10 Most Insane TV Show Storylines Ever

Telling a series of stories over several years has pitfalls unique to TV

Storylines have often been rewritten at the last minute to cover actors who are pregnant

deceased, or who simply chose to leave, while changes to executive producers or showrunners

can often mean shows switch direction on a dime. That's nice and all, but none of that actually explains the following stories

which are completely whacked out of their minds. I'm Josh from WhatCulture.com and these are the most insane TV show storylines ever

Tony Soprano dreams he's a travelling salesman. Like its spiritual successor Breaking Bad, The Sopranos is littered with dream symbolism and metaphor

which sometimes actively break into the storyline in the form of actual dream sequences

as it should be for a TV show which, in its formative years anyway, centred around a middle-aged mobster undergoing psychoysis

The premiere of season 6 took this one step further though, and saw Tony's uncle, increasingly suffering from dementia, accidentally shooting the crime boss cold, believing him to be his long dead nemesis, little , Malagna

The following two episodes saw Tony in a coma, dreaming he was a mild-mannered travelling salesman who'd lost his wallet and briefcase in a slapstick mix-up with an individual by the evocative name of Kevin Finity

So yeah, that's right, creator and showrunner David Chase used this key part of the narrative to have Tony address issues of alienation and midlife crisis in an existential near-death experience

It was the riskiest storytelling gamble in the show's risky history, and it paid off when the two episodes were cited as two of the best of the entire show

You know, when the nights get here faster and the temperature starts dropping and I'm

in need of something cozy to pick me up, there's nothing I want to do more than spend some

time with your friend and mine, Pumpkinhead. As in the 1988 Supernatural horror movie Pumpkinhead directed by Stan Winston, obviously

And wouldn't you know it, you can go and do that on Prime Video right now, and if you

sign up using our special link in the description or scan the QR code on screen, you'll get

75% off your first two months, which is as low as 99 cents per month. That includes both single

subscriptions and bundles, so you get out on stuff like Apple TV and HBO Max and watch all the movies

and shows you want to your heart's content. Like, guys, they have all of Columbo on there. I'm about

to go into a winter hibernation and come out talking like Peter Fork. I can't wait

How I Met Your Mother's Final Season covers one weekend. How I Met Your Mother initially found

itself with unfavorable and mostly unfair comparisons to a similar show about the lives

and loves of 20-something friends in New York City. You probably know the one I'm talking about

Where How I Met Your Mother parted company from other similar sitcoms though was in its dimmichry

With the titular framing device detailing the conclusion of the story, the show is laden with

so many references callbacks flashbacks flash forwards special episodes themed episodes and odd narrative devices that anyone unfamiliar with it dipping into it in later seasons would have been forgiven for wondering if some hapless

TV executive had lost their minds on hallucinogenics. Season 9, the final season, was no exception to this rule, as 24 episodes formed an arc-based

narrative taking place over a single weekend. At 22 minutes per episode, that's nearly 9 hours of situational comedy, with the situation

being a wedding at a hotel. The majority of viewers concluded that they wasted nine years of their lives

waiting to meet the mother, only to have the final season take place at a wedding

that was undermined in the series finale anyway. Community's Darkest Timeline Story

How I Met Your Mother may have made its name on gimmicked stories

but Community is the real deal. An off-the-wall sitcom set at a community college

that's given the 21st century television audience some of the wildest and weirdest episodes they'll ever experience

But one of the best and most popular revolves around a mere dinner party

Season 3's Remedial Chaos Theory invites us to explore, via a roll of the die

the various alternate ways in which the evening could have gone had a different member of the group gone downstairs to collect their pizza

Each timeline created was hilarious enough, but the final one, dubbed the darkest timeline

sees Pierce die due to an infected leg wound, Jeff lose an arm, Troy lose his larynx

and Annie be committed while Shirley becomes an alcoholic. Britta, on the other hand, ends up just dying a blue streak into her hair

indicating that even the darkest version of herself is still totally clueless

And all of this just because Troy went and got the pizza

Life on Mars is literally about a trip to Mars. This adaptation of the hit UK drama series Life on Mars sees the US version of protagonist Sam Tyler, also hit by a car in the 21st century, to wake up inexplicably in 1973

Where it sharply deviates from the UK version though is at the ending, where producers attempt to explain the seemingly inexplicable

While the UK version of Life on Mars went for two seasons and was given the ending that the writers intended

season one of the US adaptation was cancelled partway through and they had to wrap it up quickly

Instead of following the original end, this new take took a tragically literal spin on things

and revealed that both the 1973 version of Sam's life and the 2008 version are both fakes

mere virtual reality stories programmed by a computer designed to keep him stimulated while in hibernation on the first ever manned trip to Mars

Yes, they decided that the title should actually explain the mystery. The Lost Season 6 Flashes

Avid watchers of ABC's Lost were treated to a whole lot of skipping about in time during the six season run of the show

with flashbacks being prominent, then flash-forwards, and then actual time travel in Season 5

Season 6, however, treated us to something entirely different. Flashes sideways. The finale of Season 5 saw the survivors trapped in the past attempt to detonate a hydrogen bomb on the island in order to prevent the original plane crash that began the series from actually happening

