Why I stopped watching Prison Break...

Sarah beheaded: Talk about torturing viewers. Fox's nail-biting serial "Prison Break" gave fans a real shocker in Monday's episode when it killed off Dr. Sarah Tancredi, played by Sarah Wayne Callies.
Seems the bad guys at "The Company" did her in by beheading, then sending her severed head in a cardboard box to Lincoln Scofield, trying to engineer the release of his brother, Michael, Sarah's lover, from a Panama prison. It was a "don't mess" message, since they are also holding Lincoln's son hostage.

Viewers saw a quick shot of Sarah's severed head in a cardboard box. It was quite a surprise, since she was the show's only main female character and her love story with Michael Scofield added a nice touch of tenderness to the series' otherwise gritty brutality. It seems Sarah was killed off because of a contract impasse with Fox. Callies wanted to have a diminished role on the series so she could concentrate on raising a family, having recently given birth to her first child. So much for negotiations. Producers responded with the off-with-her-head twist.

It was announced earlier this summer that Callies would not be returning to the show, but it had not been revealed that her character would be abruptly terminated.
Since word of Callies departure from the series came out, Web sites for the show have been filled with fans asking that the character somehow survive, even asking she be recast, to keep the love story going amidst the show's bleakness.

"Prison Break" executive producer Matt Olmstead, defended the decision to kill off Dr. Tancredi in an interview this week with TV Guide. "We determined that this was the right thing to do in order to really jolt the series," he said.

Olmstead said that the show tried to get Callies to return in order to resolve the storyline. "We were really looking forward to paying off that relationship. But (when) it became evident that that wasn't going to happen, we made lemonade out of a lemon," he said.

from The Cincinnati Post