You Don’t Get to Destroy Them Just Because They’re Gone: Character Assassination & The Fate Worse Than Death

Do you ever randomly think about something and get angry all over again as if it’s a fresh wound?

Because that’s what it’s like when thinking about the character assassination of some of your favorite characters. Some things are impossible to get over, and that’s high up on the list.

It hasn’t been that long since 9-1-1: Lone Star signed off with its final season, but one thing still weighs heavily on a girl’s mind: the frustrating destruction of Grace Ryder.

Tampering with Lasting Legacy

I’m sorry if this is a dead horse, but I’m about to beat it because I still cannot get over how 9-1-1: Lone Star wrote out Grace Ryder.

The issue is that the final season of this 9-1-1 spinoff was so disappointing that it felt almost as bad as New Amsterdam’s final season.

Not even 9-1-1: Lone Star managed to sink to that low, but I digress.

However, what comes to mind is how both series handled the departure of their female leads because it resulted in such thoughtless disregard for their characters and everything they’d come to represent. The cavalier way they tampered with the lasting legacy of characters like Grace Ryder and Helen Sharpe will never settle within my spirit.

Of the two, 9-1-1: Lone Star had the more obviously difficult task when it realized only ahead of the final season that contract negotiations with star Sierra McClain fell through.

Naturally, it meant they had less time to come up with a solution for the absence of this pivotal character in the series, so as upsetting as the result was, there’s still a modicum of grace extended to them (pardon the pun).

But only a bit.

Grace Ryder was the series’ beating heart and emotional core for four seasons. She grounded things for all the other characters, as the Ryders served as the strong foundation from which everything else was built and extended.

We spent the last four seasons seeing how integral Grace was to the series, particularly Judd. There’s really no Judd without Grace.

Grace Ryder: The Beating Heart Torn Out

Their love was so all-encompassing, and the series spent its entire run building up this beautiful love story, maintaining the notion that Judd could not function without Grace.

She was the physical representation of his saving Grace, and as a man with that level of codependency on his wife, of whom his entire existence seemed to revolve, unnaturally rocking the boat on that never served the character well.

Grace was also the gateway to the emergencies. As the dispatcher, there was no way of adequately digging into the calls and stories or connecting the firefighters, EMTs, and law enforcement in a stronger way professionally than through Grace.

But the final season attempted to pull that off with Wyatt, who fell so short in that regard despite Jackson Pace’s best intentions that they virtually sidelined and shuffled Wyatt offscreen by the time the finals season ended.

A Graceless Exit Indeed

It was an awareness that he wasn’t a serviceable replacement for Grace professionally or personally, so at some point, the season just ups and stops trying.

In turn, it results in Judd, who frankly feels like the unspoken and narratively logical lead of the series, having one of the most aimless, frustrating, and disappointing final arcs. It doesn’t pay off until the series finale in a way that the show didn’t earn by the end.

The same budget that may have cost us Grace in the first place meant that we had a season with limited calls or action, reflecting Grace’s absence as the bridge and entry point for many of those scenes.

Her absence was felt and central to why the entire final season fell apart in a way that left many fans salty because the only thing worse than losing a fan-favorite series, especially in the wake of news that a reheated version of it will crop up soon enough, is to have an unsatisfying final season to boot.

Charity Begins At Home — The Writers Forgot That

The last hit that makes the situation incomprehensible is the thoughtless way the series tries to explain her absence.

Ironically, unlike New Amsterdam, which I’ll get into momentarily, 9-1-1: Lone Star attempted to honor the essence of who Grace was as a character when they wrote her out. It just backfired spectacularly.

Grace was a kind, compassionate, and devoted soul. She’s always been a character who genuinely wants to help others and do good, and she has more love than her small frame can contain.

The problem is that Grace’s devotion and calling came at the expense of her family and friends, and that’s where it ultimately falls apart.

At some point, rather quickly into the season, her “calling” reads more like careless abandonment, and because Grace is neither of those things, it never lands in the series or can be received well by the audience.

There’s a saying that “Charity begins at home.” It genuinely makes no sense that Grace would sacrifice time with her first-born toddler, leaving her freshly unemployed husband to take care of both their kid and his newly disabled son by himself while she’s unreachable on the other side of the world.

Grace’s Apparent Lack of Awareness of the Negative Impact of Her Absence is OOC

Grace has always been in tune with Judd’s mental headspace. His grief and poor mental health sparked the origins of their relationship, and it’s been a consistent thing from him throughout the series.

It didn’t even seem reasonable that she’d jeopardize that or potentially place her husband in some crisis mode with her year-long absence or risk adverse effects on her own child.

The attempts to make Grace altruistic (something she naturally and canonically is) subsequently result in her appearing selfish, thoughtless, and reckless (things she absolutely has NEVER been) as her entire world in Austin quite literally implodes as she’s taking care of other people’s children across the world on a mission trip.

It’s a season that also tries to throw in too much drama, including her best friend breaking things off with a fiance and then battling cancer. Her own husband descending into such an alcohol-fueled depression that he no longer takes care of his own child and comes dangerously close to giving up on his life.

Considering that, it’s hard to reconcile that the Grace we know and love would ever leave the people she cares about in such a state or wouldn’t be on the next plane home.

A Fall From Grace

One of the series’ strongest points, the Ryder marriage and family, is completely destroyed in the final season, which becomes one of the series’ most depressing and heartwrenching developments.

And then, by the season finale, 9-1-1, Lone Star tries to put a nice bow on it and call it a happy ending. But we’re not happy. No real fan of Grace Ryder or the Ryders (one of the greatest married couples) is happy.

