Why TV Pilots Crash And Burn: 2012 Fall
TV Preview
(By Hank Stuever, Washington Post, 13 September 2012)
So many TV
shows are bad right from the very start, in the first few minutes, and just
about everyone can tell. It’s a horrible feeling, a sadness — even for cruel TV
critics who write dismissive reviews based on a single episode. So many pilots
crash and burn on takeoff. Viewers can smell the fear. And yet someone put his or her whole heart
into creating this piece of trash. Someone pitched it, someone bought it. Some
actor is hoping for steady work out of it, a comeback, a big break. (See:
“Animal Practice,” “Malibu Country,” “The Mob Doctor.”) Some low-level
production assistant will be out of work in a month because of a bad pilot. You
are witnessing a disaster (“Made in Jersey,” for any example) that layers of
producers and executives, even at the top of the ratings game, felt secure
enough and enthusiastic about to put on the fall schedule. Often they are
thwarted by the dubious science of test screenings, which identify “problems”
that are “fixed” in edits and reshoots.
And it’s terrible. You know it almost as soon as the
characters start talking. But how do you know? Is it the script? Is it the
premise? Is it the cast? Is it the look? Usually it’s an intangible combination
of all those. Mostly, however, it’s in
the self-consciousness of the a first episode. It’s a blind date who sweats too
much, knowing he’s only got a few minutes to sell you, and then trying way too
hard, which only makes it worse. That is what I loathe about watching pilot
after pilot after pilot this time of year — not that the show might be bad or
cliche or insultingly stupid (I am, after all, paid to watch plenty of bad
television), but that pilots try too hard to cover up their faults.
My real problem with the whole concept of a pilot episode?
That it has to be first. Network TV
shows might be better off if they started with the second episode, or the
third. The best TV shows (most of them on cable) launch themselves into what
seems like the middle of a story. People have been watching TV nonstop for 60
years; surely we’ve learned how to figure our way around a basic premise and a
set of characters by now. Why drag us through the unnecessary clumsiness of a
beginning, an origin story? Why not use
the pilot only as a private means to persuade network executives to greenlight
a series — and then use what’s left for hype, for serving up appetizing
Internet clips? Use the pilot as something to show to potential advertisers and
TV bloggers who insist on seeing (and posting) a little of something, anything.
Shoot a pilot, but then stick it on a shelf, and air it only if the series
becomes a cult hit and the fans clamor to know: How did this all begin?Otherwise skip the pilot’s dependence on set-up and exposition, and (please!) skip the voice-over narration, in which the character tells you his or her life story up to now. This has to be the laziest way to write a TV script yet shows up in a few too many shows this fall. (Even when a pilot is charming, like “The Mindy Project,” it reveals its insecurities when the lead character starts in with the voice-over.) Often what’s most clear from a pilot is that the people who made the show don’t trust you to figure out what they’re trying to do. Everything is overstated. The jokes are driven too hard. The premises are flattened until they are far too broad. The characters come in explaining who they are and what motivates them. The drama is overcooked and supplied with its blandly meaningful rock ballad. There may as well be a text crawl across the bottom of the screen, containing the many, many notes from an unseen army of producers: Does her name have to be Cassandra? How about we call her Alex? Should the neighbor be black? Should there be more sexual tension between the leads? Can you change this line? Can you change that one? We need to recast the little girl.
Another bummer about pilots: Often it’s all that the TV
critic gets to see before he or she has to write a review — which isn’t much to
go on. (Isn’t that right, “Go On”?) No matter how badly we’d love to see
another episode (or two, or three) of a new series before we commit opinion to
laptop screen, the fact is that further episodes usually haven’t been finished
by deadline. This is why critics feel
compelled to go back and review a show again, sometimes to say that it’s worse
than we originally thought. A good pilot can be such a welcome sight in the
fall TV onslaught that critics sometimes overpraise the effort, only to
discover that it got stale fast. (Which is probably why I overpraised “Once
Upon a Time” last fall, based on its pitch-perfect pilot.) Sometimes we dial
back to say that a show turned out much better than the pilot originally
seemed, which is why I had to admit that I was mostly wrong about “Community.”
