Five Great Sitcoms with Truly Terrible Final Seasons
Plenty of sitcoms jump the shark. Sometimes the cast loses a key character or the writers run out of ideas. But perhaps the most frustrating foil is when a sitcom is solid all the way through only to shit the bed for its final season, tarnishing its legacy for all time.
If only these five shows had gotten out a year earlier, we could binge rewatch them without that looming sense of dread.
Roseanne
Roseanne is probably the most famous example of this, as the final season undermined the basic premise of the show. The whole idea behind Roseanne was that it was a show about a struggling blue-collar family in the Midwest and its best episodes often dealt with the Conners’ money troubles. So, in the final season, what do they do? The Conners win the lottery, eliminating their relatability.
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The show also had its most beloved character, John Goodman’s Dan Conner, have an affair in the final season, something the fanbase saw as a betrayal not just of Roseanne, but of who the character of Dan had been for the entire show’s run.
Those two moves in particular were so universally hated that the series finale retconned them, explaining that the whole show was a book written by Roseanne and she just made up the winning the lottery thing. As for Dan’s affair, Roseanne said she made that up, too, and that the real Dan had actually died. Dan’s death would also be retconned when Roseanne was rebooted in 2018 (which, of course, would become The Conners after Roseanne said some awful, racist shit on Twitter).
Scrubs
What’s frustrating about Scrubs is that the quirky hospital comedy had a satisfying ending. The last episode of Season Eight was even called “My Finale” and followed Zach Braff’s J.D. during his final day at Sacred Heart. But then ABC decided to renew the show for another season even though nobody — especially creator Bill Lawrence — wanted that to happen.
With everyone else’s contract fulfilled, the final season only had Donald Faison and John C. McGinley in every episode, whereas most of the other cast members only appeared in a few. The location was different, and the cast was filled out with a bunch of new, young medical interns. It was so different that Lawrence even pleaded with ABC to change the show’s name to Scrubs Med, just to make clear this was a different show. ABC, unfortunately, refused. Of course, everyone hated the new season and abandoned the show.
NewsRadio
When Phil Hartman was murdered by his wife on May 28, 1998, the hilarious, smartly-written sitcom that Hartman was a part of died with it (or should have). NewsRadio was an ensemble show about a New York City radio station in which Hartman plays the station’s egomaniacal star (and the show’s funniest character). While there was some question as to whether the show would continue without Hartman, creator Paul Simms brought in Jon Lovitz as the new on-air voice of WNYX.
Hiring Lovitz was a smart idea. He and Hartman were close in real life, and Lovitz was mourning Hartman as much as the rest of the cast was. Still, even though they tried to move on from it, the show could never escape the dark shadow of Hartman’s horrific death. Season Five flopped without Hartman, and the show was canceled.
The only part of Season Five that was really all that memorable was its premiere (before Lovitz arrived in the next episode). The episode “Bill Moves On” saw the entire cast returning from Bill’s funeral after he’d died of a heart attack. It’s still one of the saddest half hours of television ever made — but also one of its most poignant. It would have made for a fine, if tragic, series finale.
That ‘70s Show
Sure, everyone hates Ashton Kutcher now, but his character, as well as Topher Grace’s, were key to the success of That ‘70s Show. For Season Eight, both actors left the show to pursue their respective movie careers, but without the show’s lead (Grace) or its moronic pretty boy (Kutcher), the dynamics of the basement-dwelling friends were entirely disrupted. The result was a bunch of characters who no longer seemed to relate to each other and storylines that seemed rushed, particularly for the series finale.
Parks and Recreation
While it wasn’t necessarily bad in the beginning, it took a little while for Parks and Recreation to find its footing. But once it added Adam Scott and Rob Lowe at the end of Season Two, the series churned out impeccably funny stuff episode after episode.
Things took a dip when Lowe and Rashida Jones left midway through Season Six, but Season Seven is when the show went completely off the rails. Flashing forward three years after the events of Season Six, Season Seven saw Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler) as the regional director of the National Park Service, as opposed to the spunkiest, most ambitious member of Pawnee, Indiana’s Parks Department. Along with this change, pretty much every other character has a new job or career, and the show’s format shifted to tackle a season-long story arc.
While Parks and Rec fans always rooted for Leslie and no doubt felt she deserved a bigger job, getting such a promotion would have been a great way to end the series. Instead, seeing the Parks and Rec gang reorganize and break up in various ways make it feel almost like a completely different show — and one that wasn’t nearly as funny.
