All stories come to an end. But the economics of the TV business mean some shows stick around long after their stories essentially ended, and eventually turn their protagonists into lumberjacks.
—AS
Dragnet (NBC, 1951–1959, 1967–1970)
“This is the city: Los Angeles, California. I work here. I’m a cop.” “Just the facts, ma’am.” “Ladies and gentlemen, the story you are about to see is true. The names have been changed to protect the innocent.” These oft-repeated phrases defined Sgt. Joe Friday (Jack Webb), a poker-faced bulldog of an L.A. cop who investigated all manner of crimes, from murder, racketeering, and armed robbery to grifting, prostitution, and petty drug dealing. He dragged the truth out of liars by tricking, needling, threatening, cajoling, and outsmarting them, always stopping short of evidence planting, torture, and other extralegal methods. Friday’s interrogations alongside his more easygoing partners formed the template for all buddy-cop stories, and most buddy stories, period.
Film noir and the hard-boiled detective novel strongly influenced Webb, the show’s creator, coproducer, head writer, and star. Webb was a World War II washout who reinvented himself as a radio announcer and actor, penning Dragnet in a purplish macho style modeled on Raymond Chandler. (“You got nice eyes, for a cop,” an overconfident dame tells Friday in season 1’s “The Hammer.” “And I bet your mother had a loud bark,” he replies.) The success of Dragnet made Webb a star on radio (where a version of the program ran from 1949 to 1957) and then on TV. The fat-free storytelling, which leaned on Friday’s voice-over narration (a holdover from radio), was influential as well. It is hard to imagine such plot-and-character-driven, stubbornly non-arty crime series as Columbo, the various Law & Orders and CSIs, or Monk existing without its example. Webb treated each case like a terse short story, front-loading the partners’ approach to crime scene investigations and interrogations with background details and using the walk-aways to set up the next scene or foreshadow complications. It also gave worldwide positive publicity to the LAPD, and made the city seem like a fascinating setting in its own right, rather than a real-world back lot that could double for other places. The wide streets, ranch-style homes and palm trees, and the actors and models and screenwriters who mixed with machinists and nurses and short-order cooks, all strengthened a seedy-glamorous vibe that would become intrinsic to L.A.-genre tales over the next eight decades.
Dragnet’s super-square attitude toward the underground economy and countercultural attitudes was another factor in its success; it let fans enjoy the thrill of visiting taboo terrain, coupled with the assurance that there was no chance of being seduced by anything they saw there, because the righteous, incorruptible Friday, their surrogate and guide, would never allow it. The series returned for a second go-round in the ’60s, adding color and replacing Ben Alexander’s Officer Frank Smith with Harry Morgan as Officer Bill Gannon (a talented cook who made great barbecue sauce and garlic nut-butter sandwiches). The ’60s version seemed even more of a sociocultural relic than its predecessor, although the scenes of Friday lecturing hippies and other layabouts hit the Nixon-era silent majority’s sweet spot, and the special pleading on behalf of police officers made Webb such a hero in the eyes of working cops that when he died, he was given an honor guard by the LAPD, and his character’s badge number, 714, was retired.
—MZS
Flight of the Conchords (HBO, 2007–2009)
TV shows end for all sorts of reasons: The ratings are too low. The budget is too high. One of the stars wants out. The new network president isn’t a fan. The writers have run out of stories.
Flight of the Conchords may be the first show to end because it ran out of songs.
Comedy-musicians Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement toured for years as Flight of the Conchords, aka “the fourth-most-popular folk duo in New Zealand,” and had built up a decent-sized back catalog of song pastiches from multiple genres, including hip-hop, glam rock, and funk, as well as folk. Then the Conchords teamed up with writer/director James Bobin to create an HBO comedy where they played dumber, wildly less successful versions of themselves, barely subsisting on the pathetic gigs scored by their aggressively formal manager Murray (Rhys Darby)—a New Zealand consulate worker in New York who views the band as his true life’s work, even though he understands nothing of the music business, or really business of any kind—and trying to avoid the creepy attentions of their lone fan, Mel (Kristen Schaal).
