10 Great TV Shows That Lost It By The End
3. Roseanne
People often forget what a massive hit Roseanne was for a time: it was the most popular television show in America from season two and remained in the top ten for nearly a decade, the Friends or Big Bang Theory of its generation. That is, until the penultimate season, when ratings plummeted sufficiently for 1997s season nine to be declared its last.
And what a last season no, not in a good way. Roseanne was always a show about a working class family who loved each other only slightly more than they loved to fight with each other. Roseanne winning the lottery? Terrible themed episodes on Xena Warrior Princess, The Jerry Springer Show, Evita and Under Siege? Roseanne modelling for Playboy, entering a beauty pageant, her sister Jackie becoming a professional wrestler, going on a date with a prince? The intentionally ridiculous Married With Children would have balked at most of these plotlines, never mind shoehorned them all into one season.
In the series finale, it was revealed that all of the ridiculous nonsense that had come before was a fantasy: Roseannes way of coping with the loss of her beloved husband Dan, whose heart attack at the end of season eight was revealed to have been fatal after all. This didnt make up for the preceding twenty-three episodes of horrifying rubbish wed sat through, but at least it returned the show to normal in the closing moments.