Its pilot failed to convey (to me and others) the layers of nuanced snark and
absurdity that were coming.
If only pilot episodes knew how to play it cool. I don’t mean “cool” in the Ryan Murphy sense,
though Murphy can make beautifully hip, pop-culturally-savvy pilot episodes,
such as those for “Glee,” “American Horror Story” and, this year, “The New
Normal.” (If Murphy created only pilots — without ever making a second episode
— he would be an undisputed genius. As it is, “Glee” is still torturously on.) By cool, I mean remaining calm. There is so
little on TV now that comes across as calm and assured. Stop letting us see how
nervous you are about cancellation, about the future of television, about the
future of your career. Put on a show as if you don’t care that it could be
canceled after two episodes. (Which is all any of us ever saw of Fox’s
beautiful “Lone Star” two years ago. I like to think that by dying young it
remained a fantastic TV show, which I praised in print and will happily stand
behind. Had it gone on, it would surely have devolved into an outlandish soap
opera.) Be a brave pilot. Begin your story with the delusion that there will be 100 more episodes and a safe landing in syndication. Begin with the delusion that you’re the head of HBO or AMC. Begin with the delusion that television is once again in a glorious age, that it is the only entertainment medium worth talking about (still, in 2012) and that America is watching raptly. Take flight without calling so much attention to your fancy wings. Assume you are soaring right up until you hear the splat.
The Olympics, Reality Shows, And Canadian
Cop Dramas
Why broadcast TV is so lame in the summer and how cable nets
like USA pick up the slack with sunny, perfect shows.
(By June Thomas, May 29, 2012)
The 2011-12
TV season officially ended last week, leaving the broadcast schedule
simultaneously overfamiliar and unrecognizable. Overfamiliar, because if a show
is in the same time slot it’s occupied for the last eight months, it’s bound to
be in reruns. Unrecognizable, because the network lineups are suddenly full of
reality competitions, Canadian imports, and sports. If you want to see new
scripted television, the cable networks are the place to go: In the coming
weeks, buzzy new series like HBO’s The Newsroom (Aaron Sorkin!), USA’s
Political Animals (Sigourney Weaver!), ABC Family’s Bunheads (Amy
Sherman-Paladino!), and FX’s Anger Management (Charlie Sheen!) will debut
alongside returning favorites such as Breaking Bad, True Blood, and Louie.
Why have the broadcast networks never truly embraced summer?
Americans, especially the young ones advertisers most want to reach, spend more
time away from their televisions when the nights are light, the weather is
warm, and the kids are on vacation, so TV advertising is at its cheapest. With
less money coming in, the networks abandon pricey original dramas in favor of
budget programming: dating games, talent shows, and cops in oddly nonspecific
North American cities talking aboot catching criminals. If June, July, and August are of any use to
the big six networks, it’s as a period of experimentation—many staples of the
regular broadcast season, especially reality mega-hits like American Idol,
Survivor, and Dancing With the Stars, got their first trial airings in summer.
These months can also provide a second chance for sitcoms. Vacations and
outdoorsy activities, which keep people away from their TVs, mean that heavily
serialized dramas fare poorly, but sampling-friendly comedies can thrive.
Onetime NBC chief Warren Littlefield’s new book Top of the Rock: Inside the
Rise and Fall of Must See TV reveals that Cheers and Friends blossomed in
summer reruns, and more recently ABC’s Happy Endings found its audience in
second, warm-weather showings.
With the broadcast cats away, the cable mice will play. Ted
Linhart, senior vice president of research at USA Network, which has ruled the
cable ratings for six straight years, told me that the relative quiet of
broadcast-network schedules in the summer months means that “a large magnet of
viewers is turned off.” It’s no coincidence, then, that most cable hits are
launched when there’s no R in the month. “The summer break from broadcast gives
cable networks an opportunity to get people hooked,” Linhart said. And what kinds of shows do summer viewers
latch onto? Just as we reach for lemonade rather than hot chocolate when the
weather turns warm, light, bright shows appeal more than the dark, tense dramas
of the main broadcast season. USA series like Burn Notice, set in Miami, and Royal
Pains, in the Hamptons, are all sun, swimsuits, and seersucker. The heroes are
smiling and stylish—White Collar’s Neal Caffrey and Suits’ Harvey Specter are
the best-dressed men this side of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce—and they’re
always surrounded by a loyal coterie of friends and family. They’re
exceptionally good at their jobs, sometimes freakishly so—Suits’ Mike Ross has
a magnificent memory that allows him to find the tiniest flaws in arcane legal
documents after a quick perusal, while Covert Affairs’ CIA agent Annie Walker
has to do little more than pass through customs to pick up the local
language—and best of all, you can miss an occasional episode and still know
exactly what’s going on.
