The End Is Here: Best And Worst TV Finales

[lucindabelle]

On 10/9/2018 at 12:43 AM, sweetcookieface said:

I see only a passing reference to it above, but I think The Americans had one of the best series finales in recent years - and probably of all time. It was suspenseful, emotionally resonant, and just intellectually satisfying. There are so many iconic scenes - the standoff with Stan in the parking lot; the entire montage set to "With or Without You," culminating in Paige getting off the train; that final call to Henry; Elizabeth's dream sequence; Philip and Elizabeth returning to Russia and wistfully staring out on the horizon, with the latter noting "We'll get used to it"... I could go on and on. I love that the show tied up major loose ends in a way that felt satisfying, but believable, and left the audience with just the right amount of mystery (the most notable example being Renee's affiliation). I'm probably in the minority in that I disliked Breaking Bad's finale - I found it too pat, too over the top, and too fan-servicey. The Americans finale, by contrast, felt earned. I honestly couldn't ask for a better finale - it ended up being one of the best episodes in one of the best TV series in modern history.

Couldn't disagree with you more.

Hate, hate HATED the Americans finale. It felt EXACTLY like the HIMYM finale in that clearly the writers thought that would be the finale early on and stuck with it even though by the time we got there it made NO sense.

For seasons and seasons we were told that Philip wanted to defect. Then he... doesn't.

We suffered through a whole season of wheat nonsense.

Stan... lets them go? What the actual fuck.

I felt the finale had NOTHING to do with what I'd been watching, and was only enjoyable as a standalone thing. I hated it intensely.

[Chaos Theory]

I can see people are not going to like the finale of House of Cards but I found it interesting.  I don’t want to give the ending away because it is so new but it one of those endings that will piss off a lot of people....but I kinda liked it.

[DrSpaceman73]

1 hour ago, Chaos Theory said:

I can see people are not going to like the finale of House of Cards but I found it interesting.  I don’t want to give the ending away because it is so new but it one of those endings that will piss off a lot of people....but I kinda liked it.

It wasn't just how it eneded, though I wasn't a fan of that either.

The whole final season was lackluster, boring and completely uninteresting.  And they left multiple open storylines at the end that were hanging out there all season.  Which is one of the reasons the whole season seemed so uninteresting.  Seemed like the ended one major storyline and the rest was just kind of "imagine your own ending as you like"

[Proclone]

Since it was brought up in another thread (apparently a sequel is in the works) I thought I would mention how utterly unsatisfying I found the ending of Penny Dreadful to be.  The third season was pretty lackluster in general and suffered from storytelling problems.  But I had enjoyed the first two seasons immensely and hoped that it would at least come together for a satisfying conclusion...It did not.

For those that never watched the very cliff notes version of the show is taking different gothic horror (Penny Dreadfuls) stories and putting them together.  It centers on Vanessa, who was the best friend of Mina Harker nee Murray (yes, that Mina) and who was also intermittently possessed.  The show also includes Victor Frankenstein and two of this "monsters."  An Alan Quatermain-esq character in the form of Sir Malcolm Murray, Dorian Gray, and a werewolf named Ethan, for good measure.  The show was very much an ensemble piece but Vanessa was the only character that interacts with all the other characters and is really the glue that holds the show together as one narrative.

Throughout the series, Vanessa is stalked by supernatural beings and we eventually learn she is essentially the reincarnation of a death goddess who both Dracula and Lucifer (in the show they are brothers) want to use to destroy the world.  In the third season, Vanessa is separated by the plot from all her friends and allies.  She is first literally and then figuratively seduced by Dracula.  And as a side note, it annoyed me immensely that the only good enjoyable sex Vanessa ever had was with the villain.  All the other times she has sex in the show she becomes possessed.  I'm not sure what they were trying to say about female sexuality with that, but I'm not sure I like it.

