Prepare To Say Goodbye To 'Bones' & These Series

I've got bad and even badder news for you, Bones fans. The bad news is that the Season 11 finale of the crime procedural airs Thursday night at 8 p.m. ET on FOX. While I'd love to say that the good news is Bones will be back for Season 12, the "badder" news is that it will be the final season of the show, FOX announced in February. So I bet you're more eager now than ever to find out when Bones returns for Season 12.

Just like Brennan and Booth's murder investigations featured in each episode of Bones, the Season 12 premiere date is also trickier to figure out than it looks. When FOX initially announced that it had renewed Bones, the network revealed that the series' final 12 episodes would air as part of its Fall 2016 schedule on Thursday nights at 9 p.m. ET. However, FOX later revised its Fall 2016 schedule, placing the new baseball drama Pitch in that spot and revealing that the Bones Season 12 premiere had been moved to the winter. Unlike for FOX's Fall 2016 slate, the network has yet to officially announce its midseason premiere dates, although Entertainment Weekly points out that Bones ' final season will likely bow in January since "that's when FOX's winter dramas typically launch."

And I'd like to say that Bones will be the only series we'll be saying goodbye to in 2017, but we all know that's just not going to be the case. Though we're sure to hear about more series cancellations as the Fall TV season begins and we enter 2017, several showrunners and networks have already let the cat out of the bag that some series will have their final episodes airing at the end of 2016 and in 2017. Get ready to bid farewell to these shows now.

Beauty & The Beast

One beloved series is going to be over before we know it. The CW announced last October that Season 4 of Beauty and the Beast, which premiered on June 2, would be its last, according to Variety. With only six episodes left of Beauty and the Beast, we'll be saying goodbye to this romantic and fantastical adventure by the end of the summer.

Girls

Although Lena Dunham has hinted about it a couple of times in the past, HBO confirmed that Girls will return for a sixth and final season slated to air sometime in 2017, E! News first reported in January ahead of the comedy's Season 5 premiere in February. "We were always conscious, especially because the show has been at times such a lightning rod, of overstaying our welcome," Dunham said at the Sundance Film Festival in January, according to The Hollywood Reporter. "We've been very blessed to have the experience of people continuing to engage in the show in a really kind of rabid way after four — heading into five — years. We wanted to make sure we kept the momentum alive and didn't allow it to soften over time." We'll just have to have Robyn's "Dancing On My Own" on repeat to cope with its absence.

Episodes

New installments of Episodes haven't aired since March 2015, but hopefully when the Brit-American comedy returns in 2017 for its fifth and final season, it'll have been worth the wait. Following hints dropped by star Matt LeBlanc on Twitter and Showtime's president of programming Gary Levine at the Television Critics Association's winter press tour in January, the cabler announced the end of the series in April, as reported by Variety. "Episodes' scathing portrait of network executives has kept me on my best behavior these last several years, for which I am grudgingly grateful to [showrunners] Jeffrey [Klarik] and David [Crane],” Levine told Variety. “I love this show and can’t wait to see what comic heights Matt and company will scale during the fifth and final season of our inspired series.” I can't, either.

Orphan Black

Orphan Black 's end is another we probably should have seen coming. Series co-creator John Fawcett revealed to E! News in April 2015 that there were plans "to wrap this story up by the end of season five." That truth bomb became a reality last month when Entertainment Weekly confirmed the news that Orphan Black will, in fact, end after Season 5. I think the only way I'm going to get through this loss is if star Tatiana Maslany finally wins an Emmy Award.

The Leftovers

The Leftovers may not have ever picked up as much steam as co-creator Damon Lindelof's last TV series — a little ABC show called LOST — but it had a devoted following, which was probably sad to hear that HBO had renewed it for a third and final season in December 2015, as reported by Variety. Season 3, which will be set in Australia, is expected to premiere sometime in 2017, according to The Hollywood Reporter, and Lindelof has promised a "definitive" yet "wildly ambiguous but hopefully mega-emotional" ending. Prepare yourself accordingly.

Luckily, when one series ends, another always begins, so if you're missing Bones or any of these aforementioned series by this time next year, your next favorite TV show should be out there.

Images: Patrick McElhenney/FOX; Giphy (5)