This summer will be a little different, since at least one
broadcast network is guaranteed a ratings smash between July 27 and Aug. 12.
NBC paid a whopping $1.18 billion for the right to broadcast the London
Olympics and will spend untold millions more crafting sob stories about the
athletes. NBC lost $223 million on the 2010 Vancouver Games, but there are no
eight-gold-medal swimmers or plucky pixie gymnasts in the Winter Olympics. The
Summer Games are typically a ratings juggernaut—the 2008 Opening Ceremony was
seen by nearly 35 million U.S. viewers—and the 17 nights of prime-time
telecasts will provide a great promotional showcase for NBC’s fall programming.
After all, Americans tend to watch live—who wants to discuss swimming events
when the action has moved to the track?—which means that unlike during most shows
these days, during the Olympics people watch commercials. During the first week
of the Beijing Games, telecast ratings saw a DVR jump of just 5 percent,
compared with a 41-percent increase for, say, an episode of Big Brother.*
The Games also cause scheduling headaches for the cablers.
As USA’s Linhart told me, when a network has a slate of hit shows running in
the summer, it’s tough to shut everything down for a sporting event, and it’s
even harder to bring the audience back when it’s over. USA, which is part of
NBCUniversal, hasn’t yet announced its Olympic plans, but back when USA
broadcast U.S. Open tennis, Linhart says, “We had to take a break of two or
three weeks, and we would see that the numbers for the next [episode after the
hiatus] would be low, because people weren’t really aware that the show was
back.”
Apart from the Olympics, there are other signs that summer
habits might be changing. According to the Los Angeles Times, 58 percent of
U.S. homes watched prime-time television in August 2011, up from 56 percent in
August 2009. Some of the change is surely driven by all that new cable content,
but there is a technological component, too. Patricia McDonough, senior vice
president of planning policy and analysis at Nielsen, told me that increasing
adoption of DVRs—about half of U.S. households now have one—means the summer
ratings dip is less pronounced than in the past: “At 8 o’clock we may still be
outdoors, but by 9 or 10, we may be in and watching programming. Now we don’t
have to miss our favorite show if it’s on at 8, because we can DVR it and watch
it when we get back.” And it’s not just DVRs. TV catch-up service Hulu has
announced 10 original or exclusive programs that will unspool over the summer.
What’s more, as of 2012, most mobile phones are smartphones, which means
viewers can take their TV habits beyond the living room. “If I’m out in the
backyard barbecuing, I can still be watching the ball game. So the television
is going with us this year probably more than ever before, and that’s a trend
that will continue,” says McDonough. Right now, TV networks can’t sell
advertising against that al fresco viewing, because it doesn’t show up in the
standard Nielsen ratings, but the company has recently established a smartphone
panel and other cross-platform measurements, so that may soon change.
Although this is the only time of year that’s seeing
increased viewership, there’s still no incentive for the networks to invest in
summer dramas, at least not until the young audience grows significantly,
bringing with it increased ad revenues. Until then, USA and TNT—home of The
Closer, Leverage, and Rizzoli & Isles—are there to satisfy viewers’
cravings for characters. But don’t weep for the broadcast networks. They’re
putting the warm weather to good use: Five of last season’s 10 most-popular
shows were reality contests that got their start in the summer months.
Ta-Ta, UPN. So Long, WB. Hello, The
CW.
