If you follow the film industry, you'll learn that "good looks" is part of casting and the industry, and if X actor or actress is dropped and replaced by someone with more defined looks, that's going to mess with anyone. Do you understand now?
I've since switched to another field, but most of my professional life was TV casting. I've done quite a few mid-series cast changes. They were some of my bleakest professional experiences, having to recast one of the hot women because the producers concluded she wasn't hot enough, or she was "difficult", or she was so twisted into knots by trying to stay sufficiently hot and agreeable that they concluded "fuck, she seems fake!", etc etc. Regardless, I know how you present it to the world when you are firing a castmember for X reason vs Y reason.
(I would even think about Jennifer Lien when I was doing this work. I blocked attempts to do what Voyager did with the billing -- demoting Lien to guest star for her last eps, and putting the new lead in the credits immediately. I always thought that was so fucking gross of them. On my shows, if there was overlap, the outgoing regular kept their main titles spot till they were fully gone, and the new person started as a guest star)
Anyway, this is all by way of saying...
Presumptuous, leaving acting and the 2010s' events are 14 years apart, not necessarily related.
I could articulate further why it's not presumptuous, but it would be engaging in exactly the kind of discussion I don't want to have about her, and it sounds like you don't either.
This does remind me of how much I liked listening to her work being discussed on the Delta Flyers pod (Robert Duncan MacNeill and Garrett Wang's Voyager rewatch podcast). Throughout those first three seasons, there was a lot of praise from the hosts and guests about how great it was to act opposite Jennifer, how alive and present she was in the scenes, and how natural her talent was at such a young age. Ethan Phillips was a guest on the pod for "Fair Trade" and discussed how his favorite and best scene to play in all 7 years was a Neelix/Kes scene that was cut from that episode.
Also, you have given me a mission to dig out my old "The Critic" DVD boxed set. That show is a forgotten gem that was eerily ahead of it's time (a lot of it's comically idiotic fake movie trailers have since been actually made as mega-budgeted blockbusters). And in my mind, Jennifer Lien is a regular the whole time (which wasn't a long run, but it was like two or three seasons). I remember often thinking about what an exceptional voice she had, and how well suited it was to voiceover.
Now I'm wondering if it's my memory or online credits that are wrong. Did I rewatch "The Critic" so much that I was often re-encountering a one-episode performance? I really do think she was there the whole time, but it has been a couple decades.
But in my mind her character is the second-most-memorable of that whole cast (behind only the critic), so I'll really be struck if that impression is from one episode only.
If I leave before the show ends, just gimme a good send-off. If I come back from the dead, either fully commit to realism or just go bonkers with it. That said, getting fired still sucks.
