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Well, they all said your show was Too Good To Last. You fended off Executive Meddling, and stayed true to your original vision of the series.
Of course, you got cancelled, but that's to be expected. Fortunately, you had plenty of warning and were able to do a Grand Finale. It was a huge spectacle, full of guest stars and special effects and you tied up all the loose ends so that everyone could go home happy with a sense of closure. Nothing left to do now but record the DVD commentary track and sell the props on eBay.
Wait, what's that? The network just called. The fans, bless their hearts, launched the biggest letter-writing campaign ever, and the ratings on the finale were through the roof. They've decided to renew you for another season!
Oh no. What are you going to do now? You killed off Lord Voldemort, got the castaways off the mysterious island, got Voyager back to the Alpha Quadrant, sank the Bismarck, resolved all the sexual tension and/or saved the galaxy. There's nowhere else for the story to go.
But, hey, don't let that stop you. After all, you got yourself another season. Other producers would kill for a chance like this. Well, Fonzie, you'd better put on your water skiis; it's time to Jump The Shark.
The Post Script Season is what happens when a show is renewed after it's resolved its plot arc. You end up with a season, maybe two, where the show is forced to try out a whole new premise. This seldom goes well. In the first place, you've got to shoehorn these existing characters into a new premise that doesn't quite fit them. Expect Character Derailment. Secondly, you've already had a Grand Finale, and it's going to be hard to top that. You've already shot your dramatic wad. No wonder fans of other media get just a bit of dissonant feelings when they hear about how you threw away a perfectly good ending just because you wanted more.
A form of Retool. Results in Plot Leveling. Compare Trilogy Creep.
Examples:
Live Action TV
- Babylon 5 was originally plotted to a five-season arc. When the PTEN syndication network crumbled around it and the show was not renewed for a fifth season, the fourth season storyline was reworked to complete the entire arc. The show was subsequently granted a fifth season, but with almost all of its major plot threads resolved, the fifth season that resulted was much weaker, composed of a lot of stories that had been cut from earlier seasons as they weren't as strong.
- As originally planned, Season 4 would have ended with the episode "Intersections in Real Time" in which Sheridan is being held prisoner by Clark's forces. What actually happened was that "Intersections in Real Time" ended up as the fifth-last episode of the season, and the events which would have wrapped up the main arc of overthrowing President Clark and retaking Earth in early season 5 were squashed into the three episodes "Between the Darkness and the Light", "Endgame" and "Rising Star", followed by the Grand Finale "Sleeping in Light". The story arcs in Season 5 were indeed originally planned for Season 5, but the reason why it was generally weaker than previous seasons was because the developments intended for the season's beginning which were most pertinent to the series as a whole had already been shown in Season 4.
- Earth Final Conflict neatly resolved its entire premise in the penultimate season, wiping out the entire species responsible for the action of the plot. As a result, an entirely new random alien race had to be introduced to keep the plot afloat.
- Blakes Seven ended its third season with the destruction of the Liberator and the (apparent) death of the Big Bad. When the fourth season opened, they had to take the show in a radically different direction to compensate for the changes.
- Buffy The Vampire Slayer killed off its titular character in the fifth season. While this did not actually undermine the premise, the power of the Grand Finale proved impossible to match, and some people consider the following season lackluster by comparison. The characters themselves talked about how much the sixth season sucked while it was still going on, repeatedly describing their own adventures as lame, filler, etc. It was even lampshaded in the Mind Screw episode.
- I think it was a might intentional, 6th season was about how you can't win you never get to retire, "The hardest part of life is living in it.", like Angel there's never an epic battle that destroys all evil, you have to continue to fight every day and every hour. Of course in 7th season they did win, So Yeah.
- Mystery Science Theater 3000 ended its seventh season by resolving its entire premise, so the eighth season had to begin with a Reset Button, the shifting of the setting five hundred years into the future, and the introduction of a new antagonist. It survived for three more seasons, mostly because the plot of the series was never much more than a Framing Device for the slapstick and snark.
- The X Files faced retool after retool as they tried to wring a few more seasons out after the feature film. The seventh season is particularly guilty of premature closure. It "explained" the conspiracy arc, killed off nearly all the Syndicate antagonists, and perhaps most significantly, resolved the long-running mystery of Mulder's missing sister. Anything after this point falls well and truly into fans' very broad Dis Continuity margin.