(By Lisa de Moraes, Washington Post, 2006)
Fans of WWE's "Smackdown!" and "Gilmore Girls" will
have a lot in common come September when UPN and the WB are shuttered and their
most successful programming is used to launch a new network called The CW. The network, announced yesterday at a news
conference in New York, will be a 50-50 partnership between CBS, which owns
UPN, and Warner Bros., a division of Time Warner, the majority owner of the
WB. Like UPN and the WB, The CW (named
in tribute to CBS and Warner Bros., and if you think that's lame you should see
the new network's logo) will chase the elusive 18-to-34-year-old viewer with
such shows as "America's Next Top Model" and "Smallville." UPN and the WB will continue to operate
independently until September, reporters at the news conference in the St.
Regis Hotel learned from CBS President and CEO Leslie Moonves and Warner Bros.
Entertainment Chairman and CEO Barry Meyer.
Dawn Ostroff, who has been in charge of programming for UPN since
February 2002, was named president of entertainment for the new network.
And yet the list of series featured in the promo reel and news release
shown at the unveiling included more WB programs than UPN ones. Shows like
"Gilmore Girls" and "Supernatural," "One Tree
Hill" and "Smallville," "Everwood" and
"Reba," as well as the reality series "Beauty and the
Geek." The UPN shows mentioned were
"America's Next Top Model," "Everybody Hates Chris,"
"Veronica Mars," "Girlfriends" and "Smackdown!"
("Veronica Mars," the least watched of these shows, reaches an
anorexic audience of 2.6 million viewers on average. However, it's also
produced by Warner Bros.) The CW will
adopt the WB's scheduling model, programming a total of 30 hours each week:
Monday through Friday, 3 to 5 p.m. and 8 to 10 p.m.; Sunday, 5 to 10 p.m.; and
a five-hour Saturday-morning animation block.
Like UPN and the WB, The CW will not program Saturday prime time. But
then, as Moonves joked yesterday, neither do the other broadcast networks. NBC reruns weekday programming and
occasionally burns off theatrical inventory on Saturday nights, ABC mostly
burns off theatricals and has done some "repurposing" of original
programming, and CBS runs something called "Crimetime Saturday" --
just another way of saying "crime-drama reruns." Fox actually wins
the night most weeks among the 18-to-49-year-olds the broadcast networks target
with low-budget fare, including "Cops" and "America's Most
Wanted."
Meyer said the new network is expected to reach more than 95 percent of
the country at launch. It already has lined up stations reaching about 48
percent, including the 11 major-market UPN stations owned by CBS, which have
signed a 10-year affiliation deal with The CW.
Making the same long-term commitment are the 16 major-market WB stations
owned by Tribune Broadcasting, which has given up its 22.5 percent stake in the
WB. Tribune partnered with Warner Bros. to launch the WB network 11 years ago
this month. (UPN launched that same month.)
Eleven years ago, when CBS was averaging more than 20 million viewers,
ABC nearly 19 million, NBC 16 million and Fox 11 million, the marketplace was
presumed capable of accommodating a fifth and even a sixth broadcast
network. These days, facing so much more
competition from satellite, digital cable and other forms of distribution,
neither network seems likely to ever achieve parity with Fox -- the youngest of
the Big Four (it launched in April 1987).
In terms of ratings, UPN's best season was its first, when it averaged
6.2 million viewers but programmed only Monday and Tuesday nights. Its shows
included "Star Trek: Voyager," the latest incarnation in the
then-still-powerful "Star Trek" franchise.
The WB's ratings heyday came during the '97-'98 and the '98-'99 TV
seasons; it averaged 4.5 million viewers, programming Monday through Wednesday
and adding Thursday nights for the latter season. (CBS won the TV season that wrapped last May
with an average of nearly 13 million viewers; ABC and Fox finished with an
average of 10 million and NBC 9.8 million. WB and UPN trailed far behind with
3.3 million and 3.4 million, respectively.)
UPN has never been profitable and the WB turned a profit only a couple
of years. This month the latter announced it would cancel its most watched
program, "7th Heaven," because the network would lose about $16
million on that show alone this season.
