"We knew that we weren't going to have Shelley anymore and so the character wasn't going to be on the show," Max Mutchnick, one of the show's creators, told The Hollywood Reporter. "As writers, it just presented us with a situation that was too interesting to not explore and to write. To deal with Karen dealing with death and how that character would manage herself and how she would ultimately have a moment of truth in dealing with it — that was too rich of an area for us to not write to and so we went for it."