The 2005-2006 TV season was a slaughterhouse of cancellations…including some long-running TV staples. Below is the synopsis of the last episode of these now ended shows, followed by my thoughts. I didn’t include long-running shows that I never watched (The WB’s "Charmed;" CBS’s "Still Standing"); shows that were good, but only lasted one season (ABC’s "Commander in Chief"); or shows that were heavily promoted to conclude, but ended up getting renewed at the last minute by the CW ("7th Heaven;" "Reba.")

"The West Wing"

Network: NBC
Premiered: Sept. 22, 1999
Finale date: Sunday, May 14
Number of episodes: 154
Number of seasons: 7

What happened in the finale: President Matt Santos (Jimmy Smits) is inaugurated and President Josiah Bartlet (Martin Sheen) leaves office…but not before finally pardoning Toby Ziegler (Richard Schiff) for revealing classified information about a secret military space shuttle to a reporter for The New York Times. The rest of the outgoing White House staff goes on with the rest of their lives. C.J. (Allison Janney) accepts a position to manage a charitable organization run by a billionaire after her boyfriend (and later husband) Danny (Timothy Busfield) convinces her to take it. Charlie (Dulé Hill) heads off to Georgetown Law School. Josh (Bradley Whitford) became Santos’ Chief of Staff, while his girlfriend Donna (Janel Moloney) became Chief of Staff to First Lady Helen Santos (Teri Polo.) Will (Joshua Malina) campaigns to be a Congressman in Oregon (which he eventually wins) following his breakup with Deputy National Security Advisor Kate Harper (Mary McCormack.) Senator Arnold Vinick (Alan Alda) became Santos’ Secretary of State after losing to him in the Presidential election.

My opinion: It was one of the smartest shows on TV, winning four consecutive Best Drama Series Emmys, though I felt like it didn’t deserve the wins for the last two seasons. After creator Aaron Sorkin left following the fourth season, it started to slip creatively. It finally picked up in the last season, which included Santos’ win; the sad goodbye to Leo McGarry, played by John Spencer, who died in real life; and the hook-up of Josh and Donna…which had taken them seven seasons to finally do. The ratings started to slip (and they really plunged when NBC decided to move it from Wednesday to Sunday), but even if the ratings had been good, I think that the seventh season should have been the last one. This show was supposed to be about the Bartlett administration, and its transition to a new administration was the right way to go out.

"Malcolm in the Middle"

Network: FOX
Premiered: Jan. 9, 2000
Finale date: Sunday, May 14
Number of episodes: 151
Number of seasons: 7

What happened in the finale: Malcolm (Frankie Muniz) graduates from high school and he looks forward to going to Harvard, but he can’t afford to go, since they don’t have any money. When Stevie’s (Craig Lamar Traylor) dad Abe (Gary Anthony Williams) offers him a high-paying job, Malcolm’s mom Lois (Jane Kaczmarek) forbids it, since she wants Malcolm to become the President of the United States the hard way. Malcolm ends up becoming the President…and he paid for his tuition through a series of janitorial jobs. Speaking of becoming a janitor, Reese (Justin Berfield) attempts to do a stupid thing in order to become the permanent janitor for the high school. Dewey (Erik Per Sullivan) and Jamie (James and Lukas Rodriguez) become the new troublemakers in the house, now that Malcolm and Reese are gone. The family’s oldest son, Francis (Christopher Masterson), who has never lived permanently in the house since the show started, has had to fend for himself for years. When the show started, he was in military school; then he worked in Alaska; then it was on a dude ranch; finally, he gets a 9-5 job that he likes (he doesn’t tell Lois about it out of spite.) In those years, he married a girl named Piama (Emy Coligado), and they appear to be happy, despite Lois’s intrusion. In the final moments of the show, Lois tells Malcolm’s dad Hal (Bryan Cranston) that she is pregnant with their sixth child, in which he screams, because he figured that they were finally settled and everything was now working as it should.

