The 5 Most Frustrating Sitcom Cliffhangers
Situation comedies aren’t usually known for season-ending cliffhangers. But what makes the occasional white-knuckle episode especially frustrating is when the show is canceled before the payoff, leaving viewers wondering what the hell happened.
Redditors on r/Sitcoms recently grumbled about their most aggravating experiences with sitcoms that left them hanging. Sitcoms like…
My Name Is Earl
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Season Four of My Name Is Earl ended on a graphic that promised, “To Be Continued.” That turned out to be a lie and left many of the show’s questions unanswered. Grrr! In a Reddit AMA in 2013, fans tried to get closure by asking show creator Greg Garcia, “Who was Earl Jr.’s real father, and did Earl ever finish the list?”
Garcia’s response: “We never really got the chance to fully figure it out, but the talk in the writers’ room was that Earl Jr.’s dad was going to be someone famous. Like Dave Chappelle or Lil Jon. Someone that came to town on tour, and Joy slept with. But when we got canceled, we never got the chance to figure it out.”
Benson
Soap spin-off Benson saw the rise of Benson DuBois from head of household affairs for Governor Eugene Gatling to state budget director to lieutenant governor. In the show’s final season, Benson runs for the governor job against his old boss.
That final season saw the two friends battling for the election win, with the last episode ending on a freeze frame as Benson and Gatling wait for the final results. Who wins the election? Because the show got canceled, viewers never found out. But executive producer Bob Fraser later revealed that Gatling would have won, with Benson becoming a U.S. Senator.
Last Man on Earth
At the end of Season Four, Will Forte and the gang discover a small house and farm in Tapachula. It looks like the perfect new home until they’re surrounded by strange underground colonists. And that’s all she wrote, folks.
Forte told the Good One podcast (via Collider) what would have happened if the show hadn’t been canned: “The way that we would have handled these people — basically they had been in this bunker, and they went down when the virus had first started. They had some kind of medical expert or scientist who knew, ‘At this certain point, the virus will be dormant. You’ll be safe to get back out.’ Then they see a bunch of stragglers — us. And we represent a real threat to them because they’d thought everything was dead, so they quarantine us. And we eventually communicate with them a little bit. They get comfortable with us. They’re very nice people. They look scary but they end up being nice people.”
Mork & Mindy
Yeesh, what a mess. Mork & Mindy’s fourth season was set to end on a three-part cliffhanger, with the titular characters running through time from a ray-gun-wielding, Neptunian baddie named Kalnik. The final episode ends with Mork and Mindy escaping into the Vortex, holding on to each other for dear life. (The comedy, which promised a fish-out-of-water alien trying to understand Earth culture, had become a sci-fi mess.) What happens next? Tune in next fall to find out!
But the show was canceled, forcing ABC to shift the order of its episodes to kinda, sorta wrap up the series with Mork’s final report to Orson. What happened to the couple swirling in the Vortex? We’ll never know.
How I Met Your Father
How I Met Your Father never took off in the way that the original How I Met Your Mother did, ending before it could pay off its mystery. The convoluted conclusion to Season Two hinted that Sid might be Sophie’s future husband, but that was likely misdirection. The good news? The show’s dismal ratings mean no one is clamoring to find out who Your Father really is.
