Kevin James explains ‘Kevin Can Wait’ death

KEVIN James is finally speaking out about why his CBS sitcom Kevin Can Wait made the odd decision to kill off a main character after just one season.

In June, TV Line reported that Erinn Hayes – who played Donna Gable, the wife of James’s character – would not be back for Season 2 of the sitcom because the show was “heading in a new creative direction”. The news followed CBS’s announcement that Leah Remini, who starred opposite James in the long-running sitcom King Of Queens, had been added as a series regular.

Now James says that killing off Hayes’s character was necessary to keep the sitcom going.

“The plot of the show didn’t have enough drive. If we got through a second season, I wouldn’t see us getting through a third one. We were literally just running out of ideas.”

That’s a pretty stunning admission for James, one of the show’s co-creators, to make. Traditional sitcoms have existed for years without major shake-ups to the central family.

And the comedy’s handling of Donna’s death has been unconventional – when Season 2 premiered last month, Kevin Can Wait had jumped forward a year, with Kevin Gables making a blink-and-you-missed-it reference to how much he missed his wife. Four episodes in, we still don’t know how Donna died.

“Now, I have to deal with my daughter in a different way, and she’s gonna go to college, or one’s getting married, or the holidays,” James explained. “And it deals with things in a different, weightier way.”