My opinion: The show has always been funny…except when they showed the scenes of Francis’s life. I noticed that he was barely on in the final season, which made it pretty decent. Since the show has usually been in a bad timeslot (first on early Sundays, where it was constantly pre-empted by football game overruns; and then on Fridays, where no FOX show survives), I’m surprised that it lasted for seven seasons. Almost everyone deserved Emmy nominations, but only Kaczmarek got a nomination for all seven seasons (she lost the first six; we’ll have to see if she wins this year for the final year in August.) The show reminded people of how not to act as a family, but at its core, they seem to love one another (though it was hard to tell sometimes.) It was sometimes cartoonish, which made it appropriate that it was on FOX’s Sunday night adult cartoon lineup. It’s a weird coincidence that the show ended on the same day and date as NBC’s "The West Wing" after seven seasons, because Kaczmarek and "Wing’s" Bradley Whitford are married in real life.

"That ‘70s Show"

Network: FOX
Premiered: Aug. 23, 1998
Finale date: Thursday, May 18
Number of episodes: 200
Number of seasons: 8

What happened in the finale: It finally enters 1980, and all of the characters prepare to deal with the changes in their lives. Red (Kurtwood Smith) and Kitty (Debra Jo Rupp) were going to move to Florida help Bob manage his bait shop, but they decide to stay in Wisconsin after all. Donna (Laura Prepon) breaks up with Randy (Josh Meyers) and decides to head off to college. Hyde’s (Danny Masterson) rich biological father, William Barnett (Tim Reid), gives him ownership of the record store. Fez (Wilmer Valderrama) and Jackie (Mila Kunis) are now dating. Eric (Topher Grace) and Kelso (Ashton Kutcher), who both left the show at the end of the seventh season (though Kutcher made several cameo appearances in the eighth season), both return one last time to ring in the new decade.

My opinion: If it weren’t for the loss of Grace and Kutcher, the show might have lasted even longer. Since they understandably wanted to move on with their careers, the show had to end. While the last season was still funny, you could really feel the loss of Eric and Kelso. Also, they stretched the bounds of timeline credibility a little thin. When the show premiered in 1998, it took place in May of 1976. Eight years later, it finally entered the eighties. I realize that this is fiction, but it isn’t science fiction, so I don’t know why time slowed down so much. This isn’t the first time that time has slowed down on a show…"M*A*S*H," which aired for eleven years despite the Korean War only lasting three years, also did the same thing. It would have been cool if they had kept the timeline correct and re-titled the show "That ‘80s Show," but since FOX already had a short-lived show with that title that was very unfunny, I guess they had to slow down time to keep the theme correct. The ratings were decent throughout its run (FOX usually used it to plug in programming holes), but if it had gone much longer, it would have died a painful death. The Me Decade couldn’t last forever!

"Will & Grace"

Network: NBC
Premiered: Sept. 21, 1998
Finale date: Thursday, May 18
Number of episodes: 192
Number of seasons: 8

What happened in the finale: Grace (Debra Messing) remarries Leo (Harry Connick Jr.) and together they raise their child, Lila, and Will (Eric McCormack) and Vince (Bobby Cannavale) adopt a child, whom they name Ben. Karen (Megan Mullally) finds out that the always unseen Stan had borrowed all of their money following their second divorce, meaning that she is broke. Jack (Sean Hayes) was forced to be Beverly Leslie’s (Leslie Jordan) new "business associate" so that he can pay his bills, but when Beverly dies after a gust of wind blows him off his balcony, Jack inherits all of Beverly’s money, and he uses it to support Karen. Will and Grace grow apart, but in the meantime, Ben (Ben Newmark) and Lila (Maria Thayer) meet each other for the first time in college, and eventually get married. Twenty years later, in the year 2026, Jack and Karen, who live together with Karen’s maid Rosario (Shelley Morrison), arrange a reunion of the four friends in the same bar that they went to in the pilot episode.

My opinion: This was a groundbreaking show for a couple of reasons. It was the first show that managed to have leading gay characters without it courting controversy. After Ellen DeGeneres came out on her sitcom, her last season was all about her being gay…not about being funny. "W&G" managed to be funny with characters that just happened to be gay. Sure…many of the jokes were about being gay, but the show never tried to preach to anyone. Many other critics have criticized the show for relying too heavily on big name guest stars, but many of those guest stars have won Emmys for their memorable appearances. Speaking of Emmys…Messing, McCormack, Mullally, and Hayes have all won one for the show (only "All in the Family" and "The Golden Girls" have won at least one Emmy for its lead actors.) Unlike other shows whose conclusion ended at the right time, I felt like this show could have kept going. I will miss these lovable losers who never failed to make me laugh.