"WB was always a strategic asset," Meyer told The TV Column,
explaining that the goal was to create value for the programming produced for
the network by Warner Bros. But looking at the economic realities of the
network going forward, he said, "we were going to be creating less and
less original programming and repurposing or repeating more and more of
it." Programming produced jointly with CBS "is a much better way to
serve our strategic end than to continue with WB," he said. According to ad-buying firm Magna Global, the
WB's lineup already is 51 percent reruns this season. Or, as Moonves so succinctly put it,
"Fifty percent of a winner is better than 100 percent of something that's
breaking even." He told The TV
Column: "UPN had made great strides over the last couple years" but
was only approaching break-even.
"Looking down the road, there wasn't great upside." The new deal leaves in the lurch some of the
biggest UPN stations, which are owned by News Corp. When UPN launched in '95, a
station group called Chris-Craft provided stations in the country's three
largest markets -- New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. In 2001, those stations
were sold to News Corp., the home of the Fox network. Nine News Corp. stations
are currently UPN affiliates; a News Corp. spokesman told Reuters those
stations will seek new programming.
UPN's affiliation deal with News Corp. is set to expire in August; ditto
WB's affiliation deal with Tribune. That became a subject of conversation
between Meyer and Moonves, who goes way back with Meyer, having formerly
developed hit series like "ER" and "Friends." "We were having dinner one night around
Thanksgiving and looked at each other and realized that at that moment in time
we were both being pushed by affiliate groups to make long-range commitments .
. . and if we were going to find a way to do this together we had to do it now
or probably be separated for many years to come," Meyer said. "We both felt it made sense . . . and
went from there. We were of unified purpose." Yesterday they said that in spite of the
costs involved in launching it, they expected The CW to be profitable its first
season. They would not discuss how many
people would be laid off as a result of the merger. In Washington, Tribune-owned WBDC, currently
home to the WB network, will become a CW affiliate; News Corp.-owned UPN
station WDCA will not. Yesterday, WBDC
General Manager Eric Meyrowitz was doing the happy dance, telling The Post's
John Maynard he is "charged up" about the news because "it gives
us a better platform to serve the market."
WDCA General Manager Duffy Dyer did not return multiple calls left at
his office yesterday.
Theories About 'Lost'
(By Jeff Jensen,
Entertainment Weekly)
EW senior writer
Jeff Jensen solves the show! (Or so he thinks...) EW turns to our shadowy operative inside the
world of Lost for insight. Burn this when you're done. The truth is out there.
Theory 1. THE ISLAND: It's Alive!
Our theory of Lost begins with the question posed in the
pilot by smack-addled rocker Charlie: ''Guys...where are we?'' Some have argued
that the island could be a hallucination — ''A Psychological Shipwreck,'' to
use the title of an 1879 short story by Lost-linked author Ambrose Bierce. Or
an alien twilight zone. It's tempting to go with ''limbo'' — an elastic enough
idea to corral the show's incredible coincidences and odd details, like a smoke
monster and a band of child-swiping Others. But we believe the survivors of
Oceanic Flight 815 aren't stuck in a mass delusion or a satanic mousetrap.
They're alive on the island. A haunted island. And it was made that way by the
Dharma Initiative.
2. THE DHARMA INITIATIVE: Head Games
What we know about Dharma is incomplete at best, utterly
bogus at worst. According to a choppy ''orientation film'' found in the hatch,
Dharma founders Gerald and Karen DeGroot established a research facility on the
island in the 1970s to conduct experiments in meteorology, zoology,
electromagnetism, psychology, and parapsychology — a dubious science that
believes the brain houses mind-over-matter powers. (Think X-Men, Jedi Knights,
and sci-fi author Robert Heinlein, whose 1941 short story Lost Legacy is about
kids realizing their psychic potential under the tutelage of — COINCIDENCE
ALERT! — Ambrose Bierce.) Our theory is that intentionally or not, the Dharma
team pulled loose psychic powers from one of its test subjects — skip to No. 5
for the answer about who that might be — with disastrous results. How? With
fear. Where? Where else, down in...
3. THE HATCH: Human Testing
The orientation film claims the hatch was originally used to
study the island's ''unique'' electromagnetic energy. Indeed, there is a curious wall that seems to
be humming with the stuff. But the filmstrip also states that the DeGroots were
following B.F. Skinner, a psychologist famous for his Skinner boxes: controlled
environments used to study animal behavior. Folks, the hatch is a human Skinner
box. Why wasn't this mentioned in the
orientation film? Because the orientation film is part of the experiment! The
film was fiction, designed to induce paranoia and fear and observe the test
subject's reaction. What Dharma was studying was the behavior every Lost
fanatic engages in: the human imperative to organize seemingly random details
into some kind of order. The problem is that someone- someone we haven't seen
or met yet- was put in the hatch and had a psychic break of world-altering
proportions.
