Substantial, obviously. No Big Battle, no Hamilton, some actual reason for Lindsey being back, further exploration of Cyborg-Dad, etc.
Does *8 Simple Rules * count?
No, because it wasn’t the final episode.
On the subject of Newhart, Dick Louden was hit in the head by a golf ball and knocked unconscious - not necessarily dead. But when you wake from a dream, are the characters in that dream killed? This may be a hijack, and I apologize, but in 9th grade (1973), my English teacher postulated that we were all part of some alien being’s dream, and when that being awoke, we’d all disappear. I don’t really have a point, but I thought of it back on page one when the Newhart/BNS issue was brought up.
I don’t know if the characters in a dream die when the dreamer wakes up. But consider what Bob’s words were to his wife when he awoke: surely something to the effect of “I dreamed that I was living in Vermont, running an inn. All of my neighbors were crazy, and I was married to a hot blonde.”
Bob clearly considered himself identical to Dick Loudon–or, rather, considered Dick Loudon to be a subset of his own psyche. So Dick lives so long as Bob does.
One Foot In The Grave ended with Victor’s being run down by a drunk driver.