Why did they kill off Sally? Which episode was that? Wasn't she going to have a baby? What happend to the baby?
shareWell there have been many rumors why she left. But from my understanding she left over money between season 5 and 6. It was explained that she and the child had died in a plane crash. There was no big episode or anything. In the 70s things just happened that made no sense on many tv shows.
shareThanks for letting me know. I think the show was better with her. I've seen a few episodes without her it's just not as good. To bad they couldn't work something out.
shareI agree I did not care for it in first run without her. I tried watching it again on netflix now that I am a bit HMM older. But still don't like it.
shareI remember watching it as a kid then with Sally in the show then we as a family stopped watching it that's when they mustve killed her off. Then later I learned she was killed but never heard how or about the baby then a new housekeeper too.
shareI suspect there's more to it that that. At the McCLOUD boards, someone said the show almost wasn't brought back for its last season, and I believe I heard something similar about COLUMBO. Someone at NBC considered cancelling the entire NBC MYSTERY MOVIE cycle, or, they did, but changed their minds at the last minute.
In the case of McCLOUD, there were several below-par episodes during its last season. In the case of McMILLAN, not only had Nancy Walker decided to leave, but John Schuck got himself a new (short-lived) TV series at the same time. It seems to me McMILLAN & WIFE had actually been cancelled, but when someone changed their minds, they wound up having to replace THREE-FOURTHS of the cast!
Richard Gilliland (later of DESIGNING WOMEN) replaced John Schuck, Martha Raye (who had already appeared in one episode the previous year as Mildred's sister) replaced Nancy Walker, and a steady procession of attractive single women (including my favorite, Shirley Jones) allowed the now-widowed Stuart (Rock Hudson) to play the bachelor again.
NBC, meanwhile, consistently, REPEATEDLY screwed with the schedule, often pre-empting the movies for several weeks at a shot, and making up for it by running double-features on other nights (all the episodes reverting back to 90 minutes after a season or two where all of them had been padded out to 2 hours). It was an early case of a network going out of their way to MURDER a series in order to have an excuse to get rid of it.
There were only 2 survivors of that season-- the new QUINCY, M.E., which was quickly yanked out of the schedule after only 4 episodes and moved to Friday nights to become an hourly weekly (which lasted 7 years!), and COLUMBO, which ran one more year, on its own, each new episode being run at a random day and time. Not knowing when it was on, I never saw any of that season until years later when they turned up in reruns.