Big Bang Theory final season

Alright here's how it goes down:

The final season is hyped up for months. All the commercials hint at a "mindblowing surprise". People get excited, thousands of new viewers are drawn in.

Final season starts. First episode draws in the biggest audience the show has ever gotten. Nothing important happens in this episode.

The season goes on, and the story seems to grind to a halt. All the character development and plot advancement from the previous few seasons is gone. The show becomes even more episodic and stagnant than it was when it first started. People start to get impatient; viewership increases in anticipation of the series finale.

As the season draws nearer to its end, certain things start to not seem quite right. Characters begin behaving strangely. The acting quality goes down. Jokes and laugh tracks become less frequent. As time goes on, fans start to notice these changes and are confused and somewhat disturbed by the gradual but noticeable shift in tone and decline in quality of the series. This all culminates in the (what will later become infamous) penultimate episode, in which all of the main characters sit in Sheldon's living room, completely motionless and silent, for the entire 24-minute run time, with strange and unidentifiable sounds playing quietly in the background.

One week passes. Final episode premiers. Starts out just like any other episode, with the characters sitting in Sheldon's living room, talking and eating Chinese food. Sheldon says something stupid that would normally trigger a laugh track, but no laugh track plays. The characters sit there in uncomfortable silence for a few seconds, before Sheldon asks, "Why isn't anybody laughing?"

The camera zooms out to show the filming studio. Hundreds of empty seats are shown where the studio audience should be. A camera sits on a tripod with no director manning it. The set is decrepit and falling apart, as if it had been abandoned for years. As the characters all look out at the studio, reality finally settles in. Sheldon sighs heavily and says, with real, true despair in his voice, "...Oh."

Sheldon, Leonard, Penny, Raj, Howard, and the rest are a troupe of washed-up actors who have been out of work for years. Having no other skills and no living families to turn to, they fell into a deep depression and drifted further and further into poverty. By chance, they happened to gradually find each other and discover that they had all suffered the same tragic fate. Longing for a better time, they found an old abandoned film set and decided to pretend that they had their own show - a show where they are successful physicists, engineers, and biologists. A show that they could use to live out their fantasies, both of being famous actors and of having successful, fulfilling careers. But as time went on, their real lives of poverty and suffering became too much to handle, and they slowly deluded themselves into taking their made-up show as reality. As they stood on their abandoned stage and acted out their fantasies in front of an empty studio, they believed themselves to be on top of the world - successful actors with the biggest comedy on television, with millions of adoring fans who thought their show was the funniest thing ever.

The human mind is capable of reasoning; of putting together evidence from the world and using it to form reasoned conclusions; of understanding the most complex logic that lesser beings cannot even imagine; of understanding the very universe that it lives in. But it is also capable of massive delusion; of ignoring and discarding evidence when it doesn't fit pre-conceived notions; of disregarding logic; of choosing to believe what it prefers to be true rather than what actually is true, even if the truth is right in front of one's eyes. The mind will do anything to resist accepting a painful truth - deny even the most direct evidence; disregard the most glaring facts; perform all sorts of mental gymnastics that, to neutral onlookers, seem positively insane. But the smallest thing can shatter a delusion, and once the tipping point is reached where the evidence can no longer be denied, the truth comes crashing down like two-hundred-ton rockslide. To finally be forced to accept the blatant falsity of that which one most needed to be true - there is no stronger bullet to a human mind.

To these poor, failing actors, the reality of their failure and miserable existence was too much to bear. And so they deluded themselves for as long as they could. As they stood on their abandoned stage and acted out their fantasies in front of an empty studio, they believed themselves to be on top of the world - successful actors with the biggest comedy on television, with millions of adoring fans who thought their show was the funniest thing ever. But in reality, there was never really anybody laughing.

Cue end credits.