4. THE NUMBERS: Those Damn Yankees!
It has been Lost's most baffling conundrum: the seemingly
inexplicable connection between Hurley's havoc-causing Lotto picks- 4 8 15 16
23 42 - and the hatch's computer code. This is a two-part riddle. First, the
original purpose of the numbers: Skinner box experiments require test subjects
to execute empty tasks, like pulling levers or, say, inputting digits into a
computer. The Dharma-ites chose the sequence because...they were big Yankee
fans, and each number correlates to a retired Yankee jersey. But the second
question is far more important: What purpose do the numbers serve now? There
are lots of out-there (and fun) ways to go with this, but the truth is that the
numbers don't do anything. The ''cursed'' digits are just one more sinister
detail in Dharma's elaborate sleight of hand intended to freak out test
subjects. The problem was that extreme stress on the subject in the hatch
combined with the electromagnetic energy down there to jar loose some
suppressed psychic powers. And it jarred them loose in the wrong individual. In
that explosive moment, the once meaningless digits were encoded with devilish
life. Hence, Hurley's bad luck, and a virus that is rewriting reality on the island.
5. THE ANSWER TO 'LOST': The Island Is Haunted by a
Powerful Psychic
The Dharma experiments resulted in the creation of a potent
disembodied being. A being deeply steeped in pop culture- think about all the
novels, comic books, and random flotsam that make up the DNA of Lost- and
powerful enough to bring those bits of pop culture to life. Someone who
imprinted his consciousness on the island. Someone whose radioactive corpse was
walled up in the hatch. Someone named Aaron.
So how did the Oceanic crew end up on the island? Aaron summoned them,
because he has as-yet-undetermined uses for each of them...and he needed a new
body. The body of a then-unborn baby. Claire's baby. Which is why the Others
(Aaron's followers) have tried to kidnap her child. And why they had to snatch
poor, psychic Walt- remember that dead bird from season 1?- who was the only one with the ability to see
through their plan. Of course, the
castaways could all be dead. It could be a mass hallucination. The Others could
be trying to secure franchise rights to the Twilight Zone Dairy Queen. But this
is our story, and we're sticking to it. At least until the next episode.
Suit Claims Actress Fired Over Pregnancy
Former General Hospital actress Kari Wuhrer sued ABC-TV,
contending her character was written out of the soap opera and she was fired
for becoming pregnant. Wuhrer, 38, filed
the discrimination and wrongful termination suit in Los Angeles County Superior
Court. She is alleging she suffered at least $3 million in damages to her
earnings, career and through the cost of emotional distress. Details of the suit were first reported by
TMZ.com. "We have not been served
and we do not comment on pending litigation," ABC said in a
statement. Wuhrer played Reese Marshall
on the show. According to her suit, she
notified the writers and producers that she was pregnant so they would have
time to write her condition into the script.
Instead, Wuhrer said she was fired two weeks later. "The vile underbelly of the Hollywood
Machine encourages female actors to be as beautiful and slim as possible,"
the suit said, adding that an actress who "dares" to become pregnant
has one choice: "Terminate her pregnancy or be terminated."
10 Best And Worst Series'
Finales
(By Larry Getlen, New York Post, Sun., Apr. 25, 2010)
With “Lost”
finally getting off the TV island and “24” ticking down its final seconds, fans
of these shows are wondering if their conclusions can possibly live up to high
expectations. But their last episodes are destined to place these series among
either the greatest farewells in TV history, or among the worst. So with these
major finales on the horizon, we decided that now would be a good time to look
back at the best and worst of television swan songs. With any luck, next month
will make the best list crowded with smoke monsters and secret agents — and
leave the worst list just as it is.
