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The Fosters

The Fosters Is Replacing Jake T. Austin With Noah Centineo?!

Your past and current Fosters commentators discuss!

Tara Ariano
 

Our Players

Hello, I'm West Coast Editor Tara Ariano.
Hello, I'm PTV Contributor Allison Lowe Huff.

The Talk

My favourite thing about this conversation is how blindsided you were by my suggestion that we have it. "Should we talk about how The Fosters is recasting Jesus?" "They WHAT?!"

Ha! I was somehow not up to speed! And, yet, it makes all the sense in the world to me that it would happen.

I know the consensus opinion about poor old Jake T. Austin is that he's a horrible actor, but I have to say I never really thought he was that bad -- more that he was just extraneous. Am I crazy?

Are you going to make me be the one to besmirch the voice of Go, Diego, Go? BECAUSE I AM FINE WITH THAT. No, he had his moments, I guess? I mean, he was good with an eyebrow. Sometimes.

I have mostly just felt that Austin's Jesus didn't have much going on other than being cute, and he did that well enough. But I guess the proof of Austin's crappiness as an actor is that Mariana used to be tied with him (for me) as the most unnecessary character -- I even wrote about it! -- but where Cierra Ramirez must be so awesome that they figured out how to make Mariana catch up to her, Jesus kept on being a zero.

His whole acting method could just be boiled down to: Hair. They finally gave Mariana some good stuff to do, but yes, with him...they couldn't give him anything to do, because he couldn't do it, I'm afraid. His interactions with everyone were just SO wooden. I will say, however, that I fully enjoyed his relationship with that crazy Hayley girl. He seemed genuinely cold, then scared, of her.

Caitlin Carver, who plays Hayley, is so convincing as a total nutcase that I wonder if that's why the show decided not just to write Jesus out entirely -- so that she could stick around and continue having storylines. Because to me, that's the weirdest thing about it: characters get written out of TV series all the time, and this pretext for Jesus not to be around anymore because he's at boarding school is actually pretty legit. Who cares if he doesn't come home for Thanksgiving?

I totally agree. They could just mention him every now and then, or continue to have phone calls with him. I don't know, though, how long the, um, passionate fans of the show would accept that.

But I would think the concern would be that the most passionate fans are going to turn on this new kid just on principle. I mean, for starters, he needs to do something about that hair.

Yes. If you're going to basically play a bag of hair, your actual hair should be on point. And, will they do the thing like the soaps used to do (or maybe they still do it?) where the disembodied voice announces the recasting in the middle of a scene?

AHHHHH I HOPE SO!

Days Of Our Lives did that really well. Now that I think about it...why didn't they just kill him when they had the chance? It must have been on the table at some point -- they had that huge wreck. Imagine all the crying it would have caused.

It has to have been -- it would have been so easy! And the aaaaaaangst. Mariana reconnecting with her biological relatives...Jesus taken from us before he had the chance......

I feel like that's what they planned to do and then maybe freaked out and changed their minds because, well, it would have been a whole season about grieving his death. Callie and Brandon thrown into each other's arms at the memorial service. Jude building Day of the Dead altars.

It's true. Jude just got shot at and Callie's biological half-sister just walked into traffic: how much tragedy can a family take in...what, like a month?

OMG, Sophia and the car. Don't get me started. I'm sure, also, that there was an idea to have him just be horribly injured, perhaps permanently, or in a long-term coma situation and they finally must have just thought, "No -- we can't turn our whole show over to this."

You're so smart.

I guess we can only be thankful (?) that they are simply recasting, rather than a thing where Jesus was disfigured and had plastic surgery and now looks like Noah Centineo.

But if they don't have at least one person tell him "I hardly recognize you!" I will kick my TV in.

Ha HA! "School has changed me so much."

"And my drama teacher thinks I've really improved!"

Tara Ariano