CBS Boss Talks Daniel Dae Kim, Grace Park Hawaii Five-0 Exits

“We made very lucrative offers to those actors.”

By Amy Ratcliffe

CBS featured a controversial shake up earlier this summer when both Grace Park and Daniel Dae Kim exited the long-running procedural Hawaii Five-0 over a contract dispute. The actors and showrunners have previously commented on the departures, and CBS President Kelly Kahl spoke out about the nature of the exits during the network's Television Critics' Association press tour day.

When asked for more clarity on Park and Kim's Season 8 exits and the reports that it was due to their being offered lower salaries than their white co-stars, Kahl wouldn't get into specifics about the deal or the negotiations. "We never like to lose characters the audience loves off long-running shows. It's the nature of the business. We made very lucrative offers to those actors," Kahl said.

He added they wanted Park and Kim to stick around and offered them a “lot of money,” but that losing cast members is the unfortunate byproduct of having a long-running show and pointed out it's happened on other CBS shows such as SVU and Grey's Anatomy. Kahl reiterated, "We tried our darnedest to keep them."

When asked if there were any other factors influencing Park's and Kim's decisions to leave that CBS didn't want to budge on, Kahl stated, "In my mind, it was purely a business transaction."

CBS received extreme backlash to the news that it was losing two diverse leads on its non-diverse network, especially when salary issues were revealed to be the primary concern. At the time, showrunner Peter Lenkov took to Twitter to offer some clarification. “Both actors chose not to extend their contracts," he wrote. "CBS was extremely generous and proactive in their renegotiation talks. So much so, the actors were getting unprecedented raises, but in the end they chose to move on. No one wanted to see them go–they are irreplaceable.”

For his part, Kim wrote his farewell to the show in a Facebook post, saying, "As an Asian American actor, I know first-hand how difficult it is to find opportunities at all, let alone play a well developed, three dimensional character like Chin Ho. I will miss him sincerely. What made him even more special is that he was a representative of a place my family and I so dearly love. It has been nothing short of an honor to be able to showcase the beauty and people of Hawaii every week, and I couldn’t be prouder to call these islands home. To my local community, mahalo nui loa."

Amy Ratcliffe is a writer for IGN. Follow her on on Twitter at @amy_geek.

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