The Four Seasons (Netflix TV)

Spoiler alert: Don’t read if you haven’t see Series 1&2…

Liz: Why do you think they wrote him out?
Eric: You mean killed him off.
Liz: Well, yes. Why kill him? Steve Carell was one of the best things in it.
Eric: That’s why I think they had to do it. It changes the group. Up to that point, Nick’s divorce is the problem everyone is talking about. Once he dies, the problem becomes much bigger — how easy is it to go on being friends when one of your friends suddenly isn’t there anymore?
Liz: But then he comes back.
Eric: Well, sort of. They don’t resurrect him. They go backwards. Season Two has that episode during COVID, when Nick is still alive, a flashback, and suddenly you’re looking at him differently.
Liz: I liked that. And rather cleverly, it makes you miss him. You’ve just spent episodes dealing with his death, and then suddenly there he is, being Nick again — irritating Anne, irritating everybody else, but also being part of the group.
Eric: And I think that’s the cleverest thing about it. The writers realised that killing off a character also kills off all the possibilities for scenes with that character. So they asked, “Who was Nick when these people were still together?”
Liz: Then she introduces the consequences. Divorce changes the group. A younger girlfriend changes the group. Nick’s death changes the group. And even bringing Nick back in the flashback changes how we understand the group.
_________
Voice-over
Liz thinks that killing Nick was actually a way of making the series less pleasant and Eric adds Nick’s departure gives the episodes more energy.