Why Did The All-American Writers Kill Off Billy Baker?
I know I’m late to the party on this because CW originally aires the show and I’m just catching up on Netflix but WTF!?!!? Are you aware of the fact that the All-American writers just decided to kill Billy Baker off the show? RIP Coach Baker.
If you want to find the exact episode for yourself it’s season five, episode 11 of All-American. A lot of the quotes out there are almost spoken in code but Taye Diggs didn’t sound surprised that he was being written off the show. Maybe he even had something to do with it.
VIA interview with TVLine:
“I was having a great time. It was just a feeling that I got [that I was ready to leave], and I just honored that feeling. It was maybe mid-fourth season. I don’t even remember, to be honest, because the showrunner and myself are close. We’d been keeping in contact, so she had known, and we’d been talking.”
He continued: “And we decided how to go about it, and storylines and whatnot, so it was all above board, and everyone was in the know.”
Showrunner Nkechi Okoro Carroll had some interesting comments as well.
“At the beginning and end of every season, I have a conversation with the cast about the journey of their character, and it was in those conversations for Taye that we started talking about, ‘Is Billy’s journey on the show over? And if so, what would an exit look like?’ To me, there was only ever one exit for Billy if he was leaving, because the character would never leave after fighting so hard for his family,” she said.
Can we just have a conversation about the way they killed off Billy? If nobody else is going to say it then I will. Let’s just call it what it is. Spencer and Grace James basically guilt tripped Billy into staying at South Crenshaw and he died because of it. Spencer and Grace are allowed to leave the hood but Billy is supposed to feel guilty about doing so after he was offered the equivalent of the USC job.
Stop it.
It’s not a terrible show. It’s certainly a step up over that trash bag product, Homecoming. Everything has to be so over the top. Everything has to have built-in drama when there doesn’t need to be any. The drama is so over the top and all of the characters have their feelings hurt over the biggest nonsense all the time.
Personally, I’m sad about this. I get the whole dying thing can create an electric scene. One of my favorite Family Guy episodes ever is when they kill off Diane Simmons. This was a mistake. Having Billy coach Jordan and Spencer at Golden Angeles would have created plenty of intrigue right there. Instead, the cast of characters basically killed off Billy cause he wasn’t allowed to leave the hood after making the NFL and paying for everyone else’s bill.
JOKE.
Nothing more needs to be said.
Sorry, I’m not quite done yet. Can we just talk about the scene where Coach Baker dies? It doesn’t make any sense.
Car crash during the day.
Cuts to a different character.
Immediately is dark and hours later. Somehow no one called 911 to report the crash. They finally then notice Jabari is gone. Coach Baker hops in the bus and nobody even tries to talk him out of it with no public service worker on the scene. We didn’t even get to see Coach Baker go out in a blades of glory. We just saw a bunch of people crying that he was gone. Absolute disgraceful way to be written out of the show.
Side note: Does anyone hate Olivia Baker because I do? I also hate Simone but I think the embed tells you that pretty clearly.
