ST:TNG? It went out because they wanted the cast to do the movies instead of the elderly TOS bunch.
Rome was well regarded and did well for ratings but it was just too damn expensive for the HBO/BBC partnership to produce. The ending was rushed since they were told “Ok, you have half a season left to wrap up this sweeping historical epic” but the show itself was very good. That doesn’t really count as ending on the creator’s terms but it wasn’t canceled due to lack of quality or viewers.
Left on its own, the plan was end season two with the death of Brutus, a couple seasons about Egypt and culminating in season five with the rise of Christ in Israel.
I believe you’re right. But the show was just getting started when TPTB pulled the plug on it. As poor a decision as FX has made to date (IMHO). As for its ratings, the link above shows 8.5/10, which I see as pretty high. But that may be ex post facto numbers and not the ratings that were current when it was zapped. All I know is that FX fucked up by bailing out on that show.
I remember King of the Hill being good up to the end.
Are we including talk shows? Craig Ferguson quit before the tank went dry.
If it had had the viewership it deserved, the costs would have been covered. Several years on, Game of Thrones is doing very well on an extremely similar model.
The Honeymooners.
You beat me to it. Gleason had a multi-year contract but he and CBS agreed to end the show after only 39 episodes because they were running out of really good ideas. As Gleason said, “the excellence of the material could not be maintained, and I had too much fondness for the show to cheapen it”
GoT costs about $6mil per episode. Rome was costing over $10mil per episode in 2005. The first season cost over $100mil.
I don’t pay attention to ratings, so I could be missing something, but I thought the final season of Parks & Recreation was as good as the any of them.
I thought it was still pretty funny, although I just hated conceptually what they did with the fast-forward timeline where none of them work for Parks anymore and they’re all wildly successful in various random ways. It was vaguely depressing to me because I was always thinking A: “if these were real people, none of their lives would have remotely ended up this way - they’d most likely just be working in different, shittier offices” and B: being sad that they weren’t working together anymore, because that’s what I loved about the show in the first place. I will still defend the show as being funny to the end, but I could understand why some people might not have liked the last season and/or thought it out of place.
Now, Party Down was a hilarious show that ended too soon but I don’t think it would qualify for the OP since it was cancelled due to low ratings. Although part of the reason for it ending was also losing Adam Scott to none other than Parks & Rec. (BTW, if you haven’t seen this show I’m pretty sure it’s still on Netflix streaming - highly recommended!)
Wow.
As much of a fan as I was of “The Bob Newhart Show” I gotta disagree here.
Bob wanted to end the show after the 5th season but was talked back into a 6th season. The 6th season is uneven at best and a handful of episodes don’t even have Bob in them. Those episodes center around Emily, or Carol or even Mr. Carlin. Bob is “out of town” or stuck at an airport and only seen for a few seconds on the phone.
They did have a final episode, but probably should have ended a season earlier.
I think technology came a long way in that time that helped make GoT work better financially. When Rome was being done, they had to rely on very, very expensive physical sets and use very, very expensive digital effects to do the rest of the work. Digital sets are, I believe, a lot cheaper to do nowadays, and GoT also gets away with a lot of outdoor location shots which are, presumably, vastly cheaper.
Oh, and probably far, far fewer extras and costumes because, again, they can use digital effects to pad out crowds easier.
The 1970s edition of “Upstairs, Downstairs”
Perhaps “Dobie Gillis” although in the last season they started emphasing “Maynard discovers a caveman”, “Maynard becomes Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” and “Commie agent Barbara Bain mistakes Maynard for a rocket scientist” episodes. And a couple whete they tried to pass off Dobie’s cousin Dunky. They had enough left to do the season acceptably but if it came back for another year, it easily could have been terrible.
Plus a lot of GoT’s stuff is shot in Croatia which is probably cheaper than being based in Italy as Rome was. Agreed though that the tech is probably a big part of it and easier CGI “cheats”.
I think part of the issue with Rome as well was the partnership and the BBC was perhaps getting overspent more than HBO was. But, ultimately, it just cost too much regardless of the ratings. A lot of people watch the Superbowl but if the Superbowl somehow cost a trillion dollars to broadcast then there wouldn’t be enough ratings for it to matter.
If they could–similarly “somehow”–get three trillion dollars from its broadcast and ancillary earnings, that would work very well.
Doesn’t really work like that. You can spend a theoretical infinite amount of money but there’s only finite opportunities to get it back. At some point, the cost of what you’re spending exceeds the the value of the maximum audience. There’s only so many eyeballs available to watch a show and at some point the value of those eyeballs caps out.
I think 30 Rock did a great job towards the end of its run.
Funny. All the same shows from the “went to shit” thread.
One man’s garbage…
Because it was an abbreviated season, and because they knew it was their last, to me the whole thing felt like a well-earned, extended curtain call.