10 Best
Series Finales
1.) M*A*S*H
“Goodbye, Farewell
and Amen” (02/ 28/83)
The finale was
the most watched TV show in history until this year’s Super Bowl. This full-on
emotional farewell saw Hawkeye Pierce (Alan Alda, above far left, with the
cast) lose his mind after inadvertently causing a woman to smother her own
baby; and, in the series’ biggest surprise, Sergeant Klinger, who spent 11
seasons in tacky dinner dresses trying to get sent home, remain in Korea after
meeting his one true love. At the end, when Hawkeye saw B.J. Hunnicutt’s
“Goodbye” note, spelled out in rocks, from his helicopter, there wasn’t a dry
eye in the country.
2.) NEWHART
“The Last
Newhart” (05/21/90)
Sadly, the
“last season was all a dream/fantasy” device gained great traction in the
eighties, but “Newhart” used it to great effect, creating one of the most
hilarious moments in television by making the entire eight-season run a dream
of his character’s from his previous series, “The Bob Newhart Show.” When
Suzanne Pleshette, who played his wife on that show, popped her head out from
under the covers in their bedroom, this episode’s classic status was secured.
3.) THE
FUGITIVE
“The Judgment”
(08/22, 29, 67)
Dr. Richard
Kimble (David Janssen, above) ran from the law for four years while hunting the
man behind the crime for which he was convicted — his wife’s murder. With the
killing of the one-armed man, Kimble found salvation. This “Fugitive” kept
Americans glued to their seats.
4.) MARY TYLER
MOORE
“The Last Show”
(3/19/77)
Mary Richards
(Mary Tyler Moore) was the first television character to portray the challenge
of being an independent single woman in America
5.) CHEERS
“One For The
Road” (05/20/93)
A goodbye drink
at a bar where everyone knows your name should offer both humor and sentiment,
and “One for the Road” had it all, driven by the return of Diane Chambers
(Shelley Long), who engaged in a hilarious game of deceptive cat vs. lying
mouse with her old flame, Sam Malone (Ted Danson). Between that, the gang’s
usual bar talk, monitored by bartender Woody Harrelson, and Sam’s final words
of “Sorry, we’re closed,” “Cheers” said goodbye exactly the way an old friend
should.
6.) THE TONIGHT
SHOW WITH JOHNNY CARSON
(05/21, 22/92)
Johnny Carson’s farewell, after 30 years as America’s favorite talk-show host,
featured Carson (right, with Ed McMahon) sitting alone on a stool, sharing some
of his most personal moments and bidding his viewers farewell with the words,
“and so it has come to this.” But the real heart-grabber came the night before,
when Bette Midler serenaded the late-night legend with “One for My Baby,” as
genuine and touching a moment as you’ll find in the annals of TV history.
7.) SIX FEET
UNDER
“Everyone’s
Waiting” (08/21/05)
It’s only
fitting that a show that dealt with death so poignantly should usher off its
characters accordingly, with creator Alan Ball taking us through the future to
see the deaths of each of his show’s major characters. In a breathtaking
six-and-a-half minute sequence, Ball showed us their final moments in fully-realized
scenes, from Ruth Fisher’s (Frances Conroy, right) passing in a hospital bed to
a cataract-laden Claire passing similarly in 2085. This finale was haunting and
epic, and a vivid example of powerful storytelling whose triumph was really
quite simple — Ball created art by choosing to end his story at the end.
8.)
MOONLIGHTING
“Lunar Eclipse”
(05/14/89)
The finale
seemed perfectly ordinary until, with 10 minutes left, Bruce Willis’ character
returns to his office to find his furniture being hauled off. A man introduces
himself as an ABC executive and explains that the show has been cancelled.
Willis and co-star Cybill Shepherd then try to save their lives as TV
characters as their props, even including the view from their artificial
window, are carted out. The ending was funny, strange, and surprisingly meta
before meta was hip.
9.) TWIN PEAKS
“Beyond Life
and Death” (06/ 10/91)
After solving
the murder of Laura Palmer, “Twin Peaks ” ran
out of gas, until the finale in which Agent Dale Cooper is captured by the evil
BOB, and, in the show’s final shot, cackles maniacally after smashing his head
into a mirror, with BOB laughing similarly in the image across from him. We’d
expect nothing less than this creepy victory for evil from series creator David
Lynch.