In the finale episode, all her friends gather to try and save Vanessa and defeat Dracula, who has used Vanessa to cast a fog over London killing hundreds if not thousands of people.  I assumed a good percentage of the characters were going to die in some sort of epic finale battle and I was cool with that.  I had always assumed that it was going to be a fairly tragic story.  But that's not what happens.  The majority of the characters live.  The only one who dies is Vanessa.  Which is not itself what bothers me, it's how she does it.  Ethan manages to find her and she begs him to kill her so she can't be used by Dracula or Lucifer anymore.  He eventually agrees and shoots her and she dies in his arms. Then the forces of darkness seem to shrug and wander off.  Now even that doesn't bother me in isolation.  What pissed me off is that almost the exact same thing happened in the first season while Vanessa was possessed and Ethan refused to shoot her then.  If he had shot her then, thousands of people's lives would have been saved!  The entire story is rendered ultimately pointless.

It even wouldn't have bothered me that much if the scene in the first season have been framed in a way that implied it was foreshadowing Vanessa's ultimate fate, but it isn't.  It's framed in a way to imply Ethan is the only one who can reach her and the only one who can save her.  There's a lot foreshadowed about Ethan that's not paid off.  Not the least of which is that he is going to be the one to die.  He's also frequently hinted at to be Vanessa's protector and that him being a werewolf will somehow play into that (there are prophecies about the Wolf of God).  But him being a werewolf ultimately plays very little into the plot.  He's not even in wolf form when he finds Vanessa at the end.  All him being a werewolf amounted to in the end was three seasons whining about being cursed.

Another huge problem with the ending is that entirety of Frankenstein's story isn't really paid off.  No one ever finds out he's been making people out of spare parts in his basement.  He even used Ethan's dead girlfriend from the first season to make a "bride" for his original "monster" and Ethan never finds out.  How do you not pay that off?  Why have Victor use Ethan's girlfriend when Ethan is never going to know?  Just have him use some random chick then.  That's super crappy storytelling right there.

The shoot the shaggy dogness of the story would bother less if I thought it was trying to say something.  It didn't seem to be saying you can't fight fate.  Ethan whines about being cursed by fate and bound for a tragic end for three seasons but winds up being hunky dory (if not sad) at the end.  It didn't even seem to be saying something super dark like you can't fight, you should just lay down and die because, in the end, all the other characters seem to express a desire to keep fighting evil.

There was so much of in this show that was foreshadowed or hinted at but never paid off.  There were a lot of Chekhov's guns left unfired in that show.  Now I'm not saying that everything in a work should be telegraphed or that twists shouldn't happen. I'm not even saying don't off main characters (kill off all the characters). What I am saying is that a work should be thematically coherent.  It should say trying to say something.  Have everything that happens in a work serve to further what you are trying to say.  And when you say one thing for three seasons, and then say something else in the last possible moment then people are going to be unsatisfied.  You don't say, fight darkness, fight what people think about you and the boxes they put you in (which was a major theme IMO of the show) and then at the last second have the main character say, "I'm tired of fighting, just shoot me now."  It's poor storytelling.

And I think that's why Penny Dreadful annoys me more than almost any other show's ending that I've disliked.  It had so much potential, cool characters, an interesting world, a potentially interesting plot and it just wasted it all.  And it blew it by not being able to use the very fundamental concept of set up and pay off very well at all.  Don't set up all this cool stuff up and then pay none of it off.  Don't hint at things that are never going to happen. 

[Danielg342]

The only finale I ever thought was actually great was the one for The Big Bang Theory. It was simple, effective and touching all at once. Not only that, but you got the sense that the show could have continued if the writers wanted to do it, which I think is a big plus. If I'm saying goodbye to a show, I like the thought that I could keep it going in my head if I wanted to- because, even if I feel the show needs to end, I'll still have a soft spot for the characters or other aspects of the show in its better days and I hate thinking I could never imagine them continuing with their lives.

As for the finales I didn't like- I'll put in other votes for How I Met Your Mother and Seinfeld and I won't talk much about them. All I'll say is this: going back to the previous paragraph, if you wanted shows whose finales destroyed their dynamics too much, it's hard to find better examples than those two. I'll also say that if I had to pick which one was worse, it would be Seinfeld by a hair. How I Met Your Mother was faulted by poor story choices but it at least made logical sense. Although I get that they probably wanted to give the admittedly very mean characters their "comeuppance", Seinfeld's finale was simply illogical and ridiculous.

