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Cancelled TV Shows That Never Provided A Proper Ending

M

Mark Giardina

One program was " Now and Again."

The show ended with Michael Wiseman, aka Michael Newman, played by Eric Close, going to get his wife and daughter despite the threat of death from Doctor Morris (Dennis Haysbert). The audience was left in the lurch as to whether the Wiseman family escaped unharmed, or were hunted down and killed by the government.

For those of you who never saw the show John Goodman played the part of Michael Wiseman; an insurance salesman who died when he accidentally fell in front of a subway. His brain is removed and placed into the body of a younger man (Eric Close) who can best be described as a mini-superman, minus the flying and cape. Wiseman's family still mourns his death and he wants very much to be with them, but is told he can't because he's a top government secret.

I always like the show, but unfortunately it just lasted 22 episodes before being canceled.

Another show, and is is going WAY BACK....was a western called a Man Called Shenandoah. It starred Robert Horton (who played in Wagon Train) as a cowboy who was shot and wounded. When he recovers he can't remember his past. The show ended without ever revealing who Shenandoah was; a gunfighter, lawman, or trying to find where the Wagon Train was going.

If you remember any other programs that left loose ends, please write them down. I'd be interesting in reading them.
 
Good topic. :)

I can think of three right off the bat:

Gilligan's Island; They were supposed to have a fourth and final season, and plans were for them to finally get off the island in the finale. Long and complicated story short, CBS changed it's mind about canceling Gunsmoke, and somehow that decision adversely affected GI.

Married, With Children; According to cast members interviewed on the E! True Hollywood Story, Fox promised the producers of MWC a final season with a fitting finale, then shifted gears and canceled it while cast members were on hiatus. They were very angry that they didn't get their finale.

Boston Common; A character who worked in the Student Services Dept., played by Tasha Smith, was fired by the college president, who was played by the guy who played Robin Colcord on Cheers (sorry, I can't think of his name), after she clobbered the son of a wealthy donor to the college after he got too grabby. It was the finale to Season 2, then the show was canceled, so if you liked BC, you were left hanging. :mad:
 
Run For Your Life (65-68) starred Ben Gazzara as a wealthy lawyer who is told he has only a couple of years to live. He decides to do the things he's never had time to do, and embarks on a series of adventures where he goes to new places and meets new people. The plots tended to be along the lines of the Fugitive or Route 66.

An ending was never promised - but fans of the show were hoping for a "happy" ending...a cure for the fatal disease, so he could go on living. Never happened, so I guess we can assume he died.
 
Lkeller said:
Run For Your Life (65-68) starred Ben Gazzara as a wealthy lawyer who is told he has only a couple of years to live.

...fans of the show were hoping for a "happy" ending...Never happened, so I guess we can assume he died.
Click to expand...

Funny thing was that the show outlived his prognosis by a year -- and he was still "running" after the last episode.
 
Some of my fave shows never seemed to last long:

-Lazarus Man, starring Bob Urich. Urich got cancer, show was cancelled after one season because they figured he was a health risk. I guess he was because he died....6 years later.

-Nowhere Man, starring Bruce Greenwood. Cancelled after one season (95-96).

-Midnight Caller, starring Gary Cole. Ran from 88-91. "Goodnight America, wherever you are"
 
SOAP. The show left us with many, many cliff hangers involving sure deaths of nearly all of the characters. The show was cancelled before those stories could be resolved.

ADAM-12. We could only imagine that Jim Reed went on to become a detective and Pete Malloy became a Watch Commander.
 
On the second season finale for The New WKRP in Cincinnati, Donovan, the program director, was supposed to be coming in on a flight that crashed when the show ended. I guess this was supposed to be a cliffhanger assuming there would be a third season, which didn't happen.
 
The Jay North/Gale Gordon Dennis the Menace...the last episode was a very boring one where Mr. Wilson's Aunt Emma paid a visit to the Wilsons..Dennis wasn't featured all that much on that. Years ago I seem to remember reading where there was supposed to be another season of Dennis but with Gordon leaving to go to the Lucy Show, Jay's issues and the rest of cast was pretty much bored with doing the show...I seriously doubt it.

The Brady Bunch....last episode was whe Greg's hair turned orange. Actually the brady Bunch cast thought their show would continue another year but was suddenly cancelled.

Here's Lucy...there actually was an ending to this show, well somewhat. The last scene of the 1972-1973 season, once the employment agency was sold..Lucy put up a sign said "closed". That was supposed to be the last show. However Lucille Ball was talked into do another season of Here's Lucy and that last scene was re-shot to feature "temporary closed" or something like that.

Years ago I remember hearing a radio interview with Alan Young where he said that Mr. Ed was to last another year only to be cancelled due to some CBS bigshot who wanted to show how much power he had. Since a lot of Mr. Ed episodes were so much alike...I have no idea how that show ended.

Car 54 Where Are You....considered a classic by many yet it only ran for two seasons. I seem to recall hearing that show was supposed to last longer than it did but something due to the location where that show was filmed ( on the streets in the Bronx ) caused Car 54 to end.
 