- Remington Steele married off Laura and Steele, as the show's cancellation looked certain and Pierce Brosnan had been offered the role of James Bond. However, because Brosnan got the Bond role, NBC decided to renew the show, bringing it back for a very lame half-season which lacked all of the charm of the preceding seasons and effectively scuttling Brosnan's big movie break. Brosnan didn't end up playing Bond for over a decade.
- Sledge Hammer nuked its town in the first season finale, not expecting renewal. With the renewal, the second season was set "five years earlier", with all ongoing plotlines continuing uninterrupted.
- Though it had already lasted about ten seasons, Seventh Heaven in 2006 arguably counts, as it got renewed on the basis of the ratings for its Grand Finale.
- Mighty Morphin Power Rangers was originally a completed series at a mere 40 episodes, with a conclusion similar to ZyuRanger's (the Japanese basis for the first season) where Rita Repulsa was re-captured and thrown back into space in her dumpster after the defeat of Cyclopsis. However, the explosion in merchandise sales early into the series convinced Saban to pay Toei to film more footage to extend the first season to 60 episodes, as well as enter a contract for adapting whole future seasons. Traces of the original series finale are evident in the VERY choppy Command Center scene at the end of the aired version of "Doomsday Part 2."
- Old-school Battlestar Galactica, despite having left its plot arc unresolved at the time of its cancellation, was upon its renewal a year later retooled into Galactica 1980 with disastrous results.
- After an unprecedented (at the time) letter-writing campaign saved Star Trek The Original Series from cancellation, fans were "rewarded" with a third season containing many of the show's weakest and/or goofiest episodes (even by the standards of the series), including the infamous Spock's Brain
 as season premiere. Since the series was always purely episodic, the usual reasons for a lackluster Post Script Season don't apply; instead, the blame goes to creator Roddenberry pretty much abandoning his duties since the show was moved to a Friday... er, Saturday Night Death Slot.
- It didn't help that the budget got slashed as well.
- Stargate SG-1 had this happen multiple times, with seasons 6, 7, 8 and 9. The show was expected to be cancelled after five seasons, and so ended on a decent (but not Grand) finale ("Revelations") — the expectation was that they would then move on to The Movie (to be called "Stargate: The Lost City" or something similar) which would segue into the Spin Off (Stargate Atlantis, which was very different in concept at this stage). Then the show was renewed for a sixth season, and so was given a Grand Finale ("Full Circle") which introduced the planned concept of The Movie. Then the show was renewed for a seventh season, so The Movie was cancelled and its concept was rewritten as a season-long arc that would finish with a two-part Grand Finale ("Lost City") which would segue into the Spin Off instead. Then the series was renewed for an eighth season, so the Grand Finale's ending was changed to make more of a cliffhanger to be resolved in the Season 8 premiere, and Stargate Atlantis started running concurrently to Stargate SG-1. It was expected that the eighth season would be the last, however, so the end of the season was once again devised to close the book on the series: both major galactic threats were taken away in a three-episode arc ("Reckoning" Parts 1 & 2 and "Threads" — interestingly, these came just before the Grand Finale), and then the series ended with yet another two-part Grand Finale ("Moebius") involving time-traveling to ancient Egypt. The show was then picked up again for a ninth season, and was given a Re Tool which replaced several cast members and introduced a new Big Bad. Season 9 was made knowing that the show would be renewed for at least another year — and then, finally, the show was cancelled after the end of Season 10. Whether the final episode ("Unending") was a Grand Finale is doubtful; the real resolution of the series happened in the DVD movie "Stargate: The Ark of Truth". And then there was another DVD movie, and more to come... yep, Stargate SG-1 just ain't going away.
- Sea Quest DSV also had this happen twice. It was not known if the show would be renewed, so at the end of the first season, they destroyed the Sea Quest. The show was picked up, so there was a Re Tool and a new Sea Quest was constructed. Then at the end of the second season, facing a similar situation, the Sea Quest was transported to another planet and then destroyed. The show was picked up, so it was renamed Sea Quest 2032 and moved ten years into the future. Partway into season three, it was Cut Short.