"Alias"

Network: ABC
Premiered: Sept. 30, 2001
Finale date: Monday, May 22
Number of episodes: 105
Number of seasons: 5

What happened in the finale: Tom (Balthazar Getty) is killed trying to save Rachel (Rachel Nichols.) Sydney (Jennifer Garner) kills her mother, Irina Derevko (Lena Olin), after finding out that she is the mastermind behind many of the bad things that have gone on during the series. Syd’s dad Jack (Victor Garber) sacrifices himself to stop Sloane (Ron Rifkin), who has discovered a formula allowing himself to live forever. Jack caves in the cave containing Rambaldi’s tomb, trapping Sloane to live there forever. Years later, Syd and Vaughn (Michael Vartan) live happily ever after on a beach, and Syd’s daughter Isabelle (Julia Di Angelo) discovers that she has the same skills that her mother had. There is more to describe, but true to the show itself, it’s a little difficult and long to do in just this paragraph.

My opinion: "Alias" has always been somewhat of a cult show. It premiered to so-so ratings, but since it had a huge fan following and many critical praises, it stayed on the air (it was during a time when ABC was doing very badly all around, so they were desperate to hold onto anything with a buzz.) When ABC finally rebounded with the hits "Desperate Housewives" (which took over the original "Alias" timeslot) and "Lost" (created by "Alias" mastermind JJ Abrams)…the network made the great decision to move the show to Wednesdays following "Lost." The result was the show’s highest rated season ever. That was also when the show started to get a little ridiculous, with episodes involving Russian zombies and more. In the final season, with Garner’s real-life pregnancy being written into the show, I knew that it was time for the show to go. The Emmy-nominated and Golden Globe-winning Garner didn’t get to do much in the final season while she was pregnant, and the replacement characters, played by Getty and Nichols, reminded us that we want our Syd. It was a cool, though confusing, five seasons though.

"Arrested Development"

Network: FOX
Premiered: Nov. 2, 2003
Finale date: February 10
Number of episodes: 53
Number of seasons: 3

What happened in the finale: The finale was actually four episodes back-to-back on a special Friday night (the show has normally aired on either Sundays or Mondays.) George Sr. (Jeffrey Tambor) hires a producer from Justice TV who asks the Bluths to participate in a mock trial to help prepare them for the real thing. The producer has actor Judge Reinhold (playing himself), who was doing this to practice being like Judge Judy for his own reality show, to preside over the mock case. In order to get out of testifying, Buster (Tony Hale) fakes a coma (though the coma was a little bit true…he had gotten into G.O.B.’s [Will Arnett] forget-me-now pills.) George Michael (Michael Cera) and Maeby (Alia Shawkat) participate in a mock wedding to entertain hospital Alzheimer’s patients, but they discover that they really got married. In the second episode, Michael (Jason Bateman) is still searching for the mysterious "N. Bluth," who may be his long-lost sister named Nellie Bluth (Justine Bateman, Jason’s real-life sister.) He tracks Nellie down and hires her as a consultant for the Bluth Co. with the intention of telling her that she might be his sister. He learns from an acquaintance of Nellie named Frank that Nellie is a prostitute (he also learns that Frank is Franklin, G.O.B.’s alter ego in the form of an African-American puppet that talks to Michael over the phone, and that Franklin is Nellie’s pimp.) Michael asks George Sr. who Nellie really is, and he admits that Nellie was a prostitute that he had hired at one time. Michael then finds out that she had cleared out the Bluth accounts, but that she had used the money to pay herself and the company employees. He offers her a real job, but she turns it down, since she normally makes $300,000 as a prostitute. In the third episode, G.O.B. goes to Iraq to perform his Christian magic act on the USO tour and ends up being arrested for performing an accidental anti-government act. Michael learns George Sr. sent G.O.B. to Iraq to burn down the model home he built there, so Michael and Buster fly to Iraq to spring their brother from prison, where they find out that George Sr. had been a government patsy all along. They avoid being assassinated by showing the CIA pictures Buster had took with his cell camera and sent to his coma nurse. George Michael throws Maeby a sweet 16 party, which accidentally gets her fired from her movie studio job. In the fourth and final episode, Lucille (Jessica Walter) throws a yacht party to celebrate the family’s recent escape from treason, but many things still happen. After almost going to second base with his cousin Maeby, George Michael decides to win back his ex-girlfriend Ann (Mae Whitman) to repress his feelings, but he discovers that Ann has been living with G.O.B. Maeby is offered a lot of money to sell the TV rights to her story about a 15-year-old who had posed as a movie executive. Michael discovers that his twin sister Lindsay (Portia de Rossi) is actually an adopted girl that the Bluths had stolen out of spite with a rival rich family. He tells this to George Michael, who is relieved that he doesn’t need to worry that he is attracted to his cousin, but Michael still advises against it, since they are still family, if not blood-related. In the last scene, Michael and his son sail to Cabo with $500,000 in cashier’s checks to get away from his odd family.

