Long time – variety

Danny Field / © ABC / courtesy Everett Collection

It was a “long time” for Jeff Garlin’s exit from “The Goldbergs,” Wendi McLendon-Covey said during a recent interview with Andy Cohen for SiriusXM. The two comedians headlined the ABC sitcom from its inception in 2013 until December 2021, when Garlin was fired from the show following a series of HR investigations into his alleged misconduct on set.

“It’s been a long time,” McClendon-Covey said. “It finally happened, it was like, ‘Okay, finally someone is listening to us. ‘” But that was kind of difficult because we lost George Segal in real life. To have to go through another loss in a sitcom… you can’t keep asking your audience to grieve for people. That’s not why they were caught.”

When asked by Cohen if Garlin’s departure from the series was the result of complaints made over an extended period of time, McLendon-Covey replied, “Yes.”

Then I politely asked “if we can’t talk about it, that would be great”. “I’m exhausted about this topic and PTSD from it all. I just feel like the less people know about it, the better. Nobody benefits from knowing anything.”

“The Goldbergs” was in the middle of filming its ninth season when Garlin was fired. He did not complete his work for the remainder of the season, forcing the production team to devise ways to keep his character on the show in a reduced capacity.

like diverse It was exclusively reported that the producers decided to keep Garlin’s character on the show using off-camera dialogue and unused clips pulled from previous episodes, as well as previously shot photos of Garlin. The actor’s stance was also used in the group scenes, but he was shot from behind. The end result was visually embarrassing and garnered so many complaints on social media that McLendon-Covey weighed in at the time.

“This season threw us for a loop because it’s hard to incorporate someone who doesn’t want to be there and wants to leave mid-scene, and we weren’t about to rewrite the second half of the season,” the comedian wrote on Twitter at the time. “We are doing our best.”

When “The Goldbergs” began its tenth and final season last fall, the show killed Garlin’s character. The series finale, “The Goldbergs,” will premiere in May on ABC.