It happens: a show loses an actor and has to deal with it (or needs to drop one). Sometimes the character is killed off, written out, re-cast, replaced with a new character; or in the case of one TV series, goes upstairs to bed and then never comes back down.
When the show came back from cancellation, Marciano was offered a contract to come back and play Ray again, but in order to afford to stay on the air, the production budget was slashed and as a result his pay was slashed, so he declined to return.
Normally a show at this point might do one of the things I explained above, but the producers took a route I am unfamiliar with happening on any other TV series (except a variation on "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine"): they kept the character and didn't re-cast it.
The real Ray went deep undercover elsewhere and another officer took his place to keep the cover. Which was not only a clever thing to do, but left the door open for Marciano to return at some point if he changed his mind.
This created a unique situation where not only did Fraser have to play along, but it forced him to remain paired lest the cover start to fall apart, but even more importantly: it meant they didn't have to write-out or do a crummy writing excuse for the disappearance of Ray's sister, so she was able to stay on board with no changes.
There were, however, two changes to the show that are not explained but not immediately noticeable: the dog who played Diefenbaker, was replaced by a new dog, because reportedly Lincoln was becoming slow and difficult to work with. And John McCarthy, who scored every episode with Jay Semko and Jack Lenz for the first two seasons, disappeared.
Other than that the premiere remains very faithful to the original run and even opens up with the familiar wordless male vocal: Do Me Ahhh. The theme music is spiced up a little but the same. It's a fear of anybody that when a show comes back from cancellation, it never re-captures what it originally was, which is a frequent curse, but thankfully the show didn't immediately suffer another curse (see the Pilot trivia page for the first curse).
When the show came back from cancellation, Marciano was offered a contract to come back and play Ray again, but in order to afford to stay on the air, the production budget was slashed and as a result his pay was slashed, so he declined to return.
Normally a show at this point might do one of the things I explained above, but the producers took a route I am unfamiliar with happening on any other TV series (except a variation on "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine"): they kept the character and didn't re-cast it.
The real Ray went deep undercover elsewhere and another officer took his place to keep the cover. Which was not only a clever thing to do, but left the door open for Marciano to return at some point if he changed his mind.
This created a unique situation where not only did Fraser have to play along, but it forced him to remain paired lest the cover start to fall apart, but even more importantly: it meant they didn't have to write-out or do a crummy writing excuse for the disappearance of Ray's sister, so she was able to stay on board with no changes.
There were, however, two changes to the show that are not explained but not immediately noticeable: the dog who played Diefenbaker, was replaced by a new dog, because reportedly Lincoln was becoming slow and difficult to work with. And John McCarthy, who scored every episode with Jay Semko and Jack Lenz for the first two seasons, disappeared.
Other than that the premiere remains very faithful to the original run and even opens up with the familiar wordless male vocal: Do Me Ahhh. The theme music is spiced up a little but the same. It's a fear of anybody that when a show comes back from cancellation, it never re-captures what it originally was, which is a frequent curse, but thankfully the show didn't immediately suffer another curse (see the Pilot trivia page for the first curse).
