Few shows this year have as much riding on them as Netflix’s 3 Body Problem. A sprawling, outrageously ambitious sci-fi that spans whole centuries, the show has been adapted from a beloved series of novels, which means it has an army of fans to appease. It’s the first show made by David Benioff and Dan Weiss since Game of Thrones, which means it has to overcome an even larger army of fans still disappointed about that finale. Plus it’s a big, expensive show made for Netflix; a platform notoriously happy to cancel shows with no warning.
There’s also the dead executive to contend with. A recent Hollywood Reporter profile of Benioff and Weiss mentioned that 3 Body Problem was almost derailed when Lin Qi – the billionaire owner of Yoozoo, the company that owns the 3 Body Problem rights – was killed in 2020. To make matters even messier, the man charged with Lin’s murder was the executive in charge of Yoozoo’s film division. Weirder still, Lin was poisoned, a method thought to be inspired by his favourite TV show, Breaking Bad. Just to top it off, the Hollywood Reporter posits that Lin may have been killed in part due to his obnoxious behaviour during a meeting about 3 Body Problem, back when Amazon was trying to make it with Rian Johnson.
All of which has the potential to be the weirdest thing ever to have stood in the way of a TV production. But, of course, this is television we’re talking about, so it doesn’t even come close. The history of television is littered with strange injuries and deaths. The actor Jon-Erik Hexum died on the set of the 1980s series Cover Up after a disastrous game of Russian roulette. The series finale of Lost almost didn’t happen because Terry O’Quinn accidentally stabbed Matthew Fox with a real knife instead of a prop knife during a fight scene, with tragedy only being avoided by Fox’s kevlar vest.
More common are stunt performer deaths. John Bernecker died on the set of The Walking Dead after falling from a balcony in 2017, while a helicopter crash killed Reid Rondell during the filming of Airwolf in 1985. After the tragedy during the production of Alec Baldwin’s Rust, the Associated Press calculated that there had been at least 43 deaths on film and TV sets between 1990 and 2014.
But if we’re sticking with injuries, Top Gear deserves its own subsection. Richard Hammond was badly hurt when his turbojet drag racing car crashed in 2006, and hurt his neck after rolling a Suzuki Super Carry van in the same year, and had to be hospitalised after falling from a horse in 2014. Meanwhile, Jeremy Clarkson broke his thumb on a Volvo in 2004, slipped two discs in 2005, hurt his neck cornering a car in 2008 and hurt his ankle while driving a lorry through a wall in the same year. That iteration of Top Gear ended due to injury – after Clarkson punched a producer in a row about dinner – and the most recent also terminated for the same reason, after Freddie Flintoff was horrendously hurt in a crash.
Special mention should also be given to Luck, HBO’s horse racing series that aired in 2011. The series looked unstoppable from the get-go. It was written by David Milch, the closest thing television has to a literal genius. It was directed by Michael Mann. Dustin Hoffman was the star. Nothing could go wrong, until of course everything went wrong. A show about horse racing was obviously going to require a lot of horses. Sadly, two of them died during production; one in the pilot and one in episode seven. Peta caught wind of the deaths, and publicly criticised the show. When a third horse died the following year, HBO pulled the plug.
Let’s end with the queasiest story of television catastrophe. In 2021, after apparently officially running out of ideas, NBC announced that it was going to make a series entitled Ultimate Slip N’ Slide. Not only that, but it was going to be big. Ultimate Slip N’ Slide – a gameshow adaptation of the wet tarpaulin your friends used to have in their garden during summer holidays – was going to be NBC’s lead-out after the Tokyo Olympics. But the show never made it to air, because 40 crew members were struck down with giardia, leading to a mass outbreak of what was described at the time as “awful explosive diarrhoea”. Giardia is a disease you tend to catch after getting water containing faecal matter in your mouth. TV might be littered with catastrophes, but none were ever quite as gross as this.
