That was precisely my reaction to the Buffy episode mentioned above, “Never Again.” It postulated that Buffy was a psychiatric patient who created the Buffyverse as a result of her mental delusions, thereby rendering the entire show nothing but the dreams of a mad woman.
To say I was displeased would be an understatement. I understand that TV shows/books/movies/etc aren’t “real”, but they should be “real” within the context of the story!
And though I rarely watched the show, the ending of Newhart struck me as an entire slap in the face of all the fans of the show, especially fans of the supporting characters.
I had a close-but-no-cigar, in that I wanted to say that in the text near but not at the end, the story of the house at the center of the book House of Leaves is called into question (but whether it’s the truthfulness of the events, the existence of the film about them, or what, I’m not sure) by one of its commenting editors.
However, working backwards from the end of the book (not counting appendices), I didn’t find it where I thought it should be and stopped hunting for it, and in that book it’s kind of understandable if you confuse things and start questioning if it has a traditional “end” anyway.
Well, I’m sorry you took it that way. You’re entitled to your feelings.
But I think MOST viewers, and most of Bob Newhart’s most loyal fans, thought that was a delightfully clever and quirky ending to a delightfully quirky series.
There are multiple times where characters in the comic say things like, “this isn’t that kind of comic.” Plus, there’s that time Haley broke into the cast page to steal a diamond from herself.
It doesn’t come at the end, but in Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, the diary of one of the characters (which we have been reading) is revealed to have been fictional.
Back in the 1960’s/1970’s, DC comics would put out stories regarding Superman or Batman that weren’t to be considered part of the “canon” and labeled them “Imaginary Stories”. Usually they advertised that on the cover, but some of the earlier ones, IIRC, didn’t clue in the reader until the end of the story. I missed one of those clues once, and spent a couple of months thinking Luthor had actually killed Superman.
Possibly it makes a difference (to the proportion of viewers who like the ending versus the proportion who disliked it) that Newhart was a comedy.
We seem to accept that sort of playing-with-narrative better when the story doesn’t purport to be “serious.” (And Newhart had a lot of rather surreal elements to begin with.)
I just remembered that the end of Babylon 5, it is revealed that you have been watching a documentary or something about the events that actually happened in the past on the Babylon 5 station.
So really, it’s kind of saying that whatever actually happened on Babylon 5 was probably pretty close to the 5 seasons you saw, but it was a dramatization/recreation/documentary of the events. So, who knows.
I think this fits what the OP is looking for very well.
SPOILERS for “Dallas” follow. (I’m going to assume that this is so much a part of our common pop culture knowledge, now, that these comments don’t have to be actually hidden under tags.)
The reaction to the Dallas “Bobby in the shower” twist is fascinating. People were angry that the storylines from the season after Bobby’s death—revealed to be part of a dream by the wife of the Bobby character—“didn’t happen.”
Well, of course they Didn’t Happen. And those who complained knew that they didn’t “happen” in real world. They never happened at all, and wouldn’t have happened whether Bobby appeared in that shower or not.
But in some sense, in some important way, whether the fictional events “happened” in the world of the show, or (alternatively) in the world of the show were only a dream, mattered. Mattered quite a lot.
This was a revealing episode in our understanding of what fiction does for us (if I may be so pedantic as to point out).
Just remembered Guilty Conscience, where brilliant defense attorney Anthony Hopkins imagines scenario after scenario in which he murders his wife Blythe Danner but then fails to get away with it.
Eventually that falls by the wayside and the bulk of the movie gets going, as his wife and his mistress reveal that they’ve been conspiring to murder him; he’s at gunpoint, but amiably plays killjoy to them pretty much like he’d just been doing for himself: walking them through how their perfect crime would promptly fall apart as soon as the cops ask this obvious question or talk to that witness they’d forgotten about, and so on, and so on.
They argue back – after all, maybe he’s just trying to talk his way out of getting killed, and is bluffing as fast as he can, right? So all three of 'em debate, and it goes back and forth, and it ends badly, and then…
…no, wait; none of that actually happened; his wife and mistress never confronted him; he’s been imagining the bulk of the movie as just one more scenario this whole time; that’s who he is, that’s what he does: daydream about his wife and murder, picturing it all in his mind’s eye. And that’s right about when the movie ends, as his wife arrives home to swiftly and simply kill him for real.