As a buddy comedy with very specific cultural references (particularly the guys’ hatred and resentment of all things Australian) and an absurd sense of logic (Bret purchasing a second cup for the apartment so throws their finances out of whack that Jemaine eventually becomes a prostitute), it would have been amusing enough. But the two or three songs featured per episode elevated it into something truly special, whether the guys were failing to scare off a couple of muggers with their rap tune “Hiphopopotamus vs. Rhymenoceros” (“There ain’t no party like my nana’s tea party! Hey! Ho!”) or Jemaine was purring the lyrics to the decidedly unsexy “Business Time” (“Girl, tonight we’re gonna make love. You know how I know? Because it’s Wednesday. And Wednesday night is the night that we usually make love.”).
The problem was, the show burned through the duo’s preexisting song list very quickly, and McKenzie and Clement were exhausting themselves writing new tunes on top of co-writing many of the scripts with Bobin. Making a TV series with wholly new songs can be done (Crazy Ex-Girlfriend has already produced nearly as many episodes as Conchords, and didn’t have a stack of old tunes lying around to be used first), but it’s damn hard, and thus understandable why the duo decided to go out on a high note after only two seasons, including a closing number that condensed the entire series into a bad Broadway musical, and a public statement that captured the show’s deadpan humor and blurring of the lines between the real and fake versions of its stars: “While the characters Bret and Jemaine will no longer be around, the real Bret and Jemaine will continue to exist.”
—AS
The Fugitive (ABC, 1963–1967)
The Fugitive was, like Route 66 before it and other series like The Incredible Hulk and Quantum Leap after it, a kind of stealth anthology, following the same main character week after week, but with an ever-changing setting and style. Our hero was Dr. Richard Kimble (David Janssen), wrongly convicted of the murder of his wife, trying to stay free—and just out of the outstretched arm of lawman Philip Gerard (Barry Morse)—while searching for the one-armed man who really committed the crime.
Created by Roy Huggins (in between Maverick and The Rockford Files), it was sober, well-crafted, and engrossing, even though—like most dramas from TV’s early decades—it largely occupied a perpetual present, where Kimble could never really change or get any closer to proving his innocence without invalidating the premise of the show. Series in that era were thought of by the executives who green-lit them as disposable: When they stopped being successful, you just tossed them aside, because who could possibly care about getting closure for a silly TV show?
But when the decision came down to end The Fugitive, the show’s producers pleaded with ABC for one more episode to bring Dr. Kimble’s story to a proper conclusion—an idea so foreign in the era that the network’s executives dismissed it as unnecessary. So producers went directly to advertisers to scrounge up the necessary money to pay for the finale, where Kimble finally caught up with the one-armed man and was set free. (As narrator William Conrad intoned, “Tuesday, August 29: the day the running stopped.”) The episode was the most-watched episode of television at the time, with more than seventy-eight million people watching, and nearly three-quarters of all televisions in use at the time tuned to ABC.
And still it took the business another couple of decades to fully receive the wisdom that audiences like definitive endings.
—AS
Gilligan’s Island (CBS, 1964–1967)
Has any show in TV history benefited more from its theme song than
Gilligan’s Island? Without that catchy, expository tune, cowritten by series creator Sherwood Schwartz and composer George Wyle, Gilligan’s might well be another goofy, high-concept ’60s sitcom remembered only as a punch line, like My Mother the Car. With the song, which lays out how an eclectic band of castaways got stranded on an uncharted desert isle, the show became encoded in the DNA of every Gen Xer and many late boomers, who can not only quote the theme song’s lyrics but cite the many ways that the bumbling Gilligan (Bob Denver) screwed up escape attempts. (Schwartz understood the power of his lyric-writing skills well enough to use them again for his other camp classic, The Brady Bunch.)
