Shows That Had An Almost Completely Different Cast By The Time They Ended

Cast changes during the run of a TV show are common, particularly when a show has been on the air for more than a handful of seasons. Shows like "Friends," "Cheers," "Seinfeld," "The Big Bang Theory," and others, which ran for many years and kept most of the core cast from the pilot on board until the series finale, are definitely the exception. Whether it's because an actor became a movie star, contract negotiations went poorly, a character met their demise, or any number of other reasons, it's just not especially common that an actor sticks with a television show for its entire run.

While cast changes are basically the norm for most shows, there does tend to be a small core group that hangs around until the series ends. Some even leave for a couple of seasons but then come back. For a show to end with little to none of the actors that were on board from the beginning is also pretty rare. Now, this excludes legacy shows that run for decades upon decades like soap operas; the actors who were on a show when it started in the 1960s or '70s have long since moved on to other things by the 2000s or so — unless you're Susan Lucci. But among other genres of television shows, these are the rare examples where the curtain came down on an almost entirely different group of actors than were there when the curtain was first raised. 

Syfy's "Being Human" — a drama about a ghost, a vampire, and a werewolf who are roommates trying to live as regular human twentysomethings — maintained a pretty consistent main cast across its four seasons. But the same definitely cannot be said for the BBC original of the same name on which it was based. The U.K.'s "Being Human" started out with Lenora Crichlow, Russell Tovey, and Aidan Turner comprising the main cast as Annie, George, and John, respectively. Sinead Keenan was recurring at first as Nina, but would join the other three as a regular by Season 3. 

Then, in a span of just a couple of weeks during the prepping of Season 4, three of the four main cast members either quit or started down that road. Turner left to join the cast of "The Hobbit," followed by Keenan also deciding to leave the show, on top of Tovey staying on but shifting into a lesser recurring role. This left only Crichlow as the sole original to return as a main cast member for Season 4, though she too would be gone at the end of the season along with Tovey. Damien Molony and Michael Socha joined the regular cast for Season 4  — Socha was recurring in Season 3 — to fill the gaps in the roster as Hal and Tom. They were joined by Steven Robertson and Kate Bracken as Dominic and Alex, filling out the entirely new cast of regulars that closed out "Being Human" in its fifth and final season in 2013.

Though "Saturday Night Live" has had a rotating cast throughout its nearly 50-year run, the majority of sketch shows are formed by a specific group of people who mostly stay with the program until its end. This describes "Monty Python's Flying Circus," "The Kids in the Hall," "Mr. Show," "In Living Color," and "The State," to name a few.

However, it's worth noting that none of those shows lasted longer than six seasons. It definitely becomes more difficult to keep a core cast together on a sketch show much longer than that, as the various members begin to go off and do movies or other TV shows. The only other sketch show besides "SNL" to stay around for an extended period was "Mad TV," which lasted an impressive 14 seasons between 1995 and 2009 (plus a 2016 reboot season). The original cast of regulars — Orlando Jones, Nicole Sullivan, Debra Wilson, Phil LaMarr, Craig Anton, Mary Scheer, Bryan Callen, David Herman, and Artie Lange — only remained fully intact for two seasons, with Jones, Lange, and Callen all gone before Season 3. Wilson hung on the longest, leaving in 2003 after eight seasons.

By the final season of the original run of "Mad TV," the cast consisted entirely of performers who had only been there for the previous few years. The 2016 reboot season featured an entirely new cast, though veterans like Will Sasso, Bobby Lee, and Ike Barinholtz appeared as hosts, as did originals Sullivan and Wilson.

A fun mix of dark humor and sci-fi — and leaning heavily into a very U.K. flavor of both genres — "Misfits" ran for five seasons between 2009 and 2013 on E4 in England. The show focuses on five troubled teenagers who are doing court-ordered community service work when they all gain superpowers during an electrical storm. For the first two seasons, the five superpowered characters in question were played by Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, Lauren Socha, Iwan Rheon, Antonia Thomas, and Robert Sheehan, the last of whom was only recurring by Season 3.

By Season 4, only Stewart-Jarrett remained from the original cast. Joseph Gilgun had come aboard as Rudy in Season 3, and he would be joined by Karla Crome, Nathan McMullen, Natasha O'Keeffe, and Matt Stokoe. They would form the new regular cast that closed the show out in Season 5 — minus Stewart-Jarrett, who was gone after the fourth season. It's not entirely known why such a major cast exodus happened on "Misfits," but to its credit, the show did manage to stick it out for almost two full seasons after losing its entire original cast. 

There had previously been plans for an American remake of "Misfits" to air on Freeform, but there haven't been any official updates on its progress since the casting announcement way back in 2017.

Like "Game of Thrones," AMC's adaptation of the comic book "The Walking Dead" always presented itself as a show where no character was safe, and anyone — even lead characters — could die at any time. That being said, "Game of Thrones" still had nearly a dozen of its original characters survive through the final season. "The Walking Dead," on the other hand, had only two, and both of them were actually only just recurring characters in Season 1. 

Beyond Andrew Lincoln making a guest appearance in Season 11, not a single original main "TWD" cast member from Season 1 was still around by the end of the zombie apocalypse drama. The two aforementioned survivors were Daryl Dixon (Norman Reedus) and Carol Peletier (Melissa McBride). What's especially interesting in this case is that Daryl Dixon wasn't even a character from the comic books and was instead an original creation for the show, who was originally supposed to die after only appearing for a few episodes. 

But Daryl quickly became a fan favorite, which not only made him a series regular beginning with Season 2 and a survivor to the end, but the star of his own self-titled spin-off, "The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon," set to debut in 2023.

The U.S. isn't the only region that has police procedurals that last for decades. The U.K.'s "The Bill" debuted in 1983 and had an impressive 26-season run that took it all the way to 2010. While there are a number of actors who had literally hundreds of episodes of the show under their belts — such as Andrew Lancel, Lisa Maxwell, Cyril Nri, Alex Walkinshaw, Shaun Scott, Ben Roberts, Peter Ellis, and Christopher Ellison — none of the original cast made it beyond the year 2000.

The oldest of the cast members who were still regulars on "The Bill" during its final season was Simon Rouse, who began playing Superintendent Jack Meadows in 1990 and did so for an astonishing 884 episodes. Also joining Rouse in 1990 was the show's second longest-serving actor, Colin Tarrant, who portrayed Inspector Andrew Monroe for 704 episodes. But while there were definitely a few longtime veterans in the cast of "The Bill" when the credits rolled on its final episode, it had been a number of years since anyone from the show's first season had still been part of the program.