Killing Peter Krause Off '9-1-1' Is an All-Time TV Disaster

We’ve been here before. I’ve taken issue with this decision repeatedly. I’m like a broken record, but as production resumes on the next season of 9-1-1 —- a show I don’t even like that much to begin with —- I still cannot get over the fact that the series killed off Peter Krause’s Bobby Nash for no reason whatsoever.

“It’s not the same,” Jennifer Love Hewitt said upon her return to the set this week. “He was the person who mattered to everyone in the cast the most. He was our hero. And he always will be.”

I thought maybe a few weeks after the season ended, after the dust had settled and all the tributes had flowed from the other cast members, that we’d get the real story. That budget cuts made the decision necessary (which showrunner Tim Minear has vehemently denied), or that there was some friction on set, or something to make sense of one of the most boneheaded decisions in television history.

How do you kill off not just the heart and soul of a series, but the heart and soul of the set? Why? Just why? Krause didn’t want to leave. No one in the cast wanted him to leave. Tim Minear killed him off for “creative reasons.” What creative reasons are those? To tank the series? To give viewers less reason to watch? It’s not unlike Australian Survivor’s idiotic decision to fire Jonathan LaPaglia. Or The New York Times’ moronic decision to reassign their chief television critic, Margaret Lyons. It’s change for change’s sake. It’s fixing something that ain’t broke.

When everyone is happy — or at least content — with something and you change it for no reason, people are going to be pissed. This pisses me off. And it’s not even about the show — again, I barely like it. It’s background viewing, at best. It’s just… impolite. Business decisions, I get. They suck, but sometimes they’re necessary. But this? A pointless whim that harms not just the product, but upsets the harmony behind the scenes. They N’ARM’d Krause. And for what? Nothing.