10.) MURPHY
BROWN
“Never Can Say
Goodbye” (5/18/ 98)
The finale had
just the right mix of comedy, celebrity, pathos, and resolution, as Murphy beat
breast cancer, Bette Midler appeared as the last of Brown’s 93 secretaries, and
Murphy, who made waves in the 1992 presidential election about her being a
single mother, left the stage as classy as ever.
10 Worst Series Finales
1.) THE
SOPRANOS
“Made in America
One of the
singlemost frustrating endings in history. The final scene of this brilliant,
much-revered show left viewers thinking their cable had gone out. While
Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing” played in the background, Tony (James
Gandolfini, above left, with Edie Falco and Robert Iler) and his family sat in
a New Jersey
2.) ROSEANNE
“Into That Good
Night” (05/20/97)
The last major
show to use the “it was all a dream” device — for good reason. After the Conner
family won the lottery, the finale revealed that Roseanne had fictionalized her
life to distract her from a drab reality. The last scene was a voiceover, as
she stared at her typewriter. For a series praised for its portrayal of
blue-collar life, the finale seemed like a betrayal.
3.) SEINFELD
“The Finale”
(05/ 14/98)
When a show
becomes one of the best-loved shows of all-time by being, essentially, a show
about nothing, it should stay that way until the end. But “Seinfeld” ended its
run instead by sending its characters to a Massachusetts
4.) ST. ELSEWHERE
“The Last One”
(05/25/88)
“St.
Elsewhere,” while never dominant in the ratings, was enough of a critical
favorite that it lasted six seasons and won 13 Emmys, and made stars out of
cast members such as Denzel Washington and Ed Begley. But the final episode
turned out to be another “it was all a dream” disaster, when we learned that
the entire six-season run was merely a figment of an autistic child’s
imagination, as that child had apparently spent six TV seasons staring into a
snow globe, where the “St. Elsewhere” cast really lived.
5.) X-FILES
“The Truth”
(05/19/02)
The final
episode of “The X-Files” couldn’t help but disappoint, since the final season
had been a dud, with main cast members such as Gillian Anderson out the door by
then. While David Duchovny’s Fox Mulder returned to be tried for his supposed
crimes, he needn’t have bothered: The series that promised that “the truth is
out there” offered very little of it in its finale.
6.) LIFE ON
MARS
“Life is a
Rock” (04/21/09)
Maintaining credibility
in a series about a cop who travels from 2008 to 1973 was challenging enough.
But the creators of “Life on Mars,” based on a hit British series, punted the
ending. While the U.K. show
sent him back to present time, the U.S.
7.) LITTLE
HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE
“The Last
Farewell” (02/26/84)
“Little House
on the Prairie” was a hit for over nine seasons for its portrayal of
hard-working people of small town America
8.) QUANTUM
LEAP
“Mirror Image”
(05/05/ 93)
Instead of
solving the mystery of how and why Sam Beckett (Scott Bakula), leapt through
time and into other people’s bodies to help them face obstacles, the series
ended with Beckett taking one final leap into nowhere, followed by the
on-screen graphic, “Dr. Sam Beckett never returned home.” Loyal viewers were
left in the lurch.
9.) THE JAY
LENO SHOW
(02/09/10) “The
Jay Leno Show” was the equivalent of a FEMA disaster. It almost destroyed NBC
with dismal ratings that slashed affiliate newscast viewership almost in half.
Leno made scant mention that his show was leaving the air — he merely threw it
to the local news and was quickly cut off, as if everyone involved in this
nightmare wanted to forget it as quickly as possible.
10.) THE
PRISONER
“Fall Out”
(09/21/68)
This cult hit
starred show creator Patrick McGoohan as a former secret agent kidnapped by a
secret society that refers to him as Number Six, and to their mysterious leader
as Number One. In the finale, Number Six wins back his identity, and eventually
encounters Number One, who’s wearing a mask. Six pulls off the mask to reveal
an ape face. He then pulls that off, only to reveal his own face. Then Six
heads on home. That’s it — no explanations about ape face or anything. McGoohan
had to hide from outraged fans.
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