You know what other show’s finale wasn’t that great? The Osbournes: Reloaded. Oh, and the finale was also the pilot.
Ditto–the only thing even remotely worthwhile (to me) in the MASH finale was Winchester’s goodbye. Everything else was sanctimonious, treacily twaddle.
Do I get points for this Pitting?
Know what would have made the Newhart finale even worse? Gary Oldman. No one gets more ejaculate all over him on this board than Oldman for all the circlejerks people want to be in with him.
WTF man!
Gary Oldman is off limits, dude. Newhart would have been grand with Mr. Oldman. I decide who’s on the pedestal, not you.
Move along now.
See? That stuff stings when it gets in your eye.
That’s how good it was, they only needed one episode.
Always love the Bloom County references, but we should be careful, lest we inspire a pit thread about ppl who love Bloom County. 
What the fuck is up with all the fucking CIRCLE JERKS in this thread???
It’s Oldman’s own fault. He was once asked who he wanted to have attending the next circle jerk…
What you call unoriginal, I call foreshadowing. And it’s not like, during any of those times, he actually had altered memories. The idea that what we were seeing wasn’t what happened completely surprised me.
Well, what you call foreshadowing, I call recycling of hackneyed plotlines. And during the episode with the near-drowning, I recall Hawkeye describing the story differently until the true version was teased out by Freedman. That it wasn’t a long drawn-out process is a function of being a 30-minute regular episode instead of a 2.5-hour finale.
To be fair there were like 3,000 episodes of MASH, they were bound to repeat some stuff.
Wasn’t even groundbreaking. It just plain, flat-out wasn’t funny.
If he’d done this on the final episode, he would have gone down in television history.
In keeping with the last 6 seasons of MASH, which weren’t very funny either. When it turned into the Alan Alda Show, it turned to shit.
Thank God for that. Could you imagine The Osbournes: Revolutions?
On second thought, It would be pretty fun to watch Ozzy mind-meld with a Roomba[sup]TM[/sup]
I agree with the OP: “It was all a dream” plots, especially in the final episode of a series, is a slap in the collective face of the audience. You spend years watching this show, investing yourself in the characters, only to find out that (within the context of the show, of course) that none of it was “real” is, imho, the writers way of saying “Fooled you, sucka’s! What a bunch of maroons!!”.
I would’ve been extremely pissed to follow Newhart and then to be treated with such contempt for allowing myself to become a fan. It was the biggest Fuck You in the past 20 years of TV, and even worse, the audience bought it. :rolleyes: Go figure.
JohnT, if you’d been there at the time, I’d venture a guess that you wouldn’t have thought that. I’d also venture a guess that NONE of the people who watched and followed the Newhart show at the time and who saw the finale as it was broadcast thought that. Anybody who’d have said, “How dare they bring back Suzanne Pleshette as Emily Hartley?!?” would’ve been considered out of his or her mind.
I see what you did there.