Yeah…get me crying again! Go ahead!
And to be clear, yes I know the afterlife part was one half of the sixth season. But:
-
Stories where the protagonists don’t know that they are ghosts, or in heaven/ hell/ purgatory are hackneyed and predictable. We’ve all seen too many of them. It was used several times in The Twilight Zone. And The Sixth Sense.
-
The creators specifically promised that this wouldn’t be the solution to the mystery.
For that reason it angered many people. If it had been the solution to a subplot in a single episode, maybe that would have been acceptable.
Of course, all of these endings were created by Tommy Westphall
Barney Miller - The Precinct was closed and the detectives went on to the next phase in their lives.
It struck me that way for the longest time. Then I realized that it was finally coming face-to-face with the actual killer that did it.
Exactly, and I had the same experience. One season of a show ended, and the show wasn’t in the fall schedule, and that was it for the show.
How many shows never had an ending, back in the day, when their premise indicated that they could have? “Gilligan’s Island” could have (the castaways get back to civilization, but didn’t), as could “Hogan’s Heroes” (the war ends, and the guys go home). But many more did not: “The Brady Bunch,” “WKRP in Cincinnati,” “The Partridge Family,” “The Beverly Hillbillies,” and so on. How could those shows wrap things up? They were based upon a premise that had no end, so when they ended, they simply ended. No questions to be resolved were involved.
The vast majority of TV shows back in the 60s and 70s, while having a valid premise, did not have one that provided a clear-cut ending. All those cop and detective shows (“Cannon,” “Kojak,” “Mannix,” “Ironside,” and so on) did not, most sitcoms did not, and other drama shows (for example, “Mission: Impossible,” “The Waltons,” and “Lou Grant”) did not.
I agree with @terentii : “concluding” a show with a farewell episode is a fairly recent innovation. Most shows I watched back in the day had no identifiable conclusion, so one was never filmed.
-
To you, maybe. I found it an interesting new angle on the subject - not that they were ghosts in the real world, but that they were ghosts in a ghost world, where nobody knew they were ghosts. I liked it.
-
It wasn’t the solution to the mystery. The solution to the mystery, such as it was, involved Jacob and the Man in Black and the gate to hell and a bunch of other things that took place in the (is)land of the living. The flash-sideways was the story’s way of resolving issues and relationships between the characters; since it didn’t take place in the real world, that’s all it could do, really. It was an extended coda, a denouement. Did it work? I’m actually rewatching the series right now, and I’ve just reached the end of Season 5, so I’ll let you know next week.
WKRP could have done a “format change” a not uncommon event in the radio biz, and sent (almost) everybody packing. (They may have done a single ep with that theme. Been a long time since I’ve seen any WKRP.)
That was one I thought of. Of course, this is how the show started, so it would have been a nice bookend.
I think this was done at the end of one season of Frasier (the station switched to an all-Latino format). Whether they knew the show was going to be picked up again, I can’t say (but I suspect they did). If it hadn’t been, that particular cliffhanger would have gone unresolved.
With regard to The Partridge Family, it was heavily implied in the final episode that Shirley had at last met Mr Right (George Chakiris). If the show had been renewed, it might have followed their budding romance.
As a counter-example, the Big Bang Theory didn’t end anything. Sure, it ended a season long arc when Sheldon and Amy received the Nobel Prize, but nothing really ended - they even wound up eating together in Leonard & Penny’s apartment like they’ve done a million times. There would have been no problem continuing another 5 seasons after that.
I liked the last episode of Everybody Loves Raymond simply because it DIDN’T ‘tie things up’ and there was no ‘big reveal’. Everyone was wondering at the time, are Robert and Amy going to announce she is pregnant, and I was relieved that big stupid cliche didn’t happen. … After Ray’s health scare, the final shot is the family sitting around the table at breakfast, chatting and bickering, as the camera pulls back. They will go on to live out their lives, and we are finished watching them in these particular years. I thought it was a quiet and classy way to go out.
