Tiffany Wallace’s exit is further proof that the entire FBI franchise has more turnover than a fast food joint, and if that’s not vexing enough, the situation has only highlighted the show’s character problem.
As FBI Season 7 draws near, viewers face another casting shift with the departure of Katherine Renee Kane, who will likely sign off in the season premiere.
By now, casting changes amid the FBI franchise aren’t new.
From the FBIs to One Chicago, Cast Shifts as a Cost-Saving Tactic Hamper Creative Storytelling
We’ve even articulated our grievances about cast turnover before, not solely with the FBI franchise but also with One Chicago.
The Dick Wolf juggernaut series that span three franchises across different networks are notorious for a revolving door of cast and characters.
Recently, some explanations behind these abrupt shifts and changes have been tied to newly implemented budgetary measures with a revolving cast and minimal screen time as a cost-efficient tactic.
Whether or not the rotating cast members and characters facing full-on cutbacks or chops are doing something for the bottom line of crunching numbers for our favorite series is up in the air.
These measures may not be financially beneficial in the long run, and it is unclear how effective they are for networks and studios.
However, we do know that the cast and characters‘ carousel impedes the creative process and subsequent narrative results.
FBI: Most Wanted’s Bait-and-Switch Cast Foreshadowed Trouble
The FBI franchise is a prime example of how it profoundly impacts the series.
Characters barely feel like characters anymore, as, by the time we ever get to know any of them, the series has shuffled them off and replaced them with someone new.
Sure, a series can’t account for actors who may depart suddenly or opt to pursue other options (assuming that’s the real reason they leave), but the writing for many of them becomes such a point of contention that it only fuels the issue.
In many ways, FBI: Most Wanted is a series that felt guilty of a bait-and-switch.
The cast of the first season feels drastically different than where the series is now, with the family-oriented vibe of Jess LaCroix, a widower, with a rarely shown Indigenous blended family at the hub of the show.
By the second season, these characters who provided a fascinating look into the character and added a personal touch that grounded the series gradually disappeared, including fellow main character, Clint Black.
From that point forward, the series lost Kenny Crosby, Ivan Ortiz, and Kristin Gaines.
Many of the characters left well before the series had the opportunity to explore them properly, and maybe that was a factor in some of the actors opting out in the first place.
But when the show can barely scratch the surface of a character before writing them out, how can an audience connect anymore?
Limited Focus on Select Characters Comes at the Expense of Others
Even now, FBI: Most Wanted opts to spend most of its time focusing nearly exclusively on Dylan McDermott’s Remy.
It’s all great and fun for McDermott fans who craved a more stable role for the actor after his lauded stint on Law & Order: Organized Crime, but it hasn’t done anything for the other characters and actors surrounding him.
We spend so much time on Remy and developing his personal life when he’s not leading this elite unit of federal agents that there’s little room to spread the wealth.
As a result, if any of the other characters check out of the series, there will be too little fanfare.
We don’t get the chance to know most of these characters truly.
The series ascribes some of the most fundamental tropes to these characters and sends them into the field like action dolls without much thought or care.
The FBI: Most Wanted characters are brimming with so much potential that simply never comes to fruition — bits of background cobbled together to separate one character from the next.
But they rarely extend it beyond a scene or two in an episode throughout the season.
Crosby, Ortiz, and Clint’s exits were so underwhelming because the series barely devoted much time to fleshing out the characters in the first place.
They got away with shuffling them offscreen with some of the least original write-offs, and after reflection, it irks that we never fully got to know any of them.
The series invested a lot of screentime in a newer addition, Alexa, often at the expense of one of the sole original squad members, Sheryll, and even built up this complex background as a mother with a strained relationship with her daughter and ex.
Even Extended Screentime Doesn’t Equate to Character Development or Viewer Connection to Characters
But while they devoted a lot of screentime to Alexa, there was little development.
The writing for her character felt perfunctory at best and empty at worst.
But that’s been the case across the board.
Even as we head into FBI: Most Wanted Season 6, it’s evident that the series will likely continue to focus intensely on Remy and Nina Chase (whose primary development took place on FBI) and not much else.
It doesn’t make for characters to which viewers form an attachment or ones that resonate meaningfully.
FBI: International struggles with a similar issue.
So many characters have circulated in and out of this series that I can’t remember their names anymore.
While entertaining and providing some value as a procedural, FBI: Most International isn’t a character-driven series.
It’s to the show’s detriment that it isn’t, too.
We’re holding out hope that Jesse Lee Soffer’s addition to the cast will change things.
