Jen Krueger: Surviving the Fall

Jen Krueger

Jen Krueger is a writer and improviser living in Los Angeles. Ask her and she'll proudly tell you she hails from Chicago. Don't ask her, and she'll probably tell you anyway. Jen is the Associate Director of the LA Indie Improv Festival, and runs Friday night indie improv show The Manifesto Show with her team Penguins on the Playground. Jen also hosts PrePopCulture.com, a podcast about pop culture before it pops. She owns one Calvinball, two sonic screwdrivers, and has degrees in Curiosity and Advanced Curiosity.

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2 Responses

  1. mike weber says:

    Hill Street Blues killed two characters in its first episode (though their deaths were later retconned to “severely wounded” when Bochco & Co realised that on a show named Hill Street Blues they had a severe scarcity of uniformed characters. Other characters went down unexpectedly throughout the run.

    It’s the first series i recall that was so edgily upfront about almost anybody’s ass being up for grabs.

    As to killing off characters when their contract is up – Harrison Ford originally only signed for two pictures, apparently, unlike Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher.

    His carbonite-freeze at the end of Empire Strikes Back was how they were going to rite Solo out if he didn’t re-sign.

    I bet, somewhere, there’s footage of Solo dying horribly when he’s thawed out that they sot, just in case.

    It was a standard ploy in the days of chapter plays (serials) – since they were often shot only a week or two in advance of when they were supposed to go out to the theatres, actors with lead roles were known to demand more money at about Chapter Seven or so, sonce the studio was fully committed to finishing the story.

    So it became customary to shoot a generic death scene for the lead(s), one that could be put in anywhere if needed.
    And when they started making trouble … sit them down in a projection room and run that clip for them.

  1. January 28, 2014

    […] prompted a run down of good and bad TV character deaths in my column this week. Check it out here (unless you’re not caught up on Downton Abbey, in which case steer […]