Everything else would have been anticlimactic. Would you really have cared to watch Sheldon and Amy start raising a family?
I quit watching the show long before the final season, once it started focusing on “relationships.” I couldn’t have cared less about Sheldon and Amy getting married, or Raj finding a girlfriend. The whole thing ran much longer than it should have.
I can picture it… the announcement that new owners have decided that Traditional Country is the hottest upcoming trend, so starting Monday, it’s going to be basically Hee Haw.
Johnny quits on the spot, Venus says “Time for me to open a restaurant.”. They knock on Les Nessman’s “office door” and he says “Go away, I’ve got a lot of work to do. And don’t bother yelling, I can’t hear anything with the door closed.” Bailey and Jennifer admit they were about to quit for jobs in television, and Mr.Carlson admits he’s been filming a sitcom for two weeks now…
Andy pulls out his beloved cowboy hat and quips “Hey, I can run any kind of station…”, but is interrupted by a dissonant guitar chord.
It’s Herb Tarlick. He saunters in, in full Grand Ole Opry regalia: sequined suit, bolo tie, snakeskin boots and an oversized Eleven Gallon Hat. He’s strumming a huge guitar, red with pearl inlays… with “Always Been Country” painted on it.
WKRP did a format change episode – it was quite diabolical: Mrs. Carlson instigated the change because she ran the station at a deliberate loss for tax purposes. Dr. Fever found out and threatened to tell Arthur who would no doubt cause all sorts of grief to Mother.
One show that was particularly resistant to change was Green Acres. It was predicated on one set of gags that couldn’t be resolved. Remove them, and nothing would have been funny. Would anyone have kept watching if the house had been renovated, Lisa learned how to cook, Ebb grew a brain, and Haney quit swindling Oliver? I don’t think so.
WKRP actually had a bookend final episode. If they had written it a little differently, it could have been a series finale.
The new ratings arrive, and WKRP has finally become a successful station, rising to #6 in the Cincinnati market with Johnny Fever as the #1 DJ. But when a new news director (Nicholas Hormann) shows up and says he was hired by Mama Carlson, Andy soon finds out that she plans to change the station to a 24-hour news format.
There was nothing wrong with the finale, I was just offering it as a counterpoint to AlsoNamedBort’s claim that the finale is expected to wrap up the story.
As another counterexample, “Elementary” actually had 2 series finales, neither of which ended the story. They wrote the season 6 finale as a possible series finale because they weren’t sure if there would be a season 7. Season 7 was a definite series finale, but it didn’t end anything either.
Rob Morrow’s final appearance in Northern Exposure should’ve been the series finale. The show was slowly becoming derailed but Fleishman’s return to NYC pretty much shoved it right off the tracks. Phil Capra was a crap replacement and NE was fundamentally a completely different show after that.
King of the Hill was supposed to end with Luanne and Lucky getting married. That episode had a bunch of one-off characters return for the wedding and kind of wrapped up things nicely. [side rant: although it wasn’t how I would’ve done it. I would’ve liked to see Buck Strickland sell Strickland Propane to Hank and see Peggy get a full-time teaching job and maybe learn some damn humility and Luanne actually graduate college and move to Austin or somewhere big and begin a relationship with someone who wasn’t from the same socio-economic strata she came from and Bobby tackle high school with confidence – real confidence.) When Fox decided to renew KofH they had to come up with a new finale a year or three later, one which sucked mightily – Boomhauer revealed to be a Texas Ranger? The Hill’s host a backyard cookout for the neighborhood?? Pathetic.
Finally, people have been arguing for years (decades) that The Simpsons should’ve ended many years ago. Since I somewhat agree with the theory that each episode exists in its own unique universe separate from all the other episodes I don’t think there’s a way to satisfactorily wrap everything up since there aren’t any main storylines to wrap up. Perhaps the movie should’ve been the actual series finale. That story would’ve worked well for a finale.