- Only Fools And Horses: The British sitcom about two poor wheeler-dealer street-market trader brothers ended after 8 years with the Trotter brothers finding an antique watch in their garage, and becoming millionaires at last. The three episode finale, where the Trotters are finally shown in luxury penthouses and expensive sports cars, was shown over Christmas 1996 and attracted massive viewing figures for The BBC. On the strength of this popularity they convinced writer John Sullivan to reprise the characters for three more Christmas Episodes over the next six years. Having the Trotters lose their fortune in a stock market crash and return to their original lifestyle, the specials were panned by critics and viewers alike, and no more have been produced since 2003.
- The last (fifth) season of Angel The Series was, in its own way, a Post Script Season—albeit one that didn't arise from being renewed at the last second. The long story arc of the third and fourth seasons had come to a close, the characters had moved on to a completely different setting (the evil law firm Wolfram & Hart), several characters set out to be or were forcibly retooled, everyone except Angel had their memories of Connor erased and replaced by a false past, and Spike from Buffy The Vampire Slayer was added as as regular cast member. The change was apparently done at the network's request. Then, due to conflicting accounts, including the high per-episode cost, the show was cancelled anyway. What makes it a Post Script Season instead of a Re Tool is that, while it was intended to cover multiple seasons, the cancellation aborted the arc.
- Prison Break suffered from this, after the first two seasons were done, all the main plot points were tied up and the bittersweet ending finished. Then they got a third season and had to continue from Michael's escape from Sona, which originally was a 'viewer decides whether he eventually gets out or not and what he does after that' ending. The resulting season was noticeably lower quality than the other two.
- Red Dwarf suffered from this as well. Dissatisfied with the sixth season and feeling that he'd said all he wanted to on the show, co-writer Rob Grant departed the show. His writing partner Doug Naylor wanted to carry on, but the momentum of production was broken for three years by one of the leading stars of the show going though a court case. When the show eventually came back, it had a (slightly) bigger budget, new (generally inexperienced) co-writers and was no longer filmed in front of a live studio audience, and handwaved away the Series VI cliffhanger in a burst of technobabble in the first episode. Season 7 was promptly panned by critics and fans alike. An only marginally better eighth season- which tossed the entire premise of the show out the window- did not help reverse the show's fortunes, and despite strong ratings and another cliffhanger ending it disappeared from TV altogether.
- Technically, since the show never resolved its ongoing storyline of Dave Lister trying to return to Earth, the last few seasons of Red Dwarf are more an example of terminal Seasonal Rot.
- Well, until the rather aptly-named TV channel Dave got good ratings with repeats and got them to make more. The three-part 'Back To Earth' was shown at Easter 2009, and the 'Dave' logo briefly changed to 'Dave Lister'.
- Your Mileage May Vary on whether Series VIII was better than VII or vice versa (This Troper prefers VII).
- The fourth season of Xena Warrior Princess ended with Xena and Gabrielle both dying in the next to last episode and then their spirits looking all angelic headed off into the afterlife. This was followed up by an episode set in modern times featuring the modern day reincarnations of Xena, Gabrielle, and Joxer facing off against Ares (who, being a Greek god, has survived into the modern day). The fifth season opened with Xena and Gabrielle finding themselves in a different, Heaven-Hell based afterlife (as opposed to the Greek mythology version of the Elysian Fields and Tartarus previously seen in the series and its parent series Hercules The Legendary Journeys), setting up an arc where Xena and Gabrielle (after being brought Back From The Dead) are forced to kill every Greek god that comes on-screen with the exceptions of Aphrodite and Ares. And along the way, they're forced to sleep in suspended animation for 25 years, meaning all the non-god members of their supporting cast are now either dead or 25 years older. The show only lasted one more season.
- The seventh season finale of Charmed was at first planned as the series finale. Just think about it: Darryl promised his wife he wouldn't help the Charmed Ones anymore, then they destroyed their own source of power so the Big Bad would die in the explosion as well, and finally changed their faces and started living normal lives! Not to mention their dead sister Prue was mentioned a lot, and even the episode title was a mirror of the title of the pilot episode. But then they got renewed... we all know what happened since.
- This troper actually disliked the seventh season finale because it's clearly stated by the characters that they accept their lives being abnormal and having them finally become normal felt out-of-character and weird. Many times is it said that NOT fighting demons felt strangely wrong to them.
