9 TV Shows That Almost Had Different Finales: ‘Squid Game,’ ‘You’ & More
That Squid Game send-off with an Oscar-winner cameo, that meta conclusion of The Hills, the downer revelation of How I Met Your Mother, and even the destination for Star Trek: Voyager could have played out differently on screen. The writers and producers behind those TV shows and many others had different endings in mind at one point.
Here’s the backstory behind the TV finales that aired and those that could have been.
9-1-1: Lone Star
After 9-1-1: Lone Star’s fifth season became its final season, its writers plotted a series finale in which the 126 averts a nuclear meltdown and a flash-forward that reveals happy endings for Owen (Rob Lowe), T.K. (Ronen Rubinstein), Carlos (Rafael Silva), and the rest of the team.
Co-showrunner Rashad Raisani told TV Insider he mulled over other possibilities, though: “One alternate ending was, I definitely considered killing Owen and letting his death just be the death. [But] it just felt like it was too sad on top of the fact that [the show ending] was sad already. We also had talked about T.K. and Carlos maybe moving to a new city and starting a new life together somewhere else in Texas to set up a possible spinoff. To be honest, I’d say those are the two biggest. Everything else I think was we ended where we wanted to. We just ended two years too soon.”
The Good Wife
The Good Wife’s finale seems to set up a happily-ever-after for Alicia (Julianna Margulies) and Jason (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) before ending on a note of professional, romantic, and ethical ambiguity for the title lawyer. And creators Robert and Michelle King did consider a more romantic resolution for the legal drama, as they told fans.
“We were tempted to have Alicia chase after a man in the end — stop him from getting on a train or an airplane at the last minute, hold him, kiss him. We like those endings,” they wrote in a letter after the finale aired. “But there was something false about it here. It isn’t who Alicia is. In the end, the story of Alicia isn’t about who she’ll be with; it’s about who she’ll be.”
The Hills
This MTV reality show signs off with Brody Jenner bidding farewell to on-again, off-again girlfriend Kristin Cavallari as she departs for Europe. Then the camera pulls back to show Brody filming the scene on a Hollywood backlot, a nod to the scripted nature of “reality” TV. But creator Adam DiVello shot another ending, too, which actually made it to air in reruns. In that alternate finale, Brody says goodbye to Kristin and then goes home to Lauren Conrad, who had departed the series years earlier.
“None of us knew which one [MTV was] going to pick. It was out of my hands,” DiVello told Entertainment Weekly. “I’m really proud of both versions, but I think we were all waiting for it to come on the screen, and I think even Lauren was surprised when they decided to go with the other one. … I really liked the one with Lauren. It was her story that I started the show with and followed her with Laguna Beach. I always wanted to end it on her face and her being happy.”
How I Met Your Mother
HIMYM’s much-despised series finale — in which the “Mother” a.k.a. Tracy (Cristin Milioti) dies and Barney (Neil Patrick Harris) and Robin’s (Cobie Smulders) marriage ends — almost ended on a happier note. In the alternate ending revealed in a Season 9 DVD extra, the sitcom ends when Ted (Josh Radnor) greets Tracy on the train platform.
Co-creator Carter Bays discussed the alternate version on Twitter in 2014 after the finale aired. “16 days ago today we were in the HIMYM edit room, trying to decide between two very different endings,” he said, per Rolling Stone. “We only shot one script, but through edit room magic, we had two possible outcomes for the series. We chose the ending we chose, and we stand by it. But we loved the other version, too.”
Prison Break
At the end of Prison Break’s “event series” fifth season, Michael (Wentworth Miller) gets his name, his family, and his freedom back, and when we last see him, he’s smiling and seemingly at peace. And creator Paul Scheuring informed TV Insider that the finale script actually struck a more paranoid tone.
“On the page, we had a slightly different ending, with Sara [Sarah Wayne Callies] saying, ‘It’s okay, you don’t have to look over your shoulder anymore.’ And that’s exactly what he does; he looks over his shoulder, having experienced what he experienced and the history that he has,” Scheuring revealed. “And implicit with that is there is probably something out there that will tap him on the shoulder again. That didn’t end up getting shot like that. But that’s one of those alternate endings that may be interesting to fans. The idea was he may have a life again, but there will always be something out there.”
Squid Game
Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) doesn’t make it out of the third and final season of Squid Game alive: He sacrifices himself to save the baby of Jun-hee (Jo Yu-ri). But creator Hwang Dong-hyuk told The Hollywood Reporter he initially thought Gi-hun would survive the games and be the one spying on Cate Blanchett’s character stateside.
“But as I began writing the story, and as I began to think more and more about, ‘What do I want to deliver with the ending of this story,’ and also, ‘What should Gi-hun’s journey and what should his destination be,’ I was witnessing more and more what was happening around the world, and I thought it was more fitting for Gi-hun to send this powerful and impactful message to the world [with his death] and that should be how the story comes to a close,” Hwang said. “The world seems to be headed for the worst. It seems to be becoming, in so many different ways, so much worse ahead. I thought, ‘What kind of sacrifices do we need to make in the current generation for us to be able to leave the future generation with a better world?’ So I wanted Gi-hun’s sacrifice to be a symbol of that.”
Star Trek: Voyager
The “Endgame” of this Star Trek series has a future Janeway (Kate Mulgrew) reverse time to bring her crew safely back to Earth and save an otherwise-doomed Seven of Nine (Jeri Ryan). And that older Janeway, then an admiral, also defeats the Borg Queen (Alice Krige) in the process.
Voyager writer Bryan Fuller outlined another version of that finale to Star Trek Magazine (via The Hollywood Reporter), however. “The idea was this great final image of the Borg armada approaching Earth, and then out of the belly of the beast of the lead ship came Voyager, destroying all of the other Borg in its trail,” Fuller said. “It felt like an epic conclusion to Janeway’s journey with the Borg, and freeing Seven of Nine. That got abandoned somewhere along the road.”
Supernatural
The COVID-19 pandemic put the kibosh on the Supernatural finale idea that showrunner Andrew Dabb and executive producer Bob Singer envisioned, an idea Dabb later described in a souvenir book for crew members. The plan was to send Sam (Jared Padalecki) and Dean (Jensen Ackles) to a version of heaven involving “all the people the boys had met along the way (or, at least, those we could convince to fly to Vancouver) crowded into a re-built Roadhouse, as the band Kansas played our (official unofficial) theme song: ‘Carry On Wayward Son.’”
But Dabb said “that Supernatural ending… ended” amid pandemic restrictions. “I love what we have now, Dean in the car on the open road, but I have to admit that I sometimes think about our original idea — all of Sam and Dean’s family and friends, and one of the greatest rock bands ever on a masterpiece of a set, and I miss it… even though it never really existed,” he wrote. “I miss what it could have been.”
You
You’s final season has Joe (Penn Badgley) fall for Bronte (Madeline Brewer), a purported bookworm who’s secretly plotting revenge on Joe for killing her friend Beck (Elizabeth Lail). Against her better judgment, though, Bronte falls for Joe, too. But she finally gets wise, shoots Joe in the crotch, and ensures he’s thrown behind bars.
The You writers, however, initially planned on Joe dying in the finale. “I would say we operated with that option in mind for a few months before we decided to change it at the very end,” co-showrunner Justin W. Lo told TV Insider. “We knew it would have been at the hands of Bronte.”
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