Schwartz intended the show to be a social satire along the lines of Ship of Fools or Lord of the Flies but with Abbott and Costello slapstick, a laugh track, and a never-ending array of castaways who would appear on the island for one episode and then leave the original SS Minnow travelers stuck in jungle purgatory. The notion of Gilligan’s Island as prime-time fable never stuck (though Dan Harmon cites it as an influence on Community); its nearly three-decade run as a syndication powerhouse was due to its clever placement on independent stations on weekday afternoons, where children starved for the live-action equivalent of a cartoon could bask in its ritualized silliness. Viewers could always rest assured that B-movie bombshell Ginger Grant (Tina Louise) would do a Marilyn Monroe boop-boop-de-doo number; that wholesome Mary Ann Summers (Dawn Wells) would improbably play the role of the “homely” one despite looking smashing in bared-midriff outfits; that the Skipper (Alan Hale Jr.) would tire of Gilligan’s idiocy and bash him over the head with his yachtsman’s cap; that the Professor (Russell Johnson) would MacGyver a miraculous homemade gadget that Gilligan would then destroy; and that millionaire couple Thurston Howell III (Jim Backus) and his wife, Lovey (Natalie Schafer), would continue to act like millionaires at a country club even though they’d been wearing the same clothes for years and eating coconut with every meal.
—AS & MZS
Good Times (CBS, 1974–1979)
Good Times, about a working-class African American family living in an inner-city Chicago neighborhood, was a third-generation spin-off from Norman Lear’s sitcom factory, derived from Maude, which in turn was spun off from All in the Family. It was one of the most audacious sitcoms of the 1970s and one of the most problematic and ultimately frustrating. Its virtues and faults are woven so tightly together that watching any episode (but especially earlier ones) can give you whiplash, but its vitality eclipses most of the trouble spots, especially when you know how relentlessly CBS pressured the show’s producers to make an inherently raw premise as light and goofy as possible. The main character was Florida Evans (Esther Rolle), wife of the occasionally employed but always hardworking and responsible James Evans (John Amos), and the mother of three children: the “militant midget” Michael (Ralph Carter), Thelma (Bern Nadette Stanis), and James “J.J.” Jr. (Jimmie Walker). Florida was last seen working as a domestic for the title character of Maude, but the show erased nearly all of her backstory, moved her from Maude’s stomping ground of Tuckahoe, New York, to Chicago, Illinois, and started over, even renaming her husband (who was originally called Henry).
The show kept racism, deprivation, class snobbery, and financial distress on the front burner to an extent that was unusual even for a 1970s sitcom; the Bunker family struggled, too, but series creators Eric Monte and Mike Evans and their writers always made sure to point out that it was harder for African Americans to survive, let alone thrive, in a historically unequal society, especially when they had trouble “keeping our heads above water,” to quote the show’s earworm of a theme song. In season 2’s “The I.Q. Test,” Michael interrogates a test question: “‘A mother, father, and two children live in a residence with five bedrooms. The mother and father sleep in one bed and the two children each have their own bedroom. How many guest bedrooms are there?’ How many kids in the ghetto are going to know what a guest bedroom is?” “Yeah, the only time we get a guest room around here is when somebody puts a sleeping bag in the bathtub,” J.J. says. “And a lot of kids in the ghetto don’t have their own bedrooms either,” Florida adds. The dialogue was often this bluntly explanatory, and the fact that it seemed intended for white viewers to affirm the shared experience of black ones could rankle; but it was still refreshing to see a lot of the same issues that were hashed out on All in the Family and another one of its predominantly African American spin-offs, the upper-middle-class The Jeffersons, examined in a rougher context. Every Lear sitcom was distinguished by its willingness to jump between broad comedy and dark drama; Good Times pushed that tendency far indeed, especially in season 5’s two-parter “The Evans Get Involved,” which introduced Janet Jackson as Penny Gordon Woods, a girl whose mother beat her and burned her with an iron.
Unfortunately, the same breakout supporting performance that made the show a hit—Walker’s wisecracking, loudly attired J.J.—doomed its creative potential. CBS wanted to turn him into another de facto lead, like Fonzie from Happy Days, the better to goose the ratings and sell lunchboxes and other merchandise to kids. John Amos worried that J.J.’s clowning crossed the line into what black arts scholars called “coonery,” and chastised Lear and other producers over stereotypical touches that kept creeping into the scripts; after one too many disagreements, his contract was not renewed and his character was killed off in the season 4 two-parter “The Big Move.” Rolle left the show the following year, with the writers marrying off the now-widowed Florida to her new love, Carl Dixon (Moses Gunn). Rolle was back on the show again a year after that (minus Carl, who had died of cancer offscreen), but Good Times’ structural integrity had been so abused that the best it could do was limp toward the finish line.
