Yahoo Lifestyle ‘Sweet Magnolias’ EP On Season 4’s Shocking Death As Series Regular Cast Member Departs
SPOILER ALERT: The story includes details about Episodes 402, 403 & 404 of Netflix’s Sweet Magnolias.
Season 4 of Netflix’s small-town romantic drama Sweet Magnolias — about Serenity best friends Maddie, Dana Sue and Helen, their families and love lives — goes through several emotional highs and lows. Episode 2 delivered one such big swing when, right after her wedding to Cal, Maddie finds out that her ex-husband Bill has died. The news is delivered by her in-laws, who come to Serenity for the funeral.
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With Bill’s death, Chris Klein, who played him for the first three seasons, has become the first Sweet Magnolias series regular cast member to leave the show.
The last time we saw Bill was in the Season 3 finale where he, along with Dana Sue’s scheming sister-in-law Kathy, left town together after Kathy’s brother Ronnie paid her to do so (but not before Kathy made a sweet gesture to her brother as she started off on her redemption arc that continued in Season 4).
Over the last three seasons, Bill was part of several major storylines. The series kicked off with Maddie’s divorce from him after the doctor’s affair with his nurse Noreen got her pregnant. It was subsequently revealed that Isaac, an enigmatic young man working as kitchen staff at Sullivan’s, is Bill’s love child with Serenity journalist Peggy, giving Maddie’s three children with Bill two half-siblings.
In Part 2 of her interview with Deadline about Season 4 of Sweet Magnolia, series showrunner Sheryl J. Anderson discusses the reasons for the decision to kill off Bill.
“First of all, we love Chris. This was purely story-driven, and I explained that to him. He was very gracious and understanding,” Anderson said. “We were looking for an event where we could literally track the ripples through all of his friends and family and reset their journeys accordingly.”
“It obviously impacts his family, but we were also interested in that impact when you’re at the age that our ladies and their partners to be are, when that first person in your age group dies unexpectedly, decades and decades before they should, the questions about mortality and legacy and ‘Am I where I want to be? Am I with who I want to be with?’, really big existential questions that also filtered down into the younger characters, all the way to Katie and what Helen calls her doe-eyed optimism,” she continued.
The timing also worked with the place Bill’s journey on the show was at as he spent most of the last season or so trying to make amends with those he had hurt, Anderson said.
“We knew it had to be significant, we didn’t want to trivialize it,” she said. “Because Bill and Kathy had already left, we thought that that might be the way to go. And because Bill and Kathy left town on good terms with everybody; we have a saying that no one in Serenity is beyond redemption, and we felt that Kathy and Bill had achieved that.”
The potential wide impact of Bill’s death was a factor too.
“Bill is so central to the original construct of this group that we knew everybody would have something to say and something to feel if you were suddenly gone,” Anderson said.
The storyline of Bill’s death introduced the character of his mother, Bonnie, who became Season 4’s top antagonist with her insensitive comments, including bluntly making Isaac’s secret public without his consent, fighting Maddie on the funeral arrangements and insulting Ty.
“She is clearly an antagonist — and she and Maddie have a painful history — but Bonnie is a woman in pain, a woman who does not have the support system — because she’s never sought it out — that Maddie has, so she’s determined to go through this tragedy in a very specific way,” Anderson said. “The fact that Maddie is able to reach her — even though it takes some wrestling — and that Bonnie leaves with some solace and some new vision of how she and her grandchildren and her former daughter-in-law can interact, we thought was very redemptive.”
Like Bill and Kathy before her, Bonnie also leaves town a different person.
“You can’t completely change somebody overnight, but Serenity is about reminding people that there’s always hope and there’s always a second chance and there’s always a different way to go, particularly after you spend some time with our magnolias,” Anderson said.
For Anderson’s breakdown of the major Season 4 time jump and Maddie and Cal’s surprise wedding, read Part 1 of Deadline’s interview.
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