Alternative TV Endings
How Mad Men, Friends and Dawson's Creek nearly ended so differently (MAJOR SPOILER ALERT)
Follow Charlotte on Twitter: @charlotteduckPicture Editor: Tim Knowles
RexMad Men
How It Ends: Don Draper ends up at a retreat in California, from which he calls Peggy and confesses to everything he’s done wrong. The final scene sees him sitting on a grassy cliff with other retreat-goers and smiling, before the Coca-Cola’s famous “I’d Like To Buy The World A Coke” commercial plays.
Alternative Ending: John Slattery, who played silver ox Roger Sterling on the show revealed that Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner kept the finale such a closely-guarded secret that during a script reading for the final episode, he gave out a fake script. “I thought, 'Wait, what?' It wasn't as . . eventful as you would expect." Apparently Weiner then collected together a few core cast members who had been with the show since the beginning and told them the real ending.
RexDawson’s Creek
How It Ends: Joey Potter chooses Pacey, while Dawson becomes a big name film director
Alternative Ending: We always knew Joey should have ended up with Dawson and that’s what the TV bosses thought too. Apparently creator Kevin Williamson started writing Dawson and Joey’s happy ending before changing his mind. "I wanted it to be a twist on the teen genre but also wanted it to be surprising, honest and real and say something about soul mates and what soul mates can be," he revealed. "That's why we did it that way. When you left the show in that last moment, they're a family and everyone got what they wanted. There was fulfilment and they were all happy."
GettyFriends
How It Ends: Ross and Rachel’s romance was one of the enduring storylines of Friends so it only made sense that they should end up together at the end. Rachel got off the plane to Paris to went home with Ross.
Alternative Ending: It almost didn’t happen. One of the show’s producers revealed that ending with Ross and Rachel together"seems so expected". Originally, writers contemplated: "Maybe we do the vague, 'There is hope for the future,'" he said. "Then we are like, 'Screw that. We have waited 10 years. Give them what they want.'"
Downton Abbey
How It Ends: Downton Abbey’s third series Christmas Special had fans reeling after they watched Matthew Crawley die in a car accident just moments after his first child was born.
Alternative Ending: Julian Fellowes revealed that Dan Stevens (who played the role of Matthew Crawley) was determined to leave the show, even though he offered him alternative storylines which would have meant he could pursue other roles. “If he [Stevens] had been prepared to come back for maybe two or three episodes in a series, that would be different. Then we could have had a foreign posting or invented a career that would have made it possible for him to be away,” the creator said. Executive producer Graeme Neame confirmed that, despite alternative endings being banded around, because of Matthew and Mary’s romance, the only option was to kill him off. “It was too big a journey that the audience had been on with this relationship. The idea that he would go off on the journey and she wouldn’t go with him, or the idea that he would leave her or she would leave him, I think that would have been so disappointing and unbelievable to an audience. The only course open to us was that the character had to die.”
RexThe Hills
How It Ends: Brody Jenner says goodbye to his ex Kristin Cavallari as she leaves LA in a stretch limo. A montage of the series is played, before the camera returns to Brody in front of the Hollywood sign, this is then removed and he's revealed to be standing in a studio backlot – this “reality” show wasn't as real as we imagined.
Alternative Ending: Three years after the show wrapped, viewers were treated to an alternative ending. Brody says goodbye to Kristin, the montage rolls but then he returns to Lauren Conrad. He tells her: “I was just saying goodbye to a friend of mine.” She concludes “It's hard to say goodbye.” And he agrees.
RexSex & The City
How It Ends: After numerous break-ups, Carrie found her man and married Mr Big. But it could have been so different.
Alternative Ending: Producers didn't want the crew to know the ending so filmed several alternative endings. One saw her marrying Aleksandr Petrovsky, aka The Russian, in another she turns down both her suitors and tell her friends how much she loves them.
RexParks & Recreation
How It Ends: All the major characters' futures are explored, including Jerry and Andy. In the ending that aired, Jerry is seen becoming mayor and Andy and April have a son called Jack.
Alternative Ending: The original plan was that Andy would become mayor, rather than Jerry. Executive producer Mike Schur explained: “He was going to shine everyone’s shoes and everyone who meets him loves him, and that’s why we kept him doing that for a while. And one point in season two or season three, we were like, ‘Andy’s going to be the mayor someday!'”
CBSHow I Met Your Mother
How It Ends: We finally discover that the “mother” was a woman named Tracy, played by Cristin Milioti. Sadly, it's also revealed that she has been dead for six years and Ted has been telling his kids the story so that they can learn to accept his new lover, Robin.
Alternative Ending: The DVD extras show that in the original version Tracy doesn't die of a terminal illness and Ted and Robin don't end up together. In fact, the final shot would have been Ted and Tracy and the iconic yellow umbrella floating down the road.
GettySeinfeld
How It Ends: The four main characters, Jerry, George, Elaine and Kramer, are put on trial and sentenced to a year in jail for all the bad things they've done over the show's eight series.
Alternative Ending: The cast actually filmed a trial scene that had the four protagonists found innocent and allowed to walk free, leaving their angry victims behind.