—MZS
The Good Wife (CBS, 2009–2016)
If you saw Chicago attorney Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies), the heroine of The Good Wife, in a crowd and didn’t recognize her as the embattled wife of disgraced Cook County state’s attorney Peter Florrick (Chris Noth), you might not form any immediate impression beyond the fact that she was attractive, elegant, and watchful. She’s the sort of person who never speaks just for the sake of speaking; she reads the room first, and probably makes a mental flowchart to remind herself of who’s powerful and who’s not and what consequences might accrue if she’s too familiar with this person or that person. Alicia acquired this skill from being a politician’s wife, a lawyer, and a woman—but perhaps not in that order. Whether Alicia is bantering with the firm’s chief investigator, Kalinda Sharma (Archie Panjabi), flirting with her old college classmate turned mentor Will Gardner (Josh Charles), or trying to please and impress Will’s fellow senior partner Diane Lockhart (Christine Baranski), you can sense the calculations beneath the easygoing facade—the resentment at Peter for derailing her professional life and decimating her personal life, then trapping her into supporting him; her annoyance at herself for feeling attracted to Peter anyway; her fear that that the wrong word, the wrong move, could set her back again.
Individual episodes stuck to the crime-and-legal-show template, following Alicia and her colleagues at a prestigious law firm as they represented clients in class-action lawsuits against polluters and negligent railway companies, private citizens accused of felony offenses, whistle-blowers calling foul on corrupt businesses and government agencies, and murder suspects. But at its core, this was a bleeding heart of the big-city show, continuing a lineage that stretches from The Defenders, Naked City, and East Side/West Side through Hill Street Blues and The Wire. The show often felt like The Bonfire of the Vanities transferred to the Windy City, but with better female characters and more compassion: a borderline-screwball comedy filled with quotable lines. (“If you go nuclear, don’t leave missiles in your silo,” Diane advises.)
The series understood how news organizations can be used as weapons, and how they knowingly allow themselves to be used as weapons. (The chief exponent of this principle was Alan Cumming’s Eli Gold, Peter’s campa
ign manager, a ruthlessly expedient PR manipulator whose machinations could have powered quite a spin-off had the producers decided to make one.) There were scandals, scandals within scandals, double crosses, triple crosses, sweet victories and bitter defeats, and sudden, horrendous deaths (including one so tragic that fans still feel its sting).
In time, Alicia evolved from a humiliated spouse and lowly associate to become a coolheaded leader, public figure, and founder of her own law firm, the First Lady to the governor of Illinois (alongside her once-estranged, still-untrustworthy husband), and, briefly, Cook County state’s attorney (a position taken from her after an ethics scandal). It flagged somewhat in its final seasons, perhaps because Alicia had come so far since the pilot that it seemed as if her journey, in drama if not life, was done. “Men can be lazy, women can’t, and I think that goes double for you,” Diane once told Alicia. Lesson learned.
—MZS
Grey’s Anatomy (ABC, 2005–present)
The most remarkable part of the Grey’s Anatomy story isn’t that it’s been a hit for more than a decade, nor that it inspired ABC to devote an entire night of programming to shows produced by Grey’s creator Shonda Rhimes, nor even that Rhimes had never so much as written for another TV series, let alone created one that got on the air, prior to Grey’s.
No, the most remarkable part of the story is how little use ABC had for Grey’s when it debuted.
In the spring of 2005, ABC executives were feeling pretty damn pleased about themselves, and with good reason. A network is lucky if it debuts one giant hit every couple of years, but ABC had just launched two of them in one season with the fall premieres of Desperate Housewives and Lost. That duo dragged the network out of irrelevance and made it a viewer destination again.
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