NBC’s highly promoted “Friends” farewell Thursday follows a prime-time tradition and marketing strategy dating back just 20 years when programmers abandoned a long-held theory that big-event finales were bad for business.
While it may be hard to imagine in today’s world of 24-hour entertainment hype, sitcoms and drama series -- from “I Love Lucy” to “Gunsmoke” -- tended to end their network runs on a rather nondescript note during television’s first few decades.
“During the 1950s and ’60s, the spectacular was always the one-time only show. It was something like a ‘Peter Pan’ or some major variety special that could attract big audiences,” said Ron Simon, TV curator at the Museum of Television and Radio in New York. “When you said the word ’spectacular,’ or ’special event,’ you never thought in terms of the series finale.”
The modern era of blockbuster finales is widely regarded as having started with the record-shattering “M*A*S*H” farewell in 1983, though experts point to the sensational August 1967 conclusion to “The Fugitive” as the prototype for all TV swan songs that followed.
In what became the highest-rated single episode of any series to that date, 72 percent of the viewing audience tuned in to see Dr. Richard Kimble (played by David Janssen) exonerated of murdering his wife as he finally confronted the elusive one-armed killer he had pursued for four seasons.
Surprisingly, the phenomenon of “The Fugitive” finale on ABC was shrugged off by many TV executives as a rare exception predicated by that show’s then-uniquely serialized premise.
At that time, TV producers generally thought it best for sitcoms and drama series to end their runs without a climactic or conclusive ending. Neatly tying up loose ends was seen as diminishing a show’s rerun value in syndication.
Old wisdom 'absolutely false'Even the goofball comedy “Gilligan’s Island” came to an end with its seven co-stars left marooned on a desert island. It took a two-part reunion special 11 years later to finally return the castaways to civilization.
“The old network wisdom was that television series were supposed to be about a big giant center, with no real beginning and certainly no end,” said Robert Thompson, head of Syracuse University’s Center for the Study of Popular Television. “Well that turned out to be absolutely false.”
The celebrated finale to the long-running hit CBS comedy “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” 10 years later -- in which new management took over the fictional WJM-TV station and fired the entire news staff, except for inept anchor Ted Baxter -- was widely hailed as a brilliant series conclusion.
But the episode, best remembered for the scene in which the cast all shuffle over to Mary’s desk to retrieve a box of tissues in the midst of a group hug, stayed true to the show’s usual half-hour format.
It would be another five-plus years before the mother of all TV farewells -- the “M*A*S*H” conclusion on CBS on Feb. 28, 1983 -- ushered in the current golden age of TV finales with a 2 1/2-hour send-off that was seen by nearly 106 million viewers and still stands as the most watched U.S. telecast ever.
Bringing down the curtain after 11 seasons on the air, Alan Alda and rest of the 4077th mobile hospital unit finally welcome the end of the Korean War, but not before Alda’s Hawkeye Pierce suffers a nervous breakdown. Ironically, the cross-dressing Klinger, always the most eager to get out of the Army, stays behind to marry a Korean woman.
A decade later, Ted Danson’s Sam Malone quietly turned off the lights as the “Cheers” bar closed for the last time to end that show’s 11-year run. Apparently drunken cast members appeared later that night on “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno,” marking the first time a series finale crossed the boundaries of the show itself to spill over into other programs.
Finale fever reached a new crescendo in 1998 when ”Seinfeld” signed off the NBC schedule with the show’s four self-centered central characters sentenced to a year in jail for “doing nothing” to stop a crime.
One of the more unusual network finales of all time was the 1990 last episode of “Newhart.” The show’s star, Bob Newhart, wakes up in bed with Suzanne Pleshette, the TV wife from his previous sitcom, “The Bob Newhart Show,” and tells her the strange dream he just had about running a Vermont country inn -- the whole premise of “Newhart.”
In a similar vein, but one that angered some fans of the hospital show “St. Elsewhere,” that show ended with a surreal scene in which the entire six seasons appeared to have been a figment of an autistic child’s imagination.