At best, viewers can hope to invest in cases that crop up as this elite squad navigates Eastern Europe.
Abstractly, one cares about the characters because they are familiar vital entities in the series.
FBI Franchise’s Characters Have No Lasting Impact
Nonetheless, the characters are inaccessible, which contributes to their lack of lasting impact, whether ten years from now or just two.
With FBI, we face another exit from the series as Tiffany Wallace signs off in the upcoming season.
We must assume that her portrayer, Katherine Renee Kane, and the series are parting ways amicably.
There are few details about why now is the right time for Tiffany’s exit and what that will even look like.
If we’re going out on a limb to pull from the FBI Season 6 finale, perhaps it’ll simply be the case of Tiffany needing to step back from fieldwork after losing a close friend and taking down his killer.
Her departure may be a result of some form of burnout.
Regardless of the reasoning, the fact that she’ll be disappearing off our screens at all is frustrating.
Tiffany was polarizing as an agent who notoriously had a chip on her shoulder regarding the job.
Tiffany Wallace Never Reached Her Full Potential on FBI
However, the perspective that she brought to the series as a woman of color in law enforcement, as well as someone who went from being a police officer to being a federal agent, was compelling.
There was so much potential the series could’ve mined when it came to both pathways, but sadly, they barely scratched the surface when it came to her.
Her partnership with Scola was strong, and they had something that balanced out the FBI’s golden pairing, Maggie and O.A.
The two held their own as they offered something different with a tenuous dynamic that they both had to earn and faced some friction occasionally.
But Tiffany was mostly underused, as is often the case with FBI characters other than the same two or three regulars.
There was so much to discover about Tiffany Wallace, yet despite her tenure on the series, we know so little.
It’s jarring to realize that she’s been part of the series for a whopping four seasons.
In those four seasons, the little we know about the woman could fit on a Post-It and still have leftover space.
Despite that, Kane imbued so much into the character, but much of it presupposed that there would be some payout in the end — that evolution and development would be in sight.
And yet, the character, like many, remained stagnant.
Tiffany Wallace’s Exit Telegraphs How the FBI Franchise Keeps Good Characters From Becoming Great
Knowing that the character could have easily been on some track toward development is what makes her departure such a disappointing waste.
It’s also what further highlights the franchise’s problem.
Tiffany was another character relegated to the background who followed the plot’s dictates.
But amid that, the moments when she could progress or the series could deep-dive into her psyche and pull back some layers were few and far between.
Her struggle with navigating the federal world as a former cop hung over the character, but it never went beyond causing tension between her and Scola or touching on her struggles to trust him or authority at times.
Her perspective as a Black woman with a badge often came across as if the series was recycling the same story arcs for O.A. and simply slapping a different race on them.
Tiffany and O.A.’s occasional partnerships on cases or simply bonding with each other as two ethnic minorities in a predominantly White field led to some decent moments of kinship, but the series never delved into that with any sense of nuance.
Tiffany’s final arc is a half-baked plot that merely dovetails into a nettlesome exit.
Ironically, it emphasizes how pervasive the character conundrum is.
FBI Franchise’s Character Qualms Trickle All the Way Down
Tiffany Wallace spent an entire season torn up about the death of a character to whom the series barely devoted time in the first place.
Somehow, despite appearing in nearly 30 episodes across four seasons, FBI analyst Hobbs faced his swan song in a contrived bit of him inexplicably going out into the field for a “very special episode.”
And because the series may be mindful of how little it devotes to fleshing out its characters evenly and impactfully, it spent much of the season back-drafting Hobbs’ importance to the FBI and all these characters.
It opposed them showing all that in the character’s four-year existence in the series.
It’s too bad we didn’t know Hobbs’s personality the entire time.
It would’ve been emotionally gratifying if we had seen the special dynamic he and Tiffany had onscreen rather than off to add more context to how his death made her hit rock bottom.
But alas, the series and franchise in general, more often than not, resort to moving characters around like chess pieces until they’re inevitably removed from the board altogether.
Departures Have Become Unmemorable and Meaningless
Tiffany Wallace’s absence from FBI will be noticeable for the first few episodes of the season.
But after that?
She’ll likely fade from the edges of our memory like many other characters from the franchise.
She’s merely another narrative casualty in an ever-growing and revolving carousel of characters.
All the potential in the world is theoretically meaningless if the franchise doesn’t live up to the best of it with its characters when they’re still there.
Over to you, TV Fanatics.
Do you think the FBI franchise faces a character issue?
How do you feel about Tiffany Wallace’s exit from the flagship series?
Please share your thoughts with us below!