Killing off a well-liked character on a television series with a fiercely devoted fan base can obviously be quite perilous, especially when they don’t know it’s coming. It’s a particularly fraught decision in the age of social media, when viewers can vent their fury as the unthinkable and (for some) unacceptable occurs. If you hadn’t read George R.R. Martin’s “A Game of Thrones,” you were almost certainly gobsmacked during the first season when Sean Bean’s Ned Stark, the seeming protagonist of the series, was cruelly executed by that twerp Joffrey Lannister. Twitter caught fire that night, with irate newcomers to Martin’s saga pledging to never watch another episode. If you had read Martin’s novel, you were giddy with anticipation in knowing much, much worse was yet to come.

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For any writer with a shred of integrity, death is always on the table. You go where the story needs to go. I dearly wanted Michael K. Williams’ Omar to survive the Baltimore streets in “The Wire,” but his brazen Robin Hood act was bound to end with a bullet to the dome sooner or later. “The Sopranos” was incredibly rough in this regard; there were characters who more than earned their gruesome demise, but did they really have to do poor Adriana (Drea de Matteo) like that?

A series like “9-1-1” is a trickier matter. It’s a rigidly formulaic procedural, which means, as long as you know the actors are contracted to return to the series, you can be fairly certain that no one’s going to catch a bad one. So when Peter Krause’s heroic Captain Bobby Nash sacrificed himself and died of an Ebola-like virus, many fans of the show were inconsolable. Some were apoplectic with rage. Why did the Ryan Murphy-produced ABC series knock off its co-lead?

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It is not uncommon for a long-running series to pare down its cast when the series starts to get too expensive for the network’s taste, but, according to “9-1-1” showrunner Tim Minear, Nash’s death was necessary to shake things up on a series that was about to complete its eighth season. As Minear told Variety:

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“I had to convince everybody about this. The network was not like, ‘Yeah, get rid of him, it’ll save us money.’ It was nothing like that. I had to pitch this at the highest levels and just walk through the whole story and try to infect them — funny choice of words, given the storyline — because, as I pitched it, you could understand, as a writer, how suddenly the whole world felt more alive. It felt more real because this thing had happened.”

It felt a little too real for some “9-1-1” fans, which former “Six Feet Under” star Krause anticipated. So on the Thursday after the episode aired, Krause released a statement. “I’ve heard that many fans are upset by this loss, and they have a right to be,” he said. “It is a loss.” He then framed the death of Nash as a reminder that real heroes are out there risking their lives every day. Per Krause:

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“[I]t was more than a bold creative choice on a bold show. Bobby Nash was written in sacrifice and he was built for this. First responders risk their lives on the job so that others can see another day. His story arc honors them. We at ‘9-1-1’ salute all the incredible men and women who do these dangerous jobs and strive to keep us safe. Our show is incredibly difficult to make at times with long hours, challenging stunts and elaborate disasters. We couldn’t do it without each other.”

Nash’s final moments were wrenching for the “9-1-1” faithful. Though he got to bid a tearful goodbye to his wife Athena Grant-Nash (Angela Bassett), he did so coughing up blood as his vital organs liquified. That’s an awful way to go. Ned Stark got off easy with a swift and clean decapitation.