Fox didn't air it but King of the Hill has a real ending
I remember the show used to get jerked around a lot on the schedule towards the end of its run. It also got episodes preempted a fair amount. The episode "To Sirloin With Love" was indeed the series finale. Even the title suggests a callback to a classic movie (To Sir, With Love) with a great grow-up-and-graduate scene that still manages to leave a core of main characters in place. This episode story line did the same thing.
The episode is listed as number 20 with another four episodes that got released later in either streaming or a burn-off. This confuses most viewers into wrongly thinking the
Manic Kahn-Day episode (number 24) was the finale. Once they knew the series was getting chopped, they aired the finale as number 20 out of sequence so people would see it in the correct network slot. It features a final line of dialog and a final camera movement that "mirror echoed" those from the very first series episode.
Yup!
My Name Is Earl may have left the deliberate semi-cliffhanger simply in a faint hope that the writers would have a good jump off point if a miracle reprieve had happened. Really, they concluded the Hickey extended clan's main stories as well as could be expected for a sitcom.
Sure, the series had some over-arcing aspects too, but there wasn't much more to the last "mystery" than a sense of just another bit of karma playing out against Darnell for cuckolding Earl just as Earl finds his karma list has dragged him back to his real son. I saw the Earl Jr. mystery as a rim-shot after the big punchline about Dodge's Dad.
I agree that people have listed shows here that had actual endings. They may have disagreed about where or how a story ended but they were not all cases of being yanked off air suddenly. Also, I think the concept of expecting a season finale (even a series finale) for a situational comedy series is a pretty recent trend in TV history.
If I'd watched an old drama like
The Fugitive for years and it got suddenly yanked with no ending, I'd be steamed. A show like
Seinfeld may have been better off NOT doing a finale on the other hand.
MASH pretty much deserved an ending because they'd spent more time in TV-show Korea than the duration of the real Korean War hostilities or the (Vietnam) one it actually represented in parody. I think that generation of viewers went on to expect every long-running sitcom to have a grand finale.
Now the cliffhanger issue is used like a tactical game between the creative team and the networks with the viewers caught in their crossfire.
Eeek!!! I'm getting dressed.
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