The other finale I'll touch upon was Gotham. I watched that show from beginning to end- literally- but when it ended, it left a sour taste in my mouth. The actual finale itself wasn't too bad, but it still left a bittersweet feeling about the show I now concluded with. I loved the first season of Gotham, and I stuck with it mainly because I thought there was an extra gear the show could get to. There are very few shows where I think their potential is literally off-the-charts and Gotham was it, and I kept with it because I hoped, one day, it would realize it. It never did. It sure teased a lot, and S4 seemed to suggest to me they could had things back on track but, again, they pulled the plug too soon- leaving me with a series that's a bunch of middling episodes that went nowhere despite hinting they really could have gone somewhere.

[Trini]

I assume this topic isn't restricted to just series finales, right?

Two shows that I watch, God Friended Me and Prodigal Son, both had their season/series finales this week. And it was funny to me how tonally opposite they were compared to each other. Of course, the shows are very different anyway, so the finales would be too, but I was just struck by the study in contrasts.

(However, both are shows from Berlanti Prods., set in NYC, with male leads, that follow a case-of-the-week format but with a concurrent mystery also.)

GFM didn't get to finish filming and they didn't know it would also be a series finale until the last minute, so the endings of various arcs had to be narrated with a voiceover; everyone got a fairly definite, happy ending. PS, meanwhile, ended on a somber note for most characters, and storylines were left on cliffhangers. But they were able to film the ending that was planned.

Even the closing scenes were opposites: GFM ended with the lead atop a snowy mountain on a sunny day, content. PS on the other hand ended indoors with a bloody murder, with the lead unsure of what to do next.

[Blergh]

Girl Meets World:

 

OK, in spite of the fact that this show consistently disappointed me, I somehow still believe that the finale managed to be quite the let down!

To begin with the setup was absurd: Topanga had barely mentioned being a lawyer in the last season, yet somehow her firm (that she more or less ditched to run the bakery) was eager to send her to their London office! Even if Topanga was a whiz lawyer, unless the firm had a large number of cases that dealt strictly with expatriate US Citizens and/or military (with no British subjects) there's NO WAY she could have practiced British law there without having to have taken the bar but we'll go with that one for now. Rather than discuss it with Cory (you know merely her husband and co-parent) she insists that she has to hear out 'all the people she loves (though oddly not a single member of her counterculture  birth family despite Peter Tork still being alive then)'- and Cory is astoundingly passive about this- just saying that he is sure she'll make 'the right decision for their family'. I'm not saying he needed to attempt to pull the husband/father card but even him saying that he would be willing to go anywhere with her BUT she needed to consider whether she was ready seek out a new living arrangement for their 4 person family (which is even pricier in London with less space available than NYC), new schools for their children (and how easily could American credits have been transferred without needing extra courses) AND whether she'd be willing to be the sole support since it would be next to impossible for HIM to find a job there since US citizens only get jobs if the employers state that no British subjects, Commonwealth or EU (back then) folks could do the job(and he couldn't have taught in British schools)! 

Of course it was ALL about how Riley and her pals would have to suffer. 

 For one glorious moment, when ALL the Matthews family, as well as Shawn,Katy, Minkus , Harley,Mr. Turner and Mr. Feeny being at the apartment, I thought there could be some satisfaction.  Mr. Feeny gave a good nod towards London being a cultural center that could enrich everyone but then somewhat blew it by having a dumb feud with Eric (who no one including his parents acknowledged as having become a Senator). Then Amy and Alan just said that they'd miss their grandkids but wish them the best. Then Shawn gave them credit for having introduced him to Katy and that he was adopting Maya. Even THAT satisfying moment was short lived in that Maya then declared that SHE was moving to England with  Riley.,etc- and neither Shawn nor Katy attempted to put their feet down and say that she could VISIT whenever funds, school and the Matthewses allowed but she was going to stay there (and she'd need them to agree to her getting a passport)! Even more disappointing was for them to have Minkus and Harley appear standing together but saying nothing ( so whatever friendship they may have had went completely unaddressed on the show- although Danny McNulty [Harley] said that there WAS a bit of dialogue between them that got cut). Also, it might have been good to see Shawn and those two having become friends but that's NOT what we got!

