That was a singular situation. He left because he was ill (he didn't die until a year after he left), so they replaced him with Pilon, which was meant to be temporary.
(At least that's what they said. They kept up the fiction that he was coming back for a very, very long time, past the time when they had to know he was terminally ill. That was because of the stigma surrounding AIDs at the time).
Then after they wrote Alan out, they waited five years to permanently recast the character.
For me, the unseemly part IMO is they didn't do a very good job chosing a replacement.
It seems for the most part that characters are killed off when it's an older actor. No one could have replaced Charita Bauer, for instance--she had played that part for decades. They audience would have been furious. The slap-dash memorial they did for the character was bad enough.
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DeeVee ·
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