CBS; HBO; AMCWarning: The following contains spoilers for several different television shows. If you're especially averse to these sorts of things, you may want to look away. You've been warned.
It used to be that when a TV show wanted to surprise its audience, really throw them for a loop with a plot twist they never saw coming, they just wrote it into their script and waited for the thing to air. When Dallas shot J.R., or L.A. Law threw Rosalind Shays down an empty elevator shaft, or ER had Lucy Knight stabbed and killed by a deranged patient, they just did the damn thing and until the scene hit the screen, audiences were none the wiser. It was, as they say, a simpler time.
But that was then and this is now. In our social media-obsessed, paparazzi-infested new world, keeping secrets on the set under wraps has become a sort of CIA-level operation. Showrunners are going to increasingly extreme lengths to protect plot points from the prying eyes of the Twitterverse—all in service of the surprise.
While fans may have expected that Game of Thrones would resurrect Jon Snow after the fan-favorite character was killed off in the final moments of the season five finale, no one knew for sure how or when it would happen, if it even would. Maintaining that air of mystery and keeping fans on their toes until the second episode of season six was no easy feat for HBO and co-creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss—not to mention the toll it took on star Kit Harington. During the show's break between seasons, responses to the onslaught of questions about Jon's fate became a game of semantics, with all involved insisting he was dead. (Technically, they weren't lying. Jon did die. And then he was resurrected.) When he was spotted on set, his presence was explained away as a cameo as a corpse. (Again, not a complete lie. Harington spent much of the first two episodes lying in repose on a table.)
As this clever bit of careful word choice was taking place in the press, Benioff and Weiss were working double time behind the scenes to make sure Jon's resurrection wasn't leaked anywhere. When the series broke for hiatus after filming completed on season five, the producers swore Harington into secrecy about his eventual return, forcing the actor to make his friends and co-stars believe he was really done with the show. "At first I thought I would find it fun," Harington told EW. "This will be a fun game. But I had to lie to a lot of close friends and cast members and crew. The longer it went, the more I felt like I was betraying them.
Once the cast and crew went back to work for season six, the name Jon Snow became something akin to mentioning Voldemort on the Game of Thrones set, EW reports. It didn't appear in any scripts, scene breakdowns, call sheets or any other show material and, outside of on-camera dialogue, he was, at all times, simply referred to as "LC," meaning "Lord Commander."
When The Walking Dead faced a similar challenge last fall after fan-fave Glenn Rhee (Steven Yeun) fell off a dumpster into a ravenous horde of zombies and appeared to have his guts ripped out, the show followed a wildly different trajectory to keep his ultimate fate under wraps. Because the moment happened mid-season during season six, rather than during a natural break in its schedule, everyone involved in the series went completely radio silent. Several episodes went by with no return to the character's predicament and, in that time, the producers made the brazen decision to remove Yeun's name from the opening credits—a move that rubbed most fans the wrong way.
Yeun himself fell off the grid in the weeks between the shocking cliffhanger and the reveal that he'd survived in an effort to keep the junior sleuths at home from putting two and two together. "We live in a place where you can deduce what's happening on a show based on whether the actor is present in a city or somewhere. And so, for me, again, it wasn't coming from a place of, I'm going to deceive the audience," he told EW. "It was coming from a place of, I don't want to spoil anything for anybody on how you're going to consume or take in this storyline. So the best way to do that is to literally say nothing, and just get off the accessible grid."
While the show managed to keep Glenn's fate a surprise, their methods weren't without a price. Fans walked away from the experience feeling slightly manipulated by the producers whom they argued were playing games with them. (And they certainly didn't seem to learn any lesson from it after promising season six would wrap with a major death, only to keep the identity of the deceased another secret until the show returns for season seven.)
Before it became all the rage to bring characters back from the dead, another pair of shows managed to stun audiences by whacking main characters in ways that literally no one ever saw coming. We're talking about The Good Wife and Grey's Anatomy, of course.