No, I'm not even going to try to explain why right now

Anyway with the cast apparently returned to the present day once more and utterly flabbergasted

as to a why they were still on the island and b why if the bomb hadn't reset history

The blast hadn't just killed them, the now traditional intercut flashbacks began showing viewers a world in which it appeared anyway, the plane crash actually had not occurred

The question was, had the detonation of the bomb instead created an alternate timeline

Well, no was the less than emphatic answer come the series finale

The apparent alternate timeline sideways flashes were in fact glimpses of a metaphysical afterlife that the protagonists had created in order to find each other after death and oh my god I'm going to have to stop there because my brain is actually cooking itself

The entire final season of Fringe. Fringe already dealt on a daily basis with the kind of strange phenomena that would make up the oddest X-Files episodes

But the protagonists had, throughout the first four seasons, always been visited by strange men, observers with alien physiologies and mindsets

Even the episodes which didn't feature these observers would have them somewhere in the background

looking around like a mouldy slice of bread that you definitely left in the cupboard before going to work this morning

However, at the end of the show, we were suddenly yanked into the future, where in 2035 the observers had subjugated the human race

revealing themselves to be the human race from the 27th century. The entire rest of the show then would be a dystopian post-apocalyptic guerrilla war to restore history

Utterly bananas, utterly awesome. Dallas wipes out its entire ninth season. Beginning with the funeral of series favourite Bobby Ewing

long-running primetime soap opera Dallas would proceed without him. However, the season finale of the same season that he died in, called Blast from the Past

saw plot threads being brought towards a devastating explosive conclusion, only to have heroine Pam Ewing awake in the next scene in her own bed

Hearing the shower running, Pam went to investigate, to find her dead husband Bobby wishing her good morning

as the utterly Balmy finale freeze-framed on his face, and then just cut to credits

The beginning of Season 10 the following year would reveal that the entirety of Season 9 had been a particularly vivid dream of Pam's

and the 9th season would henceforth be referred to as the Dream Year

It was certainly a choice, I'll give it that. Baywatch Nights Goes Sci-Fi

In 1995, David Hasselhoff produced a spin-off of his hit series about hot lifeguards in tight red swimming costumes

intending it to be a detective series along the lines of Magnum P.I

That's exactly what the first season was about as well, with his lifeguard Mitch starting

a detective agency with a cop character from the main show. They would follow basic police and detective drama plots involving unsolved murders kidnapped damsels in distress and amusing undercover work With series ratings plummeting though The Hoff decided in his grand wisdom to go for broke in season 2 and capitalise on the

recent runaway success of The X-Files. Season 2, with no explanation may I add, premiered as a

science fiction and supernatural investigation show. The pop rock theme tune replaced by one

of Hasselhoff's own songs, the credits full of candles, skulls, screams and immense, immense amounts

of cheese. Storylines suddenly included aliens, demonic possession, mummies, ghosts, holographic dungeons and dragons games, vampires and probably the kitchen sink made an appearance as well

Sadly this unsurprisingly did not help the ratings and season 2 would see Baywatch Knights axed

The horrifying dinosaurs series finale. For those of you out there who don't remember

dinosaurs was kind of like the Flintstones or Rosanne, only with anthropomorphic puppet

Dinosaurs as the blue-collar sitcom family, the Sinclairs. Appearing in the early 90s, Dinosaurs saw traditional sitcom storylines

played out for younger viewers to a laugh track. So far, so fluffy

Despite the high concept and the puppetry, it wasn't a million miles away from the family sitcoms it followed

and certainly wasn't a parody like The Simpsons or Family Guy. Then the show was cancelled though

and the series finale aired in July 1994, four and families all across America were traumatized for life

In the final episode, due to an environmental catastrophe caused entirely by the hubris

of the dinosaur population, an ice age begins to set in and everyone we've ever met during

the course of the four seasons of this kiddie friendly show slowly freezes to death

It was genuinely as horrifying as it sounds. In fact the last scene sees the Sinclair family huddled together in their home for warmth while

the Anchorman on their television wishes everyone goodnight, goodbye. So, yay, everyone you love is dead and the world is a horrible place

Enjoy the rest of your life, I guess. Felicity travels back in time

Created by a then unknown JJ Abrams, each season of Felicity was intended to specifically

represent a year of college, from freshman and sophomore through to junior and senior

and episodes would, unusually for shows based around college, actually show the cast attending

classes and, you know, learning things. It was interesting though, I promise. Where Felicity

differed was in the final season, which was intended to finish entirely as expected, with

Felicity, our strangely self-obsessed and mock-headed heroine, graduating from school. But then

at the 11th hour, the network decided to give the show an additional five episodes. Consequently

producers decided to give themselves and their dwindling audience one last little treat

time travel yep so that meant felicity would through means of a magical spell travel back

in time and affect her own past making a series of different decisions in an effort to change the

place her life had ended up in and in doing so completely screw up the lives of all the people

around her the series would finally bow out with her mature and considered reflection that she'd

made the right decisions after all