest of Fred McMurray's Three Sons) on My Three Sons)

The Brady Bunch had a cat in the pilot episode. But I guess Tiger (the dog) ate it. Before he ran away.

It's funny that I first noticed this thread today. My friend and I got tired of debating who was the best James Bond, who was the best Batman, etc. And today we were debating who was the best Chuck Cunnigham.

On MASH, Hawkeye and Trapper had a bunkmate played by a black actor. He disappeared without explanation. There was also an Aussie doctor that vanished as well.

The black doctor was nicknamed Spearchucker, and he was a hold over from the movie. There were no black doctors in the Korean War, a fact that didn't bother Robert Altman as he was making a movie about Vietnam that only got pushed to the Korean War by a skittish studio (and even then, I believe only one sign or graphic identifies it as Korea), but the writers for the TV show used it as an excuse to get rid of a character with an unfortunate racial slur for a name.

On Smallville, Pete Ross's role got reduced to one or two lines an episode. Then they just wrote him off and the following season, no one spoke of him.

Profiler kept misplacing its black male characters. At the end of the first season, Nathan Brubaker (played by Michael Whaley) takes a wrong turn somewhere in the world and is never mentioned again. The same thing with Marcus Payton (played by Shiek Mahmud-Bey), only he went missing in a jail. Oh, brother.

I'd read something like this before (I believe it was on another TWoP thread) but I don't think that's true. M*A*S*H was originally a novel written by a former MASH surgeon in Korea, and Altman's film was never intended to be set anywhere else, although obviously it was of some relevance at the time.

REad more about that Here and Jere

Actually I have the video of the movie version (yep, video) and there is a doco at the end. Altman said that, apart from one caption at the beginning where it says "Korea, 1950" he deliberately left it ambiguous about where they were. Although it was based on the books, Vietnam was a hot topic and he wanted to make a statement about the war without actually mentioning Vietnam.

Gilmore Girls has currently misplaced Dean, who, after having an affair with Rory, appears to have left town or something. We also havent seen LuLu in a while, although she is at least being mentioned so I assume she's around somewhere.