When series regular Josh Charles decided he was ready to leave The Good Wife in 2014, the writers made the difficult decision to kill off his character Will Gardner in truly surprising fashion. (He was gunned down in a courtroom by a mentally ill client.) Even more shocking was the fact that not a soul had any idea the actor was on his way out. "First of all, we are blessed with the nature of everyone that works on the show. It's not just us keeping the secret; it's us plus 500 people keeping the secret. It was the entire crew, obviously the cast, writers and editors and everyone in post [production]. Plus, all the extras coming through," Good Wife co-creator Michelle King told E! News. "We asked them specifically. Letters were written, we did what we could and then we were relying on them caring enough about the show to not tell their loved ones."
Charles himself proved to be instrumental in keeping the secret, co-creator Robert King added. "That, and I think Josh's agent and manager, and Josh himself, were incredibly cooperative because usually where you get wind of these things it's when someone is made available for other projects. Their name goes on a list. What was great here is Josh—who really is a friend of the show, we have a great relationship—kind of wanted to play into the secret," he said. "I actually think all those things combined. I don't think it will happen again. I don't think you can keep secrets like this with the Internet."
It would happen again, however, when Grey's Anatomy managed to pull off the same trick one year later. After weeks of foreshadowing a possible departure for series regular Patrick Dempsey, the show's male lead for 11 years, fans were stunned when McDreamy himself Derek Shepherd was killed off. The series was no stranger to losing major players in its years on the air—it had just said goodbye to Sandra Oh's much alive Cristina Yang a year prior—but they usually tended to follow some celebratory fanfare (or occur in a season finale). Derek's death, however, came right after the actor had just signed a contract extension. No one was expecting it.
Creator Shonda Rhimes has built a TV empire by being notoriously tight-lipped about the twists and turns her shows take, only working with people who will respect that ethos and protect her stories. But Dempsey was still surprised that, with all the cooks in the kitchen when making an episode of television, McDreamy's denouement didn't leak. "How can it not? I thought it was going to be really tough to keep it quiet," he told EW. "The crew did a great job, and the cast. The guest players who came in were very supportive and very moving to work with."
Of course, there are still moments when secrets get out, no matter the lengths a show will go to protect them. When Gossip Girl premiered on the CW in 2007, it tapped into a perfect storm of mysterious storytelling, burgeoning online fandoms, and on-location shooting. Much of the show was filmed on NYC's busy streets, ensuring that the hordes of fans who showed up on a daily basis had a front-row view to the action months before it ever hit the TV screen. As a result, the show routinely began filming fake scenes on the streets to throw the masses off the scent.
When it came time to shoot the show's series finale in 2012, which featured the long-awaited weddings of Chuck (Ed Westwick) and Blair (Leighton Meester) and Dan (Penn Badgley) and Serena (Blake Lively) as well as a handful of big-time surprise cameos, executive producers Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage went into overdrive to keep their secrets safe. Cameos from Rachel Bilson, Kristen Bell, and Jessica Szohr were shot on the sets of entirely different CW series, even. "We didn't send dailies out, we didn't send out to international partners, we didn't send the last two acts to anyone," Savage told E! News in 2012. "We really tried to control spoilers."
Sadly, word of Dan and Serena's wedding got out anyway, thanks to some surreptitiously shot photos. "The Chuck and Blair wedding, we knew as soon as we stepped outside, it would be captured by the paparazzi. But Dan and Serena, that was really disappointing and upsetting," Savage said. "We worked really hard to dress Blake inside, she kept away from the windows. It was a locked set. But somebody either paid someone to get into the apartment across the street, or used a fire escape and used a telephoto lens, and that really upset me because I didn't want anyone to know. I wanted that to be a surprise for fans."
In this day and age, when anyone with a smart phone is a paparazzo and people have a bizarre desire to know what's happening on their favorite TV shows before it has a chance to actually, you know, happen, it's remarkable that these shows managed to keep any of the secrets they did. Remarkable, but thankfully, not always impossible.