Losing Rachel McAdams.

TV The AV Club as an interview with Susan Coyne, Bob Martin and Mark McKinney, the creators of Slings & Arrows whose first season co-starred Rachel McAdams as an inengue:

AVC: Did you have other plans for the character of Kate that then had to be cut short because of Rachel McAdams’ success elsewhere?

MM: That’s one of the sad things. We talked for a long, long time about what it’s like to come into the arts as a young person, and we were going to lay it all out. I can’t even remember now, where we wanted to…

BM: Basically she becomes Ellen in a sense, right? Except she doesn’t become Ellen. But she has that same arc, so we sort of see it happen. And then we lost Rachel. [Laughs.] To success. She was fabulous to work with, obviously. But then when she had… It was Mean Girls that, I guess, gave her the three-picture deal.

MM: No, it was The Notebook, wasn’t it?

BM: No, I mean Mean Girls was released, and that sort of made her career.

SC: I remember talking about it when we were doing publicity.

BM: We literally could only get her for a couple days of season two, so we just had to change completely the young-people storyline. It became a challenge to come up with one each season. It was always supposed to be about Kate.

I really should return to the series. I adored the first series, but availability in the UK, it's still not been released on R2 despite the presence of Rachel McAdams, has made it difficult. Oh well.