I think the title’s pretty clear: I’m looking for televison series in which the main character dies at the conclusion of the series. Off the top of my head i can only think of two: Xena: Warrior Princess and Jay Mohr’s Action. Any others?
Arguably, Angel.
Buffy (sort of). (OK, they switched networks and had two more iffy seasons).
Blake’s Seven UK tv series.
Also, arguably, Rowan Atkinson in The Black Adder Goes Forth.
No, Jay did survive; they just didn’t air the later episodes, but they’ve been broadcast elsewhere.
Not so arguably, he also died in **The Black Adder ** and Blackadder II.
At the end of Dinosaurs, everyone in the show was about to become extinct. Very surprising ending for something considered a children’s show.
I thought of Angel, but it’s not certain that the remaining Fang Gangsters died. Even if they did, they died AFTER the series ended.
Earth 2 ended their one and only season with the main character encased in a stasis tube because she had a fairly lethal neurological disorder they couldn’t, and wouldn’t ever be able to, cure.
Outside the TV box:
I always loved the ending to the book version of The Spy who Loved Me, because it ended with James Bond on the floor, writhing in pain as the lethal poison works its way through his system… and nobody notices… and no mention is made of it in the next book…
John D. MacDonald was rumored to have written a last Travis McGee novel, The Black Border of Death, in which McGee dies at the end; the story was that whenever he submitted a new novel (which was guaranteed to be a bestseller), if he didn’t get the money he wanted, he’d threaten to sell the Black Border novel to the next-highest bidder, and it’d be the last McGee novel ever.
Then there’s the Aliens trilogy…
At least after the first three incarnations, Black Adder came back as his ancestor. Not so after the fourth series.
I haven’t seen the last episode, but I understand that the HBO series SIX FEET UNDER ended with lots of deaths.
Chief Inspector Morse.
(Or Morph Inspector Cheese, as my savant friend once spontaneously verbal-anagramized.)
A) Angel was already dead.
B) Joss has said that Angel, Spike and Illyria all survived the battle. Gunn’s status is…indeterminiable.
It always seems silly to call Bufyverse vampires dead. They eat human food as well as blood (though admittedly only for taste), they sleep, they bleed, they sorrow; when they’re dusted, people refer to them as having been killed. Theyre not dead, just differently metabolized.
Oh, duh.
Sherlock Holmes.
But Holmes was brought back to life, and I don’t think Conan Doyle killed him again. Isn’t he officially still alive, in retirement somewhere, keeping bees?
Soap. The last episode was a cliff hanger with just about everyone being shot.
Offhand, I remember Jessica was in front of a firing squad and Burt and Danny had just kicked down a door and met a hail of gunfire. Not sure about the rest of the cast – it was probably 20 years ago…
I don’t know if it counts because it’s Anime, but Cowboy Bebop ended with Spike either dead or just about to die, after taking out half a building.
Sledge Hammer. The entire city was blown up by a thermonuclear device, including Sledge.
However, despite this, the series was renewed. The second season was billed “Sledge Hammer: The Early Years.”
Unless the Astrobase GO! folks get off their butts and bring 'em back toot sweet, I’m going to regretfully nominate The Venture Brothers.
Farscape - Until they made the two-part movie.
Bablyon 5
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People are always forgetting that in the Buffyverse, the vampire is really just a human meatsack with a demon living inside. The demon has access to the memories and more or less the personality of the original person, but that person is dead, dead, dead; their soul is gone. Even some of the characters in Buffy seem to forget this. So, when you dust a vampire, you are killing the demon that inhabited the meat puppet.
For Angel, of course, the situation is terribly confused, since the vampire is cursed with Angel’s original human soul. If you kill Angel, you’d kill the human soul and the demon within. The whole curse of Angel is rather bizarre–it always seemed to me that Angel’s human soul sufferred far more than did the demon inside did while the soul was there, but it was the demon that massacred the gypsies . . .
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