I used to love that show. I still remember like half the cliffhanger endings to the Dracula storyline. I keep hoping for a DVD release but I doubt it’ll ever come.
The Dracula sections actually make for a second-generation cliffhanger ending, because the first half of them got edited into a TV-movie. But the second half didn’t, so if you get suckered into watching the first half you’ll never see the conclusion. I still remember when I was in college stumbling across the TV movie and being more excited than I should have been to see it again, only to be outraged when it turned out only to be half.
Another “amnesiac searches for himself” series, also from FOX, John Doe (currently repeating on Sci Fi). Premiered with Firefly in the Friday night FOX death hole, but I think FOX actually aired all of the episodes it ordered. But we got left with the over-arching cliffhanger of who is John Doe, along with the smaller cliffhanger of Digger’s involvement with the Phoenix initiative.
Years later the creators revealed that JD was, like, dead or something, and when you die you get in touch with all the knowledge in the universe, or some shit.
WKRP in Cincinnati. Just cancelled in the early 1980s. (Note, I’m referring to the the original, not the syndicated “New WKRP” of the early 1990s.)
Who knows how many Copper Cobs, Silver Sows, and Buckeye News Hawk Awards Les might have won? Would he finally get walls for his office? Would Andy allow rap on the playlist? And if he did, would Johnny have played it? Would Arthur Carlson finally stand up to his mother? What about Herb, Venus, Bailey? Would WKRP ever be Number 1 in the Cincinnati market?
We know from the “New WKRP” that Les doesn’t get walls and that Herb stays in the same sales job. I think Arthur Carlson still served as station manager too, and AC Jr worked for the station in some capacity as well. I didn’t watch the new one closely enough to notice if any of the other characters’ fates were discussed.
And I will thank everyone not to mention non-canceled shows that I watch and like (Lost, Prison Break). It’s hard enough to keep shows I like on the air without you people tempting the Cancel Gods like this.
That was an attempt at the Sledge Hammer schtick, “Keeping the audience glued to their seats until next season, thereby ensuring that there WILL be a next season.” Too bad the gambit didn’t work for GQ; it needed a bunch of fanboys who hadn’t even been born when the show ended, to go back and “no-prize” / reengineer the unanswered questions.
Sports Night ended after two seasons. And the end of the second season, in which the show is about to be bought out by a new company, amid fears of cancellation and replacement casts when their ratings have consistently failed to rise above Fox Sports and ESPN. Dana spends the last two or three episodes talking to some random guy in the bar, who turns out to be the future network owner, and it’s looking like the guy would genuinely improve the show’s numbers, while keeping the family of the cast together.
It was a perfectly fine season finale. But it was the start of a new major story arch, and a rotten way to end a series.
I disagree. It resolved the story lines in Sports Night and gave the whole thing a happy ending. It also allowed for further stories if the show happened to be renewed.
I don’t know for sure, but I’m guessing the final episode of Peyton Place didn’t resolve anything. That’s probably true of any cancelled soap opera.
Well, in the cases of the shows that ended without closure, one could always hope for a situation like that which occurred in an episode of, iirc, Tales From The Darkside (which , seems to me, was adapted from a published short story).
In it, Darren McGavin, the aged star of a popular 1960s series (seemingly modeled closely upon The Fugitive) is called out of retirement to star in a wrapup movie financed by mysterious guys with lots of money to spend on the production.
Turns out the guys were aliens who picked up the broadcast signals of the old program deep in space, and were perturbed when there was no resolution, so they come to earth to make sure there was one
I’ll chime in with one that is not a fictional television show.
For a lot of us who watched t.v. on the weekends in the 1960’s and 1970’s, ABC’s Wide World of Sports was an oasis of really very cool amateur sporting events ( wrist wrestling? cliff diving? ) in a sea of slickly produced professional sports franchises.
I shot the last 4 years of W.W.o.S in the studio in NYC, from January to mid-August. When we did the last show in August of the year it ended, we all knew it was very likely the show was cancelled forever. Nothing remarkable was done that weekend to note the passing of a very original kind of show. That poor skiier, Vinko Bogataj fell week after week after week for us. ( He only suffered a concussion, for all of that fearful ski-flailing ).
We just wrapped the show that day, and felt awful as we left. TV-7 was never the same…
Yeah, but that was back when no one really expected a resolution. It’s the same story with Gilligan’s Island: if they show had gone on another season, they still would have been stranded because a resolution was something to be avoided.
The only show of that vintage that did resolve things was The Fugitive. The series finale got great ratings, but the show did very poorly in syndication: knowing that Kimble was proven innocent dimmed its appeal. Since shows made most of their money from syndication, this was seen as a disadvantage.
Later, when Run for Your Life was reaching an end, the producers deliberately did not resolve the situation (if you don’t remember, Ben Gazzara had been given two years to live; the show ran three years and there was a movement to resolve it by saying the original diagnosis was a mistake, or a new cure had been found).
They made a couple of TV movies, but nothing to “tie it up.” The only way the show could be tied up with be to return the aliens to their home planet. Since they were originally sold to be slaves, I doubt that any of them would want to return home (talk about your “illegal aliens”).
No, I meant they tied up the cliffhanger at the end of the last aired episode.
I don’t think sending the Tenctonese back to their original planet would have been “tying things up”: it was clear that their home was now Earth, and the issues all revolved around that. Going back was no more an option for them than it was for Black Americans to go back to Africa after the Civil War.
