Edie King

Character
Name:	Edie King
Occupation:
Relationships:
Fandom:	Beauty and the Beast (TV)
Other:
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Edie King is a Beauty and the Beast (TV) character who appears in first season of the show as a Catherine Chandler's friend and then abruptly disappears.

Portrayed in Fan Art

• 

  from Tunnels #1, artist is Nancy Stasulis, portrays Edie and Catherine Chandler (1988)

• 

  from Faded Roses #1, artist is Terrie Smith, portrays Edie and Catherine Chandler (1989)

• 

  the artist is Linn Bankson (2013)

Convention Appearances

Ren Wood, who portrayed Edie King, was a guest of honor at:

• A Distant Shore (with her blues band) (1995)
• Reflections in 1997

Comments by George R.R. Martin

Comments in 1993 by George R.R. Martin, one of the show's writers:

Characters get killed off on a television show for a number of reasons. Sometimes it is dictated strictly by the storyline.

[...]

Sometimes characters are killed -- or otherwise written out -- because of the actors who portray them, the death of Catherine Chandler being the obvious and notorious example. Catherine was killed because Linda insisted on leaving the show. Edie was another case partially along these lines. Ren Woods was simply not happy with her part, as it existed. She kept telling us she was tired of sitting at the computer and giving all the exposition on Cathy’s cases, the “shoe leather” as we called it. Well, the character she played had been created to do precisely that -- it was an economical way to get that necessary plot-advancing shoe leather across without having to have Cathy do it all herself.

[...]

One thing fans never take into account is the economics of television production. The economics of time and the economics of money. You only have so many scenes each week, and you only have so much money to pay your actors. The fans who are so vocal about how we should have kept Edie should realize that, if Ren had stayed with the show, there would have been less screen time for Jay Acovone [who portrayed Joe Maxwell], and less money to develop new recurring characters like Mouse, Pascal, and William.

[...]

None of these characters was killed because they were black, and to suggest that this was the case was ludicrous. We were constantly trying to add new minority characters. Cleon Manning was a late second season addition. Rita Escobar, the young Hispanic woman in the DA’s office who worked with Cathy in some second season episodes like “Bluebird” and “Ashes, Ashes,” was actually portrayed by a young black actress. In the final episodes of the third season, when Joe Maxwell became D.A., we gave him a black secretary who we planned to build.

Again, though, you have only so much screen time and so much money, and you need to make hard choices.

Fan Comments

Edie was a wonderful presence who was so dynamic that her unmentioned disappearance left a hole in the series that it never quite filled. She was a character I desperately missed: in a world of histrionic love vows and an over-eager string section bursting into romantic refrains every two seconds, Edie felt like an actual person in amidst the high melodrama. Ren Woods brought a decidedly different energy to the show, and I was really looking forward to her wry commentary on Catherine’s crazy fantasy double life – until the moment she disappeared without a trace, and my dreams were dashed. Woods clarified some of the reasons for her character’s abrupt exit at a convention in 1995 – the part was originally a guest role that became a recurring one, and the writers only wanted her to appear during the first few months of the story. It was Woods who recrafted the role from an uptight straight woman-type foil to Catherine into the witty, fun and sarcastic Edie we know and love; although she enjoyed her time on the show, she had a previous commitment in Europe that prevented her from coming back.

I still feel the show did her a disservice by dropping the character out of nowhere – even the laziest of writers could have done the bare minimum and added a line that explained she got a promotion, or got married, or just decided to travel the world on a whim. Something, anything, that would have done right by the character. Worse still, Edie is replaced by a revolving door of Catherine’s milquetoast and increasingly pale friends...