 

Also, they did nothing with the two performers playing Morgan but make a joke about how she'd been played by two people- what kind of person she had become was completely ignored!

 Lastly, after hemming and hawing, Topanga declared that she (and the other Matthewses) would STAY because this was HER happy place (as if there was any doubt that the show would have attempted to limp along without Sabrina Carpenter, Corey Fogelmanis,etc. in the cast had there have been a fourth season).

And for the zillionth time AFTER Topanga's called off the move, Riley and company declare that they'll always be friends wherever they may go (and THAT was worth cutting dialogue between Minkus and Harley- much less providing none of the BMW cast more than a couple of utterances?).

Anyway, considering how satisfying the  BMW finale had been (and even considering how dumbed down and lame this show more often than not was) this  still managed to disappoint me!

 

 

 

Edited May 10, 2020 by Blergh

[Hiyo]

Star Trek: The Next Generation's finale was really, really good.

[Mabinogia]

2 hours ago, Blergh said:

OK, in spite of the fact that this show consistently disappointed me, I somehow still believe that the finale managed to be quite the let down!

In spite of the fact that the show consistently disappointed me, I kept wanting it to succeed. lol You are totally right about the finale though. That was just awful. 

[Katy M]

2 hours ago, Blergh said:

at Maya then declared that SHE was moving to England with  Riley.,etc- and neither Shawn nor Katy attempted to put their feet down and say that she could VISIT whenever funds, school and the Matthewses allowed but she was going to stay there!

I never watched Girl Meets World, but don't forget on Boy Meets World, Topanga's parents moved, but she stayed with her aunt solely so that she and Corey wouldn't have to split up.  This show seems to have a weird idea about how families work.

[Avabelle]

That 70’s Show - I will never understand why they broke up Hyde and Jackie and regressed on all the great character growth they developed from each other. It made no sense. It was the last season. They were wrapping up. They were a fan favourite couple. The only fan favourites Left given Eric had left and he and Donna were no more.

And I will never, ever understand Jackie/Fez.

[Irlandesa]

1 hour ago, Avabelle said:

And I will never, ever understand Jackie/Fez.

This.  I loved Jackie and Hyde (although yikes on the actor who portrayed him) but if the show was hellbent on breaking up that couple, then have Jackie go solo.  That would have at least been a realistic ending.

[Blergh]

On 5/8/2020 at 4:21 PM, Katy M said:

I never watched Girl Meets World, but don't forget on Boy Meets World, Topanga's parents moved, but she stayed with her aunt solely so that she and Corey wouldn't have to split up.  This show seems to have a weird idea about how families work.

Agree but at least the BMW Lawrence parents insisted on Topanga staying in their homestate with a relative (one who played Juliet in that classic 1968 movie). But the GMW Hunters didn't so much as voice an objection to their teen Maya TELLING them she was going to live overseas.

Edited May 12, 2020 by Blergh

[Spartan Girl]

Netflix's A Series of Unfortunate Events had a great finale, because unlike the books, we actually got some closure and answers to questions that weren't nearly so convoluted. 

[Kel Varnsen]

5 hours ago, Spartan Girl said:

Netflix's A Series of Unfortunate Events had a great finale, because unlike the books, we actually got some closure and answers to questions that weren't nearly so convoluted. 

It is interesting, my daughter and I started reading the books after watching season 1 and finished all 13 before the final season came out. I liked the more ambiguous ending to the books since it gave us a lot to discuss and think about. But I think that much ambiguity wouldn't have really worked for a tv show.

[ParadoxLost]

On 1/19/2020 at 2:49 AM, Danielg342 said:

As for the finales I didn't like- I'll put in other votes for How I Met Your Mother and Seinfeld and I won't talk much about them. All I'll say is this: going back to the previous paragraph, if you wanted shows whose finales destroyed their dynamics too much, it's hard to find better examples than those two. I'll also say that if I had to pick which one was worse, it would be Seinfeld by a hair. How I Met Your Mother was faulted by poor story choices but it at least made logical sense. Although I get that they probably wanted to give the admittedly very mean characters their "comeuppance", Seinfeld's finale was simply illogical and ridiculous.

