5 Iconic TV Sitcom Tag Scenes From The 2010s

A tag scene is the cold open's lesser known sibling. Done right, a tag scene can become one of the most iconic scenes from the entire show. Done wrong, and audiences will skip straight onto the next episode during their binge watching session.

For those of you that don't know, a tag scene is the sequence that comes at the end of an episode. Sometimes they're only a few seconds long, sometimes they are minutes long, it really varies! The purpose of a tag scene is to wrap up the episode's story and theme in a neat little package, but it's also important for the scene to work as a stand alone moment - similar to a cold open.

The perfect tag scene needs to encompass the episode and its events well, and it needs to be memorable and either funny, shocking or maybe even dramatic and tear-jerking. It needs to leave the audience satisfied; after all it's the last thing they see. The perfect tag scene is short but sweet, and it really has to pack a punch for it to be memorable.

Community is a show that did tag scenes well, with memorable bits like 'Troy and Abed in the morning' or Troy and Abed rapping in Spanish - or anything TroBed really! And although this list could have easily been ALL Community entries, the 2010s had many sitcoms that implemented the tried and true tag scene successfully.

Oh Gary, Jerry, Larry, Terry... your life in the Parks Department was a rocky one wasn't it?

When Parks and Rec began we were introduced to a few side characters in the Pawnee Park's Department, including Donna Meagle and Jerry Gergich. Jerry Gergich was the laughing stock of the show, as every single character seemed to dislike Jerry and force him into terrible jobs.

Jerry's failure at the Parks Department was a running gag throughout the show's run and the other characters' distaste for him gave us a lot of laughs along the way. As the show continued, the running gags surrounding Jerry got more and more ridiculous, including his beautiful successful family and his love of the saddest most pathetic things, like how his favourite place in the world was Muncie, Indiana.

The best running gag about Jerry started during Season 4. In the tag scene at the end of the episode The Trial of Leslie Knope we see Jerry being interviewed as a witness for Leslie's trial. Leslie asks Jerry to state his name for the committee and he responds with Gary Gergich, to which Leslie replies with disgust that he "can't even get [his] own name right". That is when we find out in a hilarious twist of events that Gary is his real name. After repeating both names over and over and noting that they're both awful, Leslie resigns to keep calling him Jerry.

And so began one of the most ridiculous jokes in the show: Gary, Jerry, Larry, Terry. Poor Gary was always the bud of the joke, no matter what name people were calling him by.