- The seventh season finale of That70s Show was clearly supposed to be the series finale: first, Red FINALLY caught the guys smoking pot in his basement. Then he finally said to his son he loved him. And, of course, at the end of this episode, the main character Eric left the series. Aside from an open ending of the Kelso-Jackie-Hyde love triangle storyline, there was nothing more to add to the story. Another season was a season too many.
- Sliders suffered from this trope multiple times: after being canceled and then revived and then canceled again by Fox, the Sci-Fi Channel picked it up for two more excruciating seasons. In the process they lost actress Sabrina Lloyd to Sports Night and her character suffered an incredibly squicky fate worse than death, and then lost series star Jerry O'Connell for the last season.
- In Boy Meets World, the highschool graduation season finale had changes like Mr. Feeny retiring and moving away, and Shawn deciding to take a job as a photographer instead of going to college. But when the series was renewed, both of these changes were reversed so that Shawn and Mr. Feeny could be part of the college experience along with Cory, Topanga, and the rest.
- Scrubs is getting a ninth season, despite the (partially subverted) Grand Finale being in the eighth.
- The final season of The A Team. In turn, it also had a post-script finale.
Manga & Anime
- Super Dimension Fortress Macross: When the series was extended by several episodes in the middle of production, the writers added a Postscript Story Arc set After The End.
- GaoGaiGar had an OVA which retconned the titular mecha's original purpose of construction from "fighting the Zonders" to "fighting the new A God Am I villain we just came up with". It actually went a lot better than it sounds, largely owing to sheer force of over-the-top-itude.
- The TV series itself had a "postscript last couple of episodes." The Big Bad Man Behind The Man was finally, decisively and explosively defeated. Happily ever after, right? Unfortunately years before the series began a spore for a "New Machine Species" implanted itself in Mikoto's nervous system and took her over, leading to a new, powerful and nigh indestructible foe to give GGG a hard time. While it reeked of an Asspull, it somehow managed to wrap itself up nicely.
- GUNNM: Last Order might be seen as that, because when road accident forced Yukito Kishiro to Wrap It Up, he tacked a Happy Ending onto the series and left it for half a decade, until he returned to it in Last Order. However, as the "Post Script Season" is at this moment even longer than the original series, and it completely disregarded said happy ending, it is more like a cross between the sequel and the Revival now.
- Dragonball Z was originally supposed to end after the Freeza saga, but the popularity forced the creator to come out with another arc, the Androids/Cell Arc, at which point it was supposed to end again. But it was still very popular, so the creator had to make yet another arc, the Boo arc, and the creator, likely fed up, finally did end that particular series there.
- But it was still popular... and the company wanted even more money so, Dragonball GT came about as ANOTHER Post-Script Season.
- The whole reason the anime is called "Z" is because Toriyama wanted to imply that the story was ending soon. Some info suggests he had planned to end the story as early as the fight with Vegeta.
- In many ways, Transformers Energon seemed to suffer from this in its final quarter, which featured a story that essentially had nothing but the most tangenital connection to any of the plot that had come before it (the villains had obtained their main objective and were defeated three-quarters of the way through the show, leaving nothing for anyone to actually do). The frustrating thing, though, is that it's not strictly a postscript - the show was always intended to run to 52 episodes, and this final arc was simply filling out that requirement, even though the actual story of the series had been finished.
- Fist of the North Star (Hokuto no Ken) was originally intended to end after Kenshiro's final battle with Raoh, but contractual obligations forced Buronson and Tetsuo Hara to extend the manga for a couple of years more, which resulted in the sequel series Hokuto no Ken 2. With the other Hokuto brothers and Nanto Roku Seiken already dead, Hara and Buronson introduced two new rival martial art schools in the form Gento Kouken and Hokuto Ryuuken. The anime ended with Kenshiro's final fight against Kaioh, a a suspiciously similar substitute of Raoh, but the manga continued with what was essentially a post-script to the post-script that added little to the overall storyline other than introducing Raoh's son Ryu and provide a resolution to Lin's fate after falling to the effects of Kaioh's pressure point.
