Whether they intended to come back or not…
Benson. Benson and the Gov. are sitting in the mansion waiting to hear the results of their race for the same job.
The only one I can think of is “Sliders,” where, after killing off one of the coolest characters and totally changing the primary character (including the actor) they spiralled downward in a half season.
The “sliders” found a possible way home, but only one person could take it…and we don’t know if he was successful or if he died.
There was a show called EZ Streets which was written and mostly directed by Paul Haggis (who also created another classic Due South). It starred Ken Olin, Jason Gedricks and Joe Pantoliano. A stellar cast backed up by a riveting script.
Anyway it was an excellent show, with superb writing and awesome direction. There was one continuous story running through the entire show, Olin played a cop who is investigating the death of his partner who may have been corrupt, while Gedricks is an ex-con who went to prison for Pantoliano, who is busy dragging him unwillingly back into a life of crime.
To cut a long story short the last episode of the first season the identity of his partner’s killer is identified on the last line of dialogue. It was very unexpected and totally out of the blue, and I literally fell off my chair.
And then it was cancelled…
And to add insult to injury, I read that in the States they never even showed the last episode, but pre-empted it with gag Walker Texas Ranger
Soap. If I recall, Jessica, Burt and maybe Danny were all about to be killed. Then the series was cancelled.
Dallas. J.R. gets the “It’s a Wonderful Life” treatment, decides that the world would be better off without him, prepares to attempt suicide. Bobby enters the room, there’s a struggle and the gun fires. That’s how it ended.
Earth 2. Ended with the main character being left behind in a stasis tube while everybody else trundles off in search of nirvana. Bye, Devin.
Season finale of STG when Picard get assymilated(sp?).
I just posted this on another thread, but I really liked a show called Grand. It only ran one season. Had quite a large ensemble cast. As I recall, as the season ended, they weren’t sure exactly who was coming back the following season.
So in the finale, a tornado is bearing down on the town of Grand.
Every single cast member ends up crowded in a house trailer.
The tornado hits, and after it passes, the trailer is gone.
The show was not renewed for the following season.
Yeah, but there was another season after that.
Earth 2, and Crusade.
Each one of the four seasons of Blake’s Seven ended with a cliffhanger. Well, the first three did… the fourth ended with all the main characters being shot dead, one by one. It’s still regarded by avid fans (like me, I admit it) as a cliffhanger, since they got out of situations almost as dire the first three times…
Twin Peaks A lot of people thought this was a series finale, but it was conceived as a season cliffhanger, with the next season dealing with Cooper’s possession by “Bob.”
The opposite – a series finale that wasn’t the end of the series – was in Sledge Hammer. Everyone on the show thought they’d be cancelled, so in the final episode, Sledge and everyone in the cast (everyone in the city, as a matter of fact) were blown up in a nuclear explosion (Sledge’s last words just before he tried to defuse the bomb were, as expected, “Trust me. I know what I’m doing.”). Then the show was renewed. The second season was titled “Sledge Hammer: The Early Years.”
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OF course, both of these were later resolved in either their spinoff or reunion movie.
The 1989 classic series “Nightingales,” a stirring drama about scantily-clad nurses, ended in the with the child of one of the nurses kidnapped by the dad.
Just out of curiosity, what happened at the series-end of “The Incredible Hulk” and “The Fugitive”?
I remember back in the early 80’s, there was a nightime soap a la Dynasty about models called “Paper Dolls”. I was totally hooked! There was this cliff hanger but for the life of me I can’t remember the details…except that the next week when I was cuddling up to the screen, there was a special news report of some kind and then the show NEVER AIRED AGAIN! Man, was I bummed!!
I believe I soothed myself by listening to my Kajagoogoo album or something…
“The Fugitive” ended satisfactorily, with the good doctor finding the one-armed man and Lt. Gerard being convinced he was the real murdered. There was a shootout on the ferris wheel at a closed fairgrounds.
“Twin Peaks” wasn’t really headed anywhere, IMHO, and ending it with Cooper’s being taken over seemed like a good closing. What was Lynch gonna do with another season, anyway?
Is there any record of how the “Earth 2” scriptwriters were going to handle the next season? I’m still wondering what was going to happen to Devon, and if the rest of the colonists were going to be assimilated by the Terrians.
On the other end of the spectrum, like “Sledge Hammer”, there’s “Magnum P.I.”, which killed off the title character and then got renewed for another season. The real series ending was more enjoyable and in keeping with the show’s atmosphere, anyway.
I can’t believe no one has mentioned Alien Nation yet. Sure, they resolved the cliffhanger in TV movie, but it took them a few years to do it.
And Star Trek: Voyager. Will they ever make it home?
Huh?
What do you mean they made it back? I watched the whole finale, except for the last 10 seconds, when I had to take a… oooohhhhh.
Now and Again. There was only one season. The story is of a middle-aged middle-management man who got hit by a subway train. He was saved hen a top secret government project needed a brain to operate a bionic body. So now he’s alive, super strong and super fast, but is trapped in a secret compound away from his wife and family. Throughout the season he trys to slip out from the government goons and return to his family. Final episode, he manages to break free and return home, but now he is a fugitive wanted dead or alive. Thus now he and his family are in eminent danger.
To be continued next season.
Only there is no next season.
Magnum P.I., of course. Magnum is in a coma after being shot, then right at the end walks off into what must have been hell, if that song they kept playing was any indication…
…but of course the show did come back - IIRC the horrible song also came back…
Once upon a time, there was this little syndicated series called Peter Benchley’s Amazon. It started out goofy and dumb, but I watched it. And it evolved into an interesting ensemble cast, developing characters with very different, very plausible reactions to being stranded in the rain forest after a plane crash. The main character, played by C. Thomas Howell, was clearly developing a serious case of post-traumatic stress disorder. The diva was deep into Helsinki syndrome, the kid had started assimilating into a native tribe… it was getting interesting. And good.
A big chunk of the plot developed from a group of caucasians, from the early American colonial period, who had been living in the jungle there for about three hundred years. They had lost their Bible, and had transcribed the parts of it they remembered onto clay lining the walls of a cave; the clay had then started to disintegrate. Their philosophy was a little bit off. They held the plane crash survivors as semi-hostages, and imposed their odd rules on them.
The final episode had the main character interrupt a stoning by appearing at the top of the waterfall in the village, with an assault rifle in one hand, and a Bible in the other.
And we never got to find out what happened next.
There was a horrible show in the mid-to-late 80’s called It’s Your Move. It was basically a vehicle for Jason Bateman in his post Valerie/The Hogan Family/The Hogans career. He played this mischevious high school kid who could either sweet-talk or MacGuyver his way out of any situation.
Well, he had scammed his classmates into thinking he had booked The Ultimate Heavy Metal Band into playing at his school. When he realizes that he isn’t going to get a band, he rigs up an elaborate stage set with biology lab skelotons and smoke machines…
Then the show ends, and they never made any further episodes. We never got to see if he pulled it off. :sad: