NBC's highly promoted Friends farewell on 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 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," he said.
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 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.
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," he said.
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 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 Feb. 28, 1983 -- ushered in the current golden age of TV finales with a two and a half hour send-off that was seen by nearly 106 million viewers and still stands as the most watched US telecast ever.
Finale fever reached a new crescendo in 1998 when Seinfeld signed off with its four central characters sentenced to a year in jail for "doing nothing" to stop a crime.
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