In June, CBS announced that Leah Remini would be joining the cast of Kevin Can Wait and replacing the character played by Erinn Hayes, but at the time it wasn’t clear just how the show would manage replacing one TV wife with star Kevin James’ previous TV wife. During the CBS Executive Panel during the Television Critics Association press tour today, though, the network confirmed that Hayes’ character is being killed off when the show returns for its second season.
Mercifully, this won’t be a How I Met Your Mother situation where the viewers are subjected to the gradual death of a sitcom character they’ve grown to like. Instead, Kevin Can Wait’s second season will pick up after some time has passed, most likely giving the characters some time to mourn and move on. It’s a bit of a cheat, but does anyone really want to spend a single minute of this Kevin James show thinking about death?
Season two of Kevin Can Wait will premiere on CBS in September.
[Additional reporting by Erik Adams.]