That Game-Changing ‘Thirtysomething’ Death Shocked Every Cast Member … Except One
Modern-day TV viewers know not to get too attached to their favorite characters, considering how often death visits the small screen. But it was a different story in 1991, when the baby-boomer drama Thirtysomething shocked audiences with the death of Gary Shepherd, the charming literature professor played by Peter Horton, in Season 4’s “Second Look.”
It was a cruel twist of fate — especially because it seemed like Gary’s friend Nancy Weston (Patricia Wettig), another core member of the ensemble, was the one who was doomed. In fact, the day that episode aired, The Washington Post ran an open letter from two of the paper’s writers who, alerted to some upcoming devastating plot twist that season, begged producers to spare Nancy’s life.
The producers did spare her life — her second-look surgery revealed she was in remission. But then, they claimed Gary’s. He was on the way to the hospital with a gift for Nancy, an inscribed copy of Through the Looking-Glass, when he was fatally injured in a pile-up that icy night in Philadelphia.
“If it seems like a sleight of hand, it’s because people often are looking at the wrong things in life,” executive producer Edward Zwick told The New York Times at the time. “Predictability is vain, and that theme has been at the heart of the show for a very long time.”
Zwick and fellow EP Marshall Herskovitz, the ABC show’s creators, always knew one of their characters would die a thirty-something. “From the very first document we wrote about the show, we’d made it clear a character would die,” Herskovitz told The Hollywood Reporter in 2017. “These people experience happiness but also failure. They get sick. They die. And we wanted to show it all.”
As it turns out, Horton was also ready to leave the show, wanting to shift from acting to directing. (Among the many directing credits Horton has racked up since then is the Grey’s Anatomy pilot.)
In fact, Horton hoped to switch careers even before Thirtysomething premiered — and Gary’s death was part of his original agreement to do the show. “I turned down the role of Gary three times,” he said in a 2017 Television Academy interview. “Ultimately, Ed and Marshall said, ‘The show is never going to go. But if it does, we’ll kill you off after four years.’ We made that agreement.”
Because of that arrangement, Horton wasn’t surprised when Zwick and Herskovitz told him about his character’s impending demise. “They told me to keep it quiet, which was easier because it was in an age before social media,” he told THR. “Then I broke down and told [Ken Olin, who played Michael Steadman], and I think he told someone who told someone. So word got out.”
The rest of the cast, however, was shocked. “When Gary died [in a car crash], it was like a bomb dropped,” Melanie Mayron, who played Melissa Steadman, said in the Television Academy interview. “We were stunned. We didn’t know it was going to happen till the table read.”
(In that same interview, Horton recalled filming the scene where Michael has to identify Gary’s body, a scene the actor said was shot in an actual morgue. “I’m in dead man makeup in a body bag in a morgue drawer. They zipped me up and shut the drawer,” he said. “I was thinking, ‘Oh, my God! Is this a preview of what my own death is going to be like?’”)
Seventeen million people watched “Second Look” when it aired on February 12, 1991, including the cast, who had convened for a potluck at Mayron’s house. “Everybody was freaking out, gathered together around the couch like we were our characters in an episode,” she told THR. “We’d all been stunned during the read-through when we found out what was going to happen. And as the audience got a punch in the gut watching that episode, we felt the same thing together.”
Everett Collection
And in the minutes afterward, Horton had a moment of revelation. “I sat in my car that February night, it crash-landed in my gut,” he remembered in a 2017 New York Times essay. “This goofy, earnest, lovable guy I had the privilege and sheer joy of playing these last four years, was gone. And to my great surprise, I, too, was heartbroken.
Horton added in the THR interview that he wasn’t prepared for how much Gary’s death would affect the audience. “[I’d] be out somewhere and using a restroom, and someone would come up and say, ‘Oh my God, you’re alive!’” he said. I’d be in the middle of an argument with a girlfriend, and someone would come up to offer condolences. There was an awkward intensity for about six months after it aired, and it really hit me how this had permeated culture far beyond just being a show people watched.”
Reflecting on that time in his NYT essay, Horton said such fan interactions flummoxed him: “I didn’t know how to respond. I felt like a thief. As if I were somehow thieving people of their grief by still being alive, by reminding them that he was played by an actor. I felt guilty because there was community, a belonging in these reactions we all shared around entertainment.”
These days, for as much as social media connects fans, and for as much as streaming has made TV more accessible, viewers have lost the communal experience of watching a television show live with everyone else, Horton added: “Back in the winter of ’91, it was personal: water cooler talk the next day at work; a frantic phone call, ‘Oh my God. Did you see it?’; knowing looks in an elevator; a chance encounter on the street with a fellow fan, or running into me.”
ABC/Courtesy Everett Collection
The Washington Post’s Hank Stuever wrote in 2016 that Gary’s death “remains an early example of what has become a standard feature of today’s Golden Age of TV: Surprise sudden-death syndrome.”
And now, decades after “Second Look” aired, fans can still recall their reactions. “I remember how shocked I was when they killed off Gary,” a Reddit user wrote in a thread about Thirtysomething last year.
“This was the first TV show that made me cry,” another user commented. “[It was] when Gary died.”
Where Are They Now? Music Legends
July/August 2025
They rocked and rolled us, they shredded, they head-slammed and they crooned, but what happened to them and where are they now?
Buy This Issue