Courtesy of ABC
The GoldbergsstarWendi McLendon-Covey, who for 9 seasons performed Jeff Garlin’s on-screen spouse within the ABC sitcom, has addressed the actor’s exit from the collection in its tenth season. Talking on SiriusXM’s Andy Cohen Dwellon Tuesday, McLendon-Covey mentioned the present’s choice to kill off Garlin’s character “was a very long time coming.”
“That was a very long time coming,” the Reno 911 alum mentioned. “And that it lastly occurred? It was like, ‘OK… Lastly, somebody is listening to us.’”
In December of 2021, Garlin dismissed the rumor that he’d been fired from The Goldbergs. As journalist Maureen Ryan reported for Vainness Honest, three former Goldberg workers alleged that Garlin had engaged in verbal or bodily behaviors that had made some folks uncomfortable on set. Lower than two weeks after the interview’s publication, Garlin’s departure turned official following an HR investigation—a choice The Hollywood Reporter described as mutual between Garlin and the present’s manufacturing firm, Sony Footage Tv.
Garlin is much from the primary actor to see his character killed off on display on account of a real-life controversy. Valerie Harper was famously killed off her personal collection, initially titled Valerie, over cash and artistic disputes, and Two and a Half Males dropped a piano on Charlie Sheen after he went on an anti-Semitic tirade, together with in opposition to the present’s creator, Chuck Lorre. After which, in fact, there’s Roseanne Barr, who has centered a whole comeback try round discussing her firing from ABC—and the on-screen Roseanne’s loss of life by opioid overdose—after an offensive tweet about Valerie Jarrett.
The Goldbergs Season 10 addressed the loss of life of Garlin’s character, Murray Goldberg, looking back. Throughout the premiere, Murray’s son—the present’s protagonist, Adam—recollects, “Only a few months in the past, out of nowhere, we misplaced my dad. … We'll at all times love you, dad. All the time. And we are going to discover a technique to proceed on collectively. As a result of, in spite of everything, we’re the Goldbergs.”
Garlin himself mentioned his controversial on-set conduct on The Every day Beast podcast The Final Snort again in 2019, going as far as to dare ABC to fireside him for shouting random obscenities to maintain himself amused throughout tapings.
“I don’t say something disrespectful to any man or lady instantly, in a honest method,” Garlin insisted on the time. “So I discovered myself within the Sony human assets [office] they usually had been actually severe. And one of many executives mentioned, ‘What if TMZ finds out about this?’ And I mentioned, ‘Please let TMZ discover out.’ That would be the first time I’ll ever do an interview with TMZ and I’ll inform them that it’s all true. As a result of now we have to cease the silliness.”
Talking with Cohen on Tuesday, McLendon-Covey famous that previous to Garlin’s exit, George Segal, who performed the present’s beloved grandfather character, had additionally died in actual life—which offered an extra problem for the comedy. “You'll be able to't preserve asking your viewers to mourn folks,” she mentioned. “That is not why they tune in.”
In the end, nonetheless, McLendon-Covey requested her host, Cohen, to chop their dialog surrounding Garlin brief. “If we cannot speak about that, that will be nice,” she mentioned, and Cohen obliged. “I’m exhausted by that matter and the PTSD of all of it,” McLendon-Covey mentioned. “I simply really feel just like the much less folks find out about that, the higher. No person advantages from realizing something.”