My opinion: Even though it won an Emmy for Best Comedy Series in 2004, the show has never been a ratings hit. FOX actually tried to boost the ratings, but even positioning it after the long-running "Simpsons," the public never held an interest. It was a little disrespectful that FOX aired this two-hour finale opposite the opening ceremonies for the 2006 Winter Olympics on NBC. In the meantime, the show influenced many of the comedies that have come out since, with them all trying to be the new "AD." The few people who did see the show couldn’t deny the great acting, the wacky dysfunctional dynamics of the family, the inside jokes places within every episode, and the "Happy Days" cast constantly making fun of themselves (including executive producer/show narrator Ron Howard.) Creator Mitchell Hurwitz has turned down attempts to move the show to another network, and the cast has gone on to new projects, so…like cult hits "Freaks & Geeks" and "Serenity"…we will have to say goodbye forever…but we will never forget it.

"What I Like About You"

Network: WB
Premiered: Sept. 20, 2002
Finale date: March 24
Number of episodes: 86
Number of seasons: 4

What happened in the finale: Val (Jennie Garth), Holly (Amanda Bynes), and Lauren (Leslie Grossman) are stuck in a spa…which Lauren had treated them to in order to celebrate the day before Val’s wedding to Vic (Dan Cortese)…which is being searched for an escaped convict. Since three of them are late already, they "borrow" a horse to make it to the church. Vince (Nick Zano) says goodbye to Gary (Wesley Jonathan) before heading to Chicago for a new job. Val and Vic finally get married, and a returning Vince surprises Holly at the wedding. Lauren, Gary, and Tina (Allison Munn) all find love as well.

My opinion: When this show started, I already knew that Bynes had comedic talent, based on her work on Nickelodeon’s "All That," but Garth was a surprise. She had been known for ten seasons as Kelly Taylor, the spoiled rich blonde on FOX’s "Beverly Hills, 90210," but she really proved that she was a comedy natural. Unfortunately, the CW couldn’t take all of the WB comedies, so it had to go. I look forward to Garth’s next TV project, and I’ll see Bynes on the big screen again.

"Yes, Dear"

Network: CBS
Premiered: Oct. 2, 2000
Finale date: Feb. 15
Number of episodes: 122
Number of seasons: 6

What happened in the finale: When Greg (Anthony Clark) and Christine (Liza Snyder) realize that Kim (Jean Louisa Kelly) listens to everything Christine says and Jimmy (Mike O’Malley) does the same thing with Greg, they decide to form an agreement to help each other get everything they want. When Christine realizes that Greg’s demands are a little self-serving…as apposed to her demands, which she figures are for the good of everybody…she refuses to go along with it. Greg keeps on manipulating Jimmy in order to mess with Christine. Kim and Jimmy find out the truth, and everyone is forgiven…but not before Jimmy commits one last bit of retaliation by using the wood from Greg’s picnic table to construct a fence in order to keep their properties separate. O’Malley made his directorial debut with this episode.

My opinion: This show and "Still Standing" are probably two most hated long-running CBS shows on TV. While I even hated "Standing," I rather liked this show. It wasn’t the funniest thing on the air, but it managed to make me laugh. Clark has gone on to host NBC’s "Last Comic Standing," and he isn’t as funny on that as he was on this show. Since CBS constantly likes to cancel even marginally-rated shows quickly, it’s a surprise that it flew under the radar for six seasons. This finale seemed like just another episode, unlike the shows above, so they were probably weren’t aware that the show could have been canceled at any time.