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When Friends producers Marta Kauffman and David Crane met more than two years ago to pen what was supposed to be the final scene for their wildly popular sitcom, they ran headlong into an impenetrable case of writer’s block.

Try as they might, they sat for days, but the right words and tone just wouldn’t come. “We kept pitching line after line, and ultimately we just decided not to do it,” Crane said at the time. “We finally looked at each other and said, ‘Well, obviously it can’t be written’ ... So we lopped off the final scene. It was just too hard.”

Harder than some might imagine. When it comes to putting the finishing touches on a popular television show, producers and writers often find it extremely difficult to do goodbyes — and even more difficult to do them well.

There’s intense creative pressure to not only satisfy the expectations of fans who are emotionally invested in a show, but also the demands of network executives who crave the kind of big-event programming that will deliver substantial ratings.

“I think there’s a temptation to do something clever — something unexpected,” says Tim Brooks, a television historian and co-author of The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network and Cable TV Shows.

“The problem, however, is that by now we’ve all watched so many of these finales that it’s very difficult to do anything that feels truly original. There’s a whole list (of finales) everyone’s got to compete with.”

May, of course, has become the season for farewells. This month, seven prime-time shows, including NBC’s groundbreaking The West Wing and Will & Grace, will sail into the sunset. Other shows on their way out include 7th Heaven, which may get a reprieve (The WB); Malcolm in the Middle (Fox); That ‘70s Show (Fox); Alias (ABC); and Charmed (The WB). Unlike Seinfeld (1998) and Friends (2004), which were riding high in the ratings when they bid adieu, this season’s crop of departing shows are all past their Nielsen prime. That means there will be considerably less blaring hype and fanfare attached to their farewells.

Still, these shows do have their intensely loyal followers, and in their heyday they were valuable pieces of property for their networks. So their production teams all will be hoping to put together a quality swan song and go out on a high note.

The old style farewell

This wasn’t always the case. For decades, TV shows didn’t concern themselves with the grand finale. Every episode — even the last ones — would play out like the others. The conventional thinking was that building to some kind of climax would diminish the show’s value in syndication.

“Even shows that cried out for an ending — say, like Gilligan’s Island’ — never ended, says Robert Thompson, a pop-culture professor at Syracuse University. “When that series went off the air, nothing had changed. Gilligan and the others were still stranded on that blasted island.”

In the summer of 1967, ABC’s serialized action series The Fugitive became the first show to demonstrate the seductive power of a finale. At last, Richard Kimble (David Janssen) caught up with the one-armed man who murdered his wife, and proved his innocence. The show-stopper was seen by more people than any single episode of a regular series up to that time.

“It was such a huge success that you would have thought television programmers would have jumped on that bandwagon like crazy,” says Thompson. “But they didn’t.”

It wasn’t until 10 years later and The Mary Tyler Moore Show, with its weepy farewell and heart-tugging group hug, that the finale floodgates finally opened. Kauffman still regards it as the “gold standard” of TV finales, and Thompson says it was the episode that changed everything.

“At that point it finally clicked in the brains of TV executives: If you’re going to live with these characters for so many years, it’s only natural to want some kind of closure,” he says. “When longtime neighbours decide to move, you throw them a farewell party. You just don’t let them pass into the night.”

And thus the era of the “big-event” finale began. In February 1983, 125 million viewers tuned into the two-hour swan song of M*A*S*H* the largest audience ever for a single episode. In the years since, finales for series such as The Cosby Show, Dallas, Cheers, Seinfeld, The X-Files, Friends, Sex and the City and Everybody Loves Raymond have been treated like major pop-cultural events.

But as the TV finales pile up, it has become clear that the truly beloved ones are few and far between. While the hilarious and totally unexpected dream ending of Newhart may be fondly recalled, the surreal finish of St. Elsewhere probably turned off as many viewers as it pleased.

The key to creating a satisfying sendoff, says Brooks, is to avoid self-indulgence and stay true to the spirit of the show. “You want to tie up some loose ends and make it feel like a natural fit,” he says.

“Too many shows try to be overly clever and cutesy in their desire to go out with a bang. Audiences see right through that.”

Thompson agrees. He says the era of the “throw-‘em-a-big-curveball” finale has faded, and that understated farewells such as the one Everybody Loves Raymond produced last May will most likely become the norm.

“There was nothing particularly memorable that stands out with that episode, but in many ways it was the perfect ending. It was a touching episode that stayed consistent with what the show is all about.”[[In-content Ad]]

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