LOST IN SPACE (1965-68). I always wanted them to get home. With the success of such reunion movies like RESCUE FROM GILLIGAN'S ISLAND, I always had hoped that they would do a reunion movie called "No Longer LOST IN SPACE". That final episode back in 1968 about the Intergalactic Junkman just plain sucked!
 
Star Trek: Enterprise, in 2005. Having a nice little one-hour finale with Jonathan Frakes and Marina Sirtis doing a holodeck recreation of the final voyage of the NX-01 was just utterly weak compared to all the other final episodes the franchise did over the years.

Then again, the show was weak from the start thanks to UPN.
 
RicoGregg said:
Gilligan's Island; They were supposed to have a fourth and final season, and plans were for them to finally get off the island in the finale. Long and complicated story short, CBS changed it's mind about canceling Gunsmoke, and somehow that decision adversely affected GI.
Click to expand...

Ironically when Gunsmoke was cancelled they didn't do a proper ending either much to the chargin of the cast. By 1975 though the fanbase was eroded and Miss Kitty long gone, so the public outcry of the show's near cancellation in 1967 didn't occur the second time around.
 
HOgans Heroe's. I would have loved to see the war end, and Klink find out about Hogans operation. Of course Sgt. Shultz would "Know Nothing".

On the other end, the best ending to a series EVER, was the last episode of Newhart, where Bob wakes up in bed with Susanne Pleshette, his wife from his previous series, and talks about the "strange dream he had".
 
sack said:
On the other end, the best ending to a series EVER, was the last episode of Newhart, where Bob wakes up in bed with Susanne Pleshette, his wife from his previous series, and talks about the "strange dream he had".
Click to expand...

Fair enough, but I would nominate for second place the finale of The Fugitive, where Richard Kimball and Lt. Gerard finally meet up with the one-armed man. A TV classic if there ever was one. It's worth a separate DVD of it's own.
 
HOgans Heroe's. I would have loved to see the war end, and Klink find out about Hogans operation. Of course Sgt. Shultz would "Know Nothing".

There was talk of a theatrical movie a few years back based on Hogan's Heroes. I guess nothing came out of it.
Then again there is always Stalog 17, which did have an ending.
 
Coronet Blue (CBS, summer 1967): A man (Frank Converse)
is pulled out of the East River, barely alive. In the hospital,
he is told (or is given the name) that his name is Michael Alden,
and that he was mumbling the words "Coronet Blue" when he
was rescued. Alden spends the series trying to figure out what
it all means: is he a cop ambushed by mobsters, is he a mobster
who was a target of an unsuccessful hit, or what? And the show
explores both possibilities.

The problem is that Herb Brodkin had been guaranteed a time slot
on CBS's fall 1965 schedule, so he went ahead and wrote and filmed
13 episodes. 1965 came and went, as did 1966, and CBS showed no
intention of scheduling the show, so Brodkin suggested the network
play it off and salvage something from it in the summer of 1967. It
worked its way into the top 20, and CBS wanted to make it a regular
series, but Frank Converse had moved to ABC to do N.Y.P.D.

So we still don't know who Michael Alden was or what "Coronet Blue"
meant.
 
Need I add "The Wonder Years." Cancelled after its sixth season with Kevin, Winnie, and Paul just completing their junior year in high school, with the end of its hour-long finale rushing through the details of what happened to the Arnold family after the show ended in summer 1973 "reel time" (Karen's new baby, Kevin's dad passing away two years later and Wayne taking over the furniture factory, Paul off to Harvard, and Winnie studying for 8 years in Paris--with Kevin marrying someone else).

I had heard, IIRC, that TWY had been belatedly cancelled after the production of what became the series finale, and the details of what happened to the characters later added to the end of the show. Does anyone know for sure the history behind the finale of "Wonder Years?"
 
I'd read at the time TWY wanted to do a proper finale that would detail Dad's death, whether or not Kevin and Winnie "did it", etc but they had to just rush those details onto the last show.
 
Tim from Springfield said:
Need I add "The Wonder Years." Cancelled after its sixth season with Kevin, Winnie, and Paul just completing their junior year in high school, with the end of its hour-long finale rushing through the details of what happened to the Arnold family after the show ended in summer 1973 "reel time" (Karen's new baby, Kevin's dad passing away two years later and Wayne taking over the furniture factory, Paul off to Harvard, and Winnie studying for 8 years in Paris--with Kevin marrying someone else).

I had heard, IIRC, that TWY had been belatedly cancelled after the production of what became the series finale, and the details of what happened to the characters later added to the end of the show. Does anyone know for sure the history behind the finale of "Wonder Years?"
Click to expand...

All my information is at best second hand, but story has it that a female crew member of The Wonder Years had filed a sexual harrassment lawsuit against Fred Savage and Jason Hervey. Her suit purportedly included the ABC network as a co-defendant. Needless to say, ABC was not happy because apparently, this was not the first sexual harassment complaint coming from that show. The first one was handled quietly out of public view.

Originally, ABC had plans to take the Wonder Years through the end of Kevin Arnold's senior year, but as a result of the newest complaint, suits at ABC got fed up, and canceled the show a year early.
 
"8 Rules".

Third season ends with Cate and Ed Gibb appearing to get together romantically and there is talk of moving from Detroit to NYC but......
 
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