The Goldbergs will return with or without that weird CGI Jeff Garlin

If you thought you saw the last of CGI Jeff Garlin smiling from the depths of the uncanny valley, well you might be out of luck. The Goldbergs are returning for another season at ABC. However, they haven’t figured out how to handle the abrupt exit of Jeff Garlin, who starred as family patriarch Murray Goldberg.

Garlin left the show last December after an investigation into his conduct on set. He described his antics as “silly.” According to Garlin, there was an HR investigation on him for three years after his co-workers repeatedly accused him of misconduct.

However, Garlin left the show before filming on the current season was completed. Thus, it led to one of the strangest wedding episodes in broadcast television history, with Murray Goldberg appearing as a smooth-faced Force ghost presiding over his daughter’s nuptials. When the video of Murray’s attendance surfaced online, Garlin’s former co-star Wendi McLendon-Covey described the decision to include him as the result of “someone who doesn’t want to be there and wants to leave mid-scene.”

Per Variety, the show will continue to use Murray Goldberg for the remainder of the ninth season through “off-camera dialogue pulled from earlier episodes and unused takes, as well as previously shot images of Garlin.” Variety continues that while “official plans” for Murray are still to come, he’ll probably be written off the show, which, yeah, that makes sense.

So it looks like we’ve got a big Two And A Half Men-style funeral coming to The Goldbergs in which Ashton Kutcher replaces Jeff Garlin and the show continues, undeterred, for another few years. We can only hope that the last episode of The Goldbergs ends with a helicopter dropping a piano on Murray and show creator Adam F. Goldberg turning to the camera and saying, “Winning.” Something real classy like that.