Has the curse of the TV 'It Girl' returned?

Renee Rapp has just taken the first step on what has notoriously been one of Hollywood's most treacherous career paths.

This week, Rapp announced she is stepping back from Mindy Kaling's hit series The Sex Life of College Girls mid-way through season three. She will still appear as Leighton Murray in a handful of episodes, but the 23-year-old actress will no longer be a series regular on the show.

"College Girls moved me out to LA and introduced me to some of my favourite people. Two and a half years later – it's given me y'all and this community," Rapp wrote on social media. 

"A lot of queer work gets belittled – but playing Leighton has changed my life. I love who I am 10x more than I did before knowing her. I hope she gave y'all a little bit of that too," she added.

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Rapp reportedly hired a top Hollywood lawyer to get her out of her contract, Page Six reported, and her Snow Hard Feelings music tour across the US and Europe was reportedly announced without knowledge from show bosses.

Rapp is currently filming Mean Girls: The Musical movie, the on-screen version of the Broadway musical she also starred in as Regina George.

But she's never shied away from sharing her true goal: "[I thought], I can do music on the side, like, I can just hustle. And now I've just kept acting, because it keeps supporting the music. Acting was my way into tricking everyone that I warranted attention, so that I could have this interview with you [to talk about music]," she told Variety in 2022.

That's clearly the plan now. This move — to leave the TV series that made you a 'star' at its peak — is a familiar one for stars, but that doesn't mean it's not a big risk.

Especially for young female TV stars, who are overwhelming the ones dealing with the 'TV It Girl curse'.

That was why, when the news of Rapp's exit made its way to social media, the reaction was immediately of concern about what could happen to her career.

Think Mischa Barton, who left The O.C. after three seasons. Or Katherine Heigl, whose highly publicised exit from Grey's Anatomy in 2010 was scrutinised for years.

Barton has since spoken about on-set factors that helped her decide, and Heigl's issues behind-the-scenes played out in public in real time. But both women also left for career reasons that never quite eventuated as expected.

In 2011, when Teen Wolf became a huge teen phenomenon, its lead Crystal Reed was believed to be 'the next big thing'. She asked to leave the series after three seasons but her career immediately faltered.

When the Rapp news broke, internet users were quick to express concerns that she'd face the same fate as Nina Dobrev, the former lead of The Vampire Diaries, who has continued to work steadily, but not with the same level of visibility and success as before.

This is not their fault. Hollywood is notoriously brutal and fickle, always on the lookout for the 'next' person. For many, it's a case of out-of-sight, out-of-mind.

And of course, it happens to men too: Chad Michael Murray left One Tree Hill at the same time as Hilarie Burton, and he's since taken the TV Christmas movie route. The internet is in constant chatter about whether Rege Jean Page should've ridden the Bridgerton wave a little longer.

But mostly, that's a little less exciting to a society that still enjoys nothing more than a young woman in crisis – especially if it's the type that can have us saying 'I told you so'.

these situations are always so crazy to see play out because you can either end up like nina dobrev or olivia rodrigo https://t.co/0uRNl75CK8

— ceo of kory • TRIN DAY (@korysverse) July 10, 2023

The antidote here might be music, or at least that's what Olivia Rodrigo has us believing.

She was the lead in High School Musical: The Musical: The Series for two seasons, before becoming recurring in season three and then leaving for good ahead of the fourth.

Not that it matters, because she also happened to line up one of the biggest musical debuts of all time with her first album Sour and its singles.

Here's hoping Rapp is also lighting up the charts very soon.

Feature image: The CW/ABC/Fox/Max/Mamamia.