In the end, whether intentional or not, the series ends sourly by taking one of the franchise’s most beloved characters and decimating our great memories of her.

When we’re left in Austin seeing the fallout from her absence, and there aren’t enough references or offscreen phone calls to make up for it, the series concludes with the most endearingly sweet character on the show being regarded as an antagonist for whom viewers lost respect.

And I cannot forgive 9-1-1: Lone Star for that or for handling a precious character like Grace and her legacy with care.

The Dangers of Scapegoating

However, it still doesn’t hurt as deeply as what New Amsterdam did to Helen Sharpe.

Seriously, it leaves me wondering what good is there in sacrificing the characterization of one’s own creations to advance the story.

Of all the pathways to craft a worthwhile conclusion of a series, what is there to gain in back-drafting and destroying characters held in high regard once they’re gone?

It’s a level of scapegoatism that’s unsettling, especially for these particular women.

While I can at least afford Lone Star the benefit of the doubt of meaning well and just executing things poorly and it backfiring, New Amsterdam’s abhorrent treatment of Helen Sharpe remains one of the most egregious offenses I’ve experienced in recent years on television.

I won’t presume to say it was any which way, but I can only as a viewer, it felt malicious, meanspirited, and appallingly tone-deaf.

New Amsterdam had the time to craft a story that properly omitted Freema Agyeman. They had the advance notice yet still opted for the most offensive and deeply hurtful.

Helen Sharpe: From Heroine to Villain

Fans of Sharpwin had to deal with the shocking destruction of their relationship when Helen never boards a plane to return to NYC, even while Max is bafflingly preparing a “surprise wedding” on the hospital roof during a natural disaster.

Don’t ask. It still makes no sense to this day.

From that point forward, we had her send him a “Dear John” later explaining why she couldn’t do it or be with him, thus abandoning him and Luna, the baby she’d come to treat as her own.

Again, this abandonment angle of the most nurturing, loving characters onscreen is a specific slap in the face to anyone who has ever loved them because what?

We spend the entire season reeling from Helen, a Max, New Amsterdam loyalist, and most faithful warrior and fighter, cutting ties and abandoning everything she knows and loves behind with no real explanation.

Despite Helen’s tenure at New Amsterdam preceding Max himself and her forming what we’d have presumed to be lifelong friends with all the other characters, the final season treats her like no more than Max’s evil ex-girlfriend who the others “put up with” because of him.

And they spend the entire season having every character imaginable casting aspersions on her, attacking her character, and chipping away at everything we’ve come to know and love about Helen since the series premiere.

The final season actively launches a smear campaign against one of its most beloved characters throughout, suddenly attempting to rewire our brains and perceptions of the previous four seasons of Helen Sharpe.

Suddenly, everything we knew about her wasn’t the truth or came from a more sinister place that should’ve told us that she wasn’t as great as we previously thought.

Regardless of Intention, We Can’t Ignored the Devaluation of WOC

They opted to play up that perhaps we, the viewers, were merely seeing Helen through rose-colored glasses like Max (and presumably everyone else, too, up until now).

And they do all this while carelessly setting up an ill-advised romance between Max and Elizabeth (who they ironically also destroy in the final season, frankly), all for it never actually to amount to anything of substance anyway.

But it was one thing to merely demolish everything we could think about Helen in the romantic department or even as a friend to all within the series. Still, the final season comes after her medical prowess and integrity.

In a stunning move that still makes my blood boil all this time later, they belatedly drudge up some medical study with racist undertones and slapped her name upon it as if she was somehow the orchestrator and enabler of a type of profound medical racism and bigotry in the name of saving the white man they were simultaneously trying to proclaim she didn’t really love.

Frankly, just typing this has my hands shaking.

With that, in a single season, the final one in which the character isn’t even around to defend herself, New Amsterdam lights a torch and burns everything we know and love about this character with no regard whatsoever for who she was and, more importantly, what she represented to viewers.

And for a series, ironically, much like 9-1-1: Lone Star, that went out of its way to be progressive and even preachy, the horrific treatment of their female lead of color’s memory is astounding in ways I don’t have the time even to unpack further.

What Happens After a Legacy is Lost?

It genuinely leaves me wondering why it is so difficult to honor who and what they were in the process when faced with the challenge of writing out beloved characters.

Death is uninspired sometimes. There are many instances where it’s the laziest but most clean-cut option, and people don’t want that for some of the characters they hold dear.

But do you know what’s infinitely worse? The death of everything that beloved character was and used to be.

Killing off a lovable character means viewers must mourn them, but their legacy and impact remain intact.

But assassinating their character? It’s a fate worse than death. Essentially, you’ve dismantled that impact and legacy, permanently immortalizing them as something other than what they represented for so long.

After stripping a character of everything that took years and collaboration to build and establish, all that remains is a memory of what used to be, dried ink on a page with no essence, and a deeply hurt and betrayed faction of viewers unsettled by the ride they’ve been taken on who apparently had more passion and care for characters than the creators themselves.

When death befalls, all we have is memories; when shows senselessly and carelessly distort those, there’s nothing left but bitterness, distrust, and anger.

Over to you, TV Fanatics. Are you still in your feelings about Grace and Helen? What other series have done this to beloved characters? Let’s discuss it all below.

Watch New Amsterdam Online

Watch 9-1-1: Lone Star Online

TV Fanatic is searching for passionate contributors to share their voices across various article types. Think you have what it takes to be a TV Fanatic? Click here for more information and next steps.