Western Animation
- Justice League Unlimited finished its plot arc in its second season, ending with an epilogue to the entire DC Animated Universe, set after Batman Beyond. The series went on for one more season, however, with an entirely different storyline involving Luthor and Grodd forming the Legion of Doom; however, unlike many other examples on this list, it managed to maintain its high quality until the end. The series' creators have stated that they made every season finale a possible Grand Finale, since they never knew whether or not they would get another season.
- Teen Titans also got renewed for one additional season (season five) that year. The surprise of this development could be seen in that the three-part finale for season four was titled simply "The End".
- Kim Possible's Season 4 is another rare but undeniable Post Script Season success. With its Grand Finale and the Official Couple now officially going out.
Video Games
- Mega Man X 5 ended the Megaman X story and left Zero Killed Off For Real. Capcom produced a sequel anyway, without Keiji Inafune's involvement. X6's mostly pointless story tried to combine all 3 of X5's endings, used one of the worst Ass Pulls ever to bring Zero back, and demoted Big Bad Sigma to Anticlimax Boss status. It even included a robot shark for easy jumping purposes. Dis Continuity was inevitable.
- The less said of Axl, and the 2 further sequels, the better.
- There's also the fact that X5 was supposed to lead up to the Zero series.
- Halo 3 suffered from a variation on this. The developers have been very frank in saying that a need to meet a publisher-enforced deadline for Halo 2 not only deprived them of much-needed game polishing time and various chunks of gameplay, but forced them to cut off the game's actual ending. They had to come up with a way to pad out a game's third act into an entire new, console-selling, killer-app extravagansa. They didn't do a bad job gameplay-wise, but the storyline suffered from the resolution of most of the plot points in the previous title.
- It was an unwritten rule that Final Fantasy games didn't have sequels. Then came along Final Fantasy X-2, which only exists to provide copious amounts of Fanservice, to give cosplayers an orgasm and to reverse the incredibly poignant Bittersweet Ending of Final Fantasy X.
- And create an extremely bizarre numbering system.
- And to be a great game of its own.
- X-2 also constituted a half-hearted attempt to make X a prequel to VII.
- There were hints in Final Fantasy X that the Bittersweet Ending wasn't permanent. Namely, some Fayths hint that they may be able to keep Tidus alive after the Big Bad is killed and there is a scene of Tidus swimming after the credits are over.
Comic Books
- The comic book maxiseries Amethyst Princess of Gemworld was originally going to be just a twelve-issue series. At the end of the series, the titular heroine and her allies triumph, the Big Bad is killed off, and the heroine returns to her normal life on Earth after peace is restored to the Gemworld. However, the series was so successful that DC Comics decided to do an ongoing series. The first twelve issues, done by the original creative team behind the maxi-series, weren't too bad. But when they left, the new creative team changed the direction of the series drastically, and did a series of Retcons designed to drag the series kicking and screaming into the mainstream DC universe. The series was cancelled soon afterward.
Literature
- For those who took Latin in high school, one can't help but wonder if the writers of the Cambridge Latin Course textbook thought they wouldn't get their contracts renewed after Book I. Vesuvius blows and everybody dies, Caecilius dying onscreen and his son's fate left in question... until next semester. Also, Book IV had a lot of filler arcs, don't you think? Who cares about Those Two Guys at Bath and random weddings? Get back to Salvius and his evil!
- But we have to learn all the grammar first, and the only way we can is through poorly-thought-out side stories!
- You think that's bad, the entirety of Ecce Romani book two was filler! (They spend all of it stuck in a ditch.)
- But we do get to meet crazy Uncle Titus! That made the whole book worthwhile! The last third of book two involves Titus drinking, drinking, drinking, gambling, drinking, and dying.
- Henry V - After the roguish Prince Hal won a loyal fanbase in Henry IV parts one and two, the author eventually decided to extend the story, even after bringing Hal's relationship with the Ensemble Darkhorse Falstaff to a satisfactory conclusion in the finale. The reboot ended up being much Darker And Edgier, and contrary to the author's promises didn't include Falstaff at all.
Radio
- This happened to The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy in its original radio incarnation, which had to get Arthur and Ford off of prehistoric Earth and rescue Marvin and Zaphod from a carbon copy of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal so they could go on further adventures. (While poor old Trillian got a one-line Put On A Bus.)
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