The hiring and firing on a big television show can be as dramatic as the events happening on screen. Whether it is an actor suddenly quitting their post and forcing a panicked restructuring by the writers, or a showrunner leaving and taking their vision for the show with them, a cataclysmic walkout can be hard to recover from. The news that upcoming dystopian epic Snowpiercer has lost both its major creatives adds it to the roster of dramas that have had to keep competing without at least one star player.

Mandy Patinkin: Criminal Minds

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Mandy Patinkin and the cast of Criminal Minds. Photograph: Cliff Lipson/CBS Broadcasting Inc.

Tony award winner and Princess Bride cult hero Mandy Patinkin looked to have settled into mainstream TV after two seasons leading Criminal Minds, a disturbing FBI procedural with 14 million viewers on CBS. But when the cast reconvened for season three in the summer of 2007, Patinkin did not turn up: the series’ relentlessly dark subject matter had overwhelmed him. “I never thought they were going to kill and rape all these women every night, every day, week after week, year after year,” he later explained. “It was very destructive to my soul.” Furious producers had to arrange for seven episodes to be rewritten. It was four years before Homeland took a punt on reviving Patinkin’s TV career by casting him as Saul Berenson. Then, in 2016, another Criminal Minds star, Thomas Gibson, took more direct action when he did not like that day’s script: he kicked a writer in the shins and was duly fired.

Scott Derrickson: Snowpiercer

Based on the Bong Joon-Ho movie about a viciously unequal society formed by the few survivors of a frozen Earth, US cable network TNT’s Snowpiercer has itself become an icy dystopia strewn with bodies. The original showrunner, Josh Friedman, stepped off the train in February, claiming TNT had removed him “because they didn’t think I’d be compliant”. His replacement, Graeme Manson – already described as a “coward” and a “Vichy motherfucker” by Friedman for supposedly not consulting him about the work done thus far – has now lost the director Scott Derrickson. His exit statement at the end of June can be paraphrased as “Friedman’s script was brilliant, but your rewrite is a big frosty turd”. Can Snowpiercer, originally announced an embarrassing three years ago, survive? You would expect it to be a sort of Westworld/Handmaid’s Tale grimfest, where people are brutally killed without warning, but losing two big behind-the-scenes characters before it has even started is a bit much.

Aaron Sorkin: The West Wing

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Winging it … Aaron Sorkin. Photograph: Christopher Polk/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty

When a creative faces off against the network money men, there is usually only one winner, even if the creative’s name is Aaron Sorkin. NBC’s White House drama was more synonymous with its showrunner than just about any TV show in history. Sorkin wrote or co-wrote all but one of the first 88 episodes in his unmistakable, clatteringly smart style and, by his own admission, had delivered not a single one of those scripts on time. He had already survived a drugs bust and struggled to cope with continuing the show in a post-9/11 world when, with burnout biting at the end of the fourth season in 2003, disputes about the content and cast of the show pushed him over the edge. When the crunch came, Sorkin and the suits called each others’ bluff. The show limped on for three more seasons without him. Sorkin’s subsequent work has been, in comparison to The West Wing, unreliable and unfocused.

Bryan Fuller: American Gods

Writer and producer Bryan Fuller – the king of cancelled-too-soon TV, having helmed Pushing Daisies and Hannibal – left his new job as showrunner of Star Trek: Discovery in 2016, before filming started, to focus on American Gods, a lavishly weird dramatisation of Neil Gaiman’s graphic novel. After an acclaimed but not heavily watched first season, Fuller and his collaborator, Michael Green, will not be involved in Gods’ second coming. The rumour mill agrees this was down to some combination of financial disputes – Fuller was reportedly tens of millions of dollars over budget for season one – and Gaiman’s strong views on how many changes should be made to the original text. Not accommodating Fuller’s vision means American Gods will go on without him and the Fullerphile actor Gillian Anderson, who quit not long after he did. Fuller is instead in charge of a new TV version of The Vampire Chronicles – for now, at least.

Kim Bodnia: The Bridge

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Don’t mess with my comeback … Kim Bodnia. Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian

This year’s final season was the Saga Noren Show but, when one of Scandi TV’s greatest cop dramas first hit BBC4 in 2012, it was very much a two-hander, with emphasis on the forced collaboration between Saga, Sofia Helin’s efficient Swede, and Martin Rohde, the Dane played by Kim Bodnia. Fans assumed the severe ending of season two – Saga realises Martin has murdered the man who killed his son – would somehow be resolved, and indeed the writers did plot a way back. But Bodnia did not like how they had done it, so he abruptly walked. Both the hastily rescripted show and the departed actor survived the bombshell. The Bridge cleverly half-replaced its male star with Thure Lindhardt as Henrik, a foil who revealed new layers of Saga’s character. Meanwhile, Bodnia can be seen on BBC1 later this year, having a blast as assassin Jodie Comer’s mentor in Killing Eve, Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s terrific spy v spy caper.