Sophia Bush and Bethany Joy Lenz aren’t happy with the way some of their One Tree Hill costars were written off the show.

“I wish we could have seen Haley [Lenz’s character on the show] reading a letter from Lucas [Chad Michael Murray] just to hear what was going on in their lives,” Lenz said on yesterday’s episode of the Drama Queens podcast, answering a listener question. The fan then asked what Lucas and Peyton (Hilarie Burton Morgan‘s character), who were written off the show after season 6, would be “up to” now, prompting a round of head scratches from Lenz, Bush, and cohost Robert Early Buckley.

“I don’t even remember where they moved. Where did they go?” Lenz asked.

“They left in a convertible, so I’m gonna guess maybe the West Coast where it’s a bit warmer and less rainy,” Buckley speculated.

“I don’t know,” Bush said flatly, adding, “This is the problem: They didn’t give us enough to make where our friends went make sense.”

“It’s weird, and I know we brought this up, obviously, with the powers that be at the time,” Bush, who played reformed party girl Brooke Davis on all nine seasons of the series, continued. “I feel like it was more a personal beef than anything that made sense for our characters, which is unfortunate…. I used to ask, ‘Why can’t Brooke be getting text messages from Peyton? Why can’t you see them texting? Like, why am I not getting photo updates of this baby? It feels really weird.'”

Bush and Burton’s characters on the series were best friends, making Peyton’s radio silence after driving away from the fictional North Carolina town of Tree Hill perplexing.

“And Karen,” Lenz added, citing the character played by Moira Kelly, who was also dispatched after six seasons, “like everybody, they just faded off into the distance. I do wish they had kept that up in some more clear way. I don’t think it would have been hard.”

Murray and Burton’s characters had one of the most shipped romances on TV in the 2000s. When Peyton finally gave birth to their child, Sawyer Brooke Scott, it seemed that the One Tree Hill family had gained another major player, not that it was gearing up to lose two, but the episode closes with the young family driving off into the sunset, with only Murray making a cameo on a later episode.

“I think it was some sort of personal beef behind the scenes that they had just like — not they, but he, our creator, just didn’t wanna have. He was hoping the audience would just forget about them,” reasoned Lenz, referring to series creator Mark Schwahn.

“Which seems so stupid,” Bush observed, “because it’s a choice rooted in ego, and it’s like, ‘Dude, you wrote those characters, so you knew they were great. So why are we suddenly pretending they’re not?'”

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Burton has spoken about her and Murray’s exit from the series in the past, noting in 2021, “Chad had nothing to do with my leaving. We were both treated badly, and he defended me…. I just wanted to clarify that Chad was my teammate. My bosses were the s—-.”

Murray has been less outspoken on the issue, but said of his time on the series last year, “There was a moment where I was quitting. I was done. I just couldn’t do it anymore…because, when you’re 18 to 25, these formidable years where you’re really cutting your teeth on life experiences and your brain isn’t fully developed, you make mistakes.” Though he learned from those mistakes, he said, “it’s hard for me to see past those moments when you’re not adult enough to understand the scenarios that you’re in.”

Listen to the rest of Bush, Lenz, and Buckley’s conversation on Drama Queens below.