‘Yes, Dear’s Series Finale Aired 20 Years Ago — How & Why Did It End?

Two decades ago, on February 15, 2006, Yes, Dear aired its series finale, not that fans knew it at the time. CBS canceled the show after six seasons two weeks later, unceremoniously cutting short a sitcom that had never been a critical hit but had become a crowd-pleaser.

Yes, Dear, created by Alan Kirschenbaum and Greg Garcia, starred Anthony Clark, Jean Louisa Kelly, Liza Snyder, and Mike O’Malley as two young couples with wildly different parenting principles. Greg and Kim Warner (Clark and Kelly) were anxious first-time parents — he a career man, she a stay-at-home mom, while Kim’s sister Christine (Snyder) lived with husband Jimmy (O’Malley), who were more veteran parents, lived in the Warners’ guest house.

The show got dogged by critics — literally in the case of the Chicago Sun-Times critic who said that if Yes, Dear were ”judged by kennel club standards, it would be deemed a mutt” — but it became a minor hit with viewers. Yes, Dear almost reached the Top 20 of broadcast TV in its second season, landing at No. 21 with 13.9 million viewers, per USA Today. And the show frequently won its time slot and ranked as the youngest-skewing show on CBS, per Entertainment Weekly.

“[There’s] a huge difference between the critics and mainstream America,” Nancy Tellem, then president of CBS Entertainment, told the magazine. ”My biggest problem was everybody wanted to jump on board among the critics and say, ‘This thing’s gonna die, it’s so unsophisticated.’ And you know what? Critics be damned. The public loves it.”

But the public’s love waned, as it so often does. At the end of its sixth and final season, the Yes, Dear audience had slipped to 7.6 million watchers, and its ranking had dropped to No. 85. Along the way, critics were galled that the show was surviving. “How does a comedy this mediocre survive?” asked the Associated Press’ Kevin McDonough. “Seriously, doesn’t anything get canceled anymore?”

Sometimes they do. The Washington Post columnist Lisa de Moraes broke the news of Yes, Dear’s cancellation on March 3, 2006, after NBC hired Clark as the new host of Last Comic Standing to replace Jay Mohr after a reported falling out with NBC. “Clark has starred for six seasons on Yes, Dear, for which he has our sympathy,” de Moraes wrote. “Surely CBS would never allow the star of one of its prime-time series to star in a series for a competing network?”

So she contacted a CBS rep, who confirmed that Yes, Dear, in de Moraes’ words, was “being put out of our misery.”

The writing was on the wall months earlier, when The Futon Critic reported that CBS had considered canceling Yes, Dear but reversed course after 20th Century Fox Television slashed the show’s license fee.

Plus, The Futon Critic noted that CBS only wanted 13 new episodes from Yes, Dear Season 6 instead of the usual 22. The network had similarly curtailed the sixth and ultimately final season of the Ted Danson sitcom Becker a year earlier.

The decision to short-shrift those two sitcoms’ final seasons angered viewers, even those who were, by their own admission, not fans of either TV show. “Nothing drives me crazier than when they don’t let a show tie itself up in a nice, neat package,” TV Fodder blogger Rachel Cericola wrote. “It’s been almost six years, fellas. Let the show leave the fans somewhat happy.”

In the inadvertent series finale of Yes, Dear — Season 6’s “Should I Bring a Jacket?” which O’Malley directed — Greg realizes Kim listens to Christine more than to him, and Christine realizes Jimmy listens more to Greg than to her, so Greg and Christine join forces to get what they each want from their respective spouses.

And the show’s remaining fans were disappointed that was all they got. “Yes, Dear has been cancelled after six seasons!” one Sitcoms Online forum user wrote, adding seven more exclamation points and a frowning emoticon.

Wrote another, “Well, it had a heck of a run for such a low-key series. And although the last season was a little weak, overall the series was fantastic.”

A third user observed that the Season 6 finale did, at least, bring the story full circle as Greg and Kim move in with Jimmy and Christine, inverting the sitcom’s initial premise.

Yes, Dear did get a coda, of sorts, nearly seven years later on the Fox sitcom Raising Hope, another Greg Garcia creation. In the Season 3 episode “Sex, Clown and Videotape,” O’Malley and Snyder play the characters “Jimmy” and “Christine,” a couple that finds a sex tape Virginia (Martha Plimpton) and Burt Chance (Garret Dillahunt) had filmed.

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O’Malley, for his part, remains philosophical about the rise and fall of Yes, Dear. “Well, listen, man, we did 122 episodes,” he told That Thing They Did in 2024. “Our show fit very well into what CBS was doing on Monday nights, and we made 122 episodes. And trust me, there were people trying to take our time slot and beat us, and they didn’t.”

Now, however, Yes, Dear might be receding from our cultural memory. The show currently isn’t streaming, despite a recent Change.org petition asking streamers to host the sitcom. “Yes, Dear is a (sadly forgotten) CBS sitcom created … that ran for six wonderful seasons,” petition starter Evin Tuttle wrote. “It’s time for Yes, Dear to finally come home to a streaming platform.”

So far, just over 500 people have signed that petition.

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