Postmortem news about Happy Endings continues to roll in, even as the cast has long since moved on, and even creator David Caspe now has a new pilot in development. On Entertainment Weekly’s TV Editors Hour on Sirius XM, Caspe and his Happy Endings star/fiancé Casey Wilson talked about some of the hypothetical plot lines that might have been seen had the show been renewed or found another network. Caspe and co-showrunner Jonathan Groff have already talked briefly about what could have happened in a fourth season, but this conversation specifically got at why a Dave/Penny pairing wouldn’t have made sense in the long-term:
“Our show is not at all a soap opera. Some of these other comedies are able to go a little more melodramatic than I ever liked, and any time we tried to do it, sometimes it felt a little false. I don’t think anyone really wanted to see Dave have to date his ex-fiancée’s best friend. There’s just something about that that’s kind of mean. I didn’t want to have to have Penny and Alex hate each other for five episodes.”
The conversation then took a comedic turn, with Caspe suggesting that a properly planned series finale would have revealed all the characters to have been dead the whole time, with the entire show revealed to take place in a kind of purgatory version of Chicago. It’s a tossed-off joke, to be sure, but it would've retroactively explained the commercial for Dave’s food truck Steak Me Home Tonight, at least. Listen to the excerpt of the episode below.