10 Most Bizarre TV Series Finales In History
4. St Elsewhere Took Place Inside a Child's Mind
The 1980s hospital drama St. Elsewhere is best known for two things - launching the career of Denzel Washington and unwittingly creating a sprawling fictional universe. Knowing that the show was to be cancelled, St. Elsewhere's writing team pitched increasingly ridiculous ways to end the series with a bang. Possible endings included a nuclear bomb wiping out the hospital whilst another had one character admit to assassinating JFK.
The "least bad" option was that the St. Elsewhere hospital was actually inside a child's snow globe. The characters and situations weren't real at all, they had been thought up by young Thomas Westphall. It's a daft ending, a Hail Mary by a departing writing team. However, it had extraordinary, unintended implications for the rest of network television.
The show had alluded to several different shows whilst it was on the air. If St. Elswhere was invented by Thomas, then surely so were these other series? It's a mind-bending concept that, in essence, means that series as diverse as Cheers, The X-Files, The Wire, and Arrested Development all share the same fictional universe. When you look deeper into the "Tommyverse", it makes the MCU look like amateur hour.