Many MANY years ago in Chicago, a young cartoonist friend of mine recited to me for a good three minutes an entire episode of
Petticoat Junction, ending with “so then he took one last puff on his cigar and lovingly put it down on a nearby ledge”.
Then he paused and said “NOTHING HAPPENED IN THE ENTIRE SHOW”.I LOVED IT!” He was also around that time much enamored of a TV movie he’d just seen, called KILLDOZER, about a bulldozer that went around killing people, way before Steven King ever though of it.
I poster this several years ago. My favorite review of the movie from somewhere online was;
If you see only one movie in your life about a killer bulldozer, make it Killdozer.
I distinctly remember an episode of Gunsmoke (with Matt & Chester) from the 50s (b/w) that had the marshal and his sidekick out on the trail of a bad guy for several days on the plains of Kansas. They lost the trail and were running out of food and water. Matt admitted to Chester that we can't catch them all, "Let's go back to Dodge." There was no resolution, no arrest, only failure. That was the only show that I can remember where nothing was resolved. It was tremendous and I've never seen it again in reruns.