Green Wing
How It Ends: Caroline and Mac are married but at her wedding, Caroline is dragged into the air by a mass of helium balloons. Alan and Joanna decide to commit suicide by walking into the sea after accidentally killing a policeman with a nut allergy.
Alternative Ending: An alternative ending was made but never broadcast. Guy and Mac try to rescue Caroline from the balloons but are dragged into the air with her. Caroline says: "We're all going to die!", to which Mac quite sternly says "Caroline, there's something I've been meaning to tell you". Alan and Joanna had a different ending too: they are seen hanging onto a buoy and talking as they wait for the sea to drown them. The actors apparently preferred this ending and had a third series been commissioned this is what would have been broadcast as it is much more ambiguous.
FoxThe Simpsons (Who Shot Mr Burns?)
How It Ends: Maggie Simpson is found to be the one who shot Mr Burns after he tried stealing her lollipop and his gun fell into her hands.
Alternative Ending: Several “terrible endings” were written for this episode according to showrunner David Mirkin and several alternative recordings were made with Harry Shearer. One version saw Burns' assistant Waylon Smithers as the culprit, while others involved Apu, Moe, Barney and Santa's Little Helper. It was Mirkin's intention to leak the alternative endings to the press but he was unsuccessful and no one took the bait.
RexBreaking Bad
How It Ends: Walter White rescues his partner Jesse Pinkman from a gang who have taken him prisoner but in the process is fatally shot (ironically with his own gun) and dies in a meth lab.
Alternative Ending: The alternative ending discussed saw less redemption for Walter White. The show's creator Vince Gilligan revealed that the original idea was that the character would become a full-on bad guy. “We had an idea for the longest time that Walt was going to break into the downtown jail in Albuquerque and just shoot the sh*t out of the jail with this M60 machine gun and rescue Jesse. We kept asking ourselves, ‘Well, how bad is Walt going to be at the end here? Is he going to kill a bunch of upstanding, law-abiding jail guards?'”
Rex24
How It Ends: Jack's wife is fatally shot and he's seen cradling her his his arms, telling her he is sorry.
Alternative Ending: There were multiple endings shot to keep the finale a surprise for the crew. One saw Teri live through the gunshot and another had her not being shot at all but reuniting with her husband a daughter after long 24 hours.
RexLost
How It Ends: The audience of Season 4 of Lost knew that one of the main character was set to die in the future – it turned out to be Locke.
Alternative Ending: To keep the identity of the victim a secret, three different versions of the finale were filmed and saw Sawyer and Desmond die.
RexDexter
How It Ends: Dexter fakes his own death by driving a fishing boat into a hurricane. He works for a lumber company and hides his true identity under a beard.
Alternative Ending: Dexter wakes up as if from a dream but as the camera pans back, you can see he's on an executioners table about to be administered with a lethal injection. He looks over to the gallery and sees all the people he's killed.
RexNurse Jackie
How It Ends: Jackie collapses after snorting heroin up her nose. You don't know whether she dies or not but as the camera zooms in, Zoey is seen saying: “You're good, Jackie. You're good.”
Alternative Ending: A quite different take on things. In this ending, Jackie is caught up in a hospital fire and tries to rescue a heroin patient before she's consumed by flames. At the last minute though she squeezes herself through a little window and manages to escape.
RexTrue Detective
How It Ends: Cohle and Hart recover in hospital while Papania and Gilbough connect Errol to dozens of missing-person cases. Cohle reveals that he feels a mysterious connection to his daughter having encountered the killer and his life has renewed purpose.
Alternative Ending: Creator Nic Pizzolatto had a very different idea of the ending at first. “I even had an idea where something more mysterious happened to them, where they vanished into the unknown and Gilbough and Papania had to clean up the mess and nobody knows what happens to them. Or it could have gone full-blown supernatural.”
RexWhite Collar
How It Ends: Neil Caffrey pulls off his greatest con yet, making everyone believe he is dead. A yearlater and Neal is in Paris, planning to rob something priceless from the Louvre.
Alternative Ending: There were lots of different ideas being banded around though, according to creator Jeff Eastin. "The last moment was going to be a couple years in the future," he said. "Neal has just gotten out. It's the first he had been off his anklet and has been a free man. He walks down and, standing at the apex [of the Flat Iron Building], he's flipping a coin." If heads came, Neal would walk to the left and get into a limo, with Mozzie to become the "greatest criminals." But he could just have easily become the head of the white collar division and the "world's greatest lawman."
ABCSecrets and Lies
How It Ends: Tom’s killer is revealed to be Ben’s younger daughter Abby (in the original Australian version of the show, she’s known as Eva).
Alternative Ending: Though TV bosses kept the killer the same as in the original, it might have been very different. KaDee Strickland, who plays Christy Crawford in the show, revealed not even the stars knew who the killer was at the end. “We shot alternate endings, so it’s definitely something I’m excited to find out as well. For an actor, it was a lot of fun to be caught up in the same web that the audience is finding themselves in, because I won’t know [who the killer is] until the final episode airs.”
