Jeff Garlin has reopened an exit that never really closed. In an interview on Obsessed: The Podcast, he said he understands Wendi McLendon-Covey’s reaction to his departure from The Goldbergs because he was dealing with undiagnosed bipolar disorder at the time.
That matters now because Garlin has been on the promotional circuit for Best Seat in the House: Moments No One Asked Me to Capture... But I Did Anyway, released on Sept. 15, and he used the conversation to revisit one of the most public workplace splits in recent sitcom memory. Garlin said he was “miserable on the show, and I was miserable with my performance,” but also said McLendon-Covey was always trying to tell him, “Hey, you’re really great on the show.”
Garlin left The Goldbergs in 2021 after a series of human resources investigations into his behavior on set, ending a run that had lasted from 2013, when the show began, through nearly a decade of the series. He said McLendon-Covey was “very resentful and angry” when he left, but added that he holds no resentment toward her and “actually empathize[s]” with her because, he said, his bipolar disorder was not diagnosed until he was 59.
McLendon-Covey’s response made clear that she does not accept his version of events. In Instagram comments, she replied, “Huh,” then added, “Let’s just say I remember things very differently, as does the crew, the other actors, the writers, and our executives.” Her reaction echoed what she told Bravo’s Andy Cohen, when she said Garlin’s departure was a long time coming and that she was exhausted from the PTSD of it all.
The clash also drew in Drew Droege, who wrote that Wendi is one of the best people he has ever known and that Garlin is one of the vilest people he has ever worked with. He said he did an episode of The Goldbergs and that the entire cast and crew was traumatized by Garlin. Garlin has not answered that latest criticism in the comments, but the split between his explanation and McLendon-Covey’s memory is still the story: one says illness shaped the fallout, the other says the people around the set remember something much darker.
The unresolved question is not whether Garlin regrets the breakup. It is whether his new explanation changes anything for the people who say the set had already become intolerable long before he left, and whose version of that history is now just as public as his own.
