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Newhart was so bent on keeping the ending a surprise that he actually cooked up a fake ending and fed it to the tabloids. In it, he died and went to heaven, where he met God, played by George Burns.

Roseanne (1997):

Roseanne also went out with an "it was all a dream" ending, but the results were more of a nightmare.

Up until the final episode, viewers had been led to believe that the blue-collar Conner family had won the lottery and that Roseanne's TV husband Dan (John Goodman) had survived a heart attack.

But in the finale, Roseanne reveals in a bizarre voice-over that the show's entire final season was all fiction that she wrote as therapy after Dan died. Her husband's apparent survival had been just part of her fantasy.

In the voiceover, Roseanne slips back and forth between herself and her character, talking about the origins of the show and her relationship with the characters, in a monologue that might have been even more confusing than the troubled star's personal life at the time.

When Roseanne says, "My sister in real life is gay," it sounds as if she's talking about her real-life sister. She's actually referring to her on-screen sister Jackie (Laurie Metcalf), who had suffered many man problems throughout the series.

Seinfeld (1998): Chief writer Larry David vowed never to allow Seinfeld the slightest drip of sentimentality, and the show went down making fun of itself all the way.

It begins with George and Jerry gloating over their good fortune after NBC picks up their TV pilot — a show with no plot, just like Seinfeld itself.