How I Met Your Mother was worse than Seinfeld by far because it rendered the entire series meaningless. They couldn't let go of the ending they crafted at the beginning despite spending too many years doing too good a job convincing viewers that Ted and Robin didn't belong together.

I've said this before but I thought Seinfeld's finale was quite clever because it rendered the entire series that was famously about nothing entirely about something.   Frankly, it struck me a bit like a punchline to one of Seinfeld's jokes.  One long drawn out piece of observational humor.  But since I don't find Seinfeld's stand up particularly funny, I liked the series better than the punchline.

[Katy M]

I started watching The Office during lockdown and I don't think I saw all the episodes and I saw a bunch out of order, but I thought the finale was close to perfect.  

[Kel Varnsen]

On 9/20/2020 at 10:53 PM, ParadoxLost said:

How I Met Your Mother was worse than Seinfeld by far because it rendered the entire series meaningless. They couldn't let go of the ending they crafted at the beginning despite spending too many years doing too good a job convincing viewers that Ted and Robin didn't belong together

The How I Met Your Mother finale is a perfect example for me of why network/studio notes on a script might not always be a bad thing. Because if someone, anyone with the power and authority to say "this isn't good it needs to be changed before we can film" had done that they probably could have saved the audience from what we ended up getting.

[ParadoxLost]

27 minutes ago, Kel Varnsen said:

The How I Met Your Mother finale is a perfect example for me of why network/studio notes on a script might not always be a bad thing. Because if someone, anyone with the power and authority to say "this isn't good it needs to be changed before we can film" had done that they probably could have saved the audience from what we ended up getting.

The perfect example of this is BSG's first season finale.  Ron Moore had the dumb idea that they should cast Dirk Benedict as God (or a character claiming to be God) and have him meet Baltar in the Opera House.  I thought he was joking about this until he named the Sci Fi executive that stopped him.

That put me in a very uncomfortable place.  I had become hooked on a show run by one of the two people that ruined Roswell. And I was grateful to a Sci-Fi network executive  for reigning in Moore's worse impulses. I was relying on the Sci-Fi network to not allow this show to go totally off the rails.  The Sci Fi network.  At that point Farscape was the only dead show heaped at their feet and still I knew this was a no good very bad place to be.

And the cyclons didn't have a plan.  And I still don't understand how they found Earth twice.  And they dumped all their tech and wandered into the woods just so Moore could have a Hitchcock cameo on "our" Earth,

Edited September 22, 2020 by ParadoxLost

[Bastet]

19 hours ago, ParadoxLost said:

And I still don't understand how they found Earth twice.

They didn't.  They found Earth - of their recorded history, where the 13th tribe settled, where you could see all the constellations, etc. - but it was a nuclear wasteland and they couldn't live there.  The planet they stumbled upon at the end was an entirely different one, one they knew nothing about, and when Laura asked if it had a name, Bill said they'd call it Earth (ah, colonization - the planet they didn't bother to ascertain the name of is what they called, and thus we still call, Earth) on the theory that Earth was ultimately the name for the new home they'd been searching for rather than a specific place from ancient stories. 

As to the series finale, I don't love the Lee Adama decrees we abandon all technology policy the survivors inexplicably agree on, but I ultimately don't care - I still love the BSG finale on the whole.  And I like that the story winds up being our ancient history rather than something in the future (I like the "all of this has happened before, but does it have to happen again?" aspect of it, so I love the present-day tag), so I accept that plot as a way to get there. 

I've watched it several times in just the three years since I first watched the series, because I get caught up in the characters each time and wind up quite emotional.  It is not without flaws, but I find it powerful and moving.

The finale of The X-Files (the only other sci-fi show I've watched), however - that's shit, and the only emotion I feel is anger.

Edited September 22, 2020 by Bastet

[Spartan Girl]

I think Malcolm in the Middle was one of the most underrated finales ever. It brought home the “us against the world” ties that managed to keep that crazy family together. Also all of the kids managed to wind up in relatively good places. Malcolm is at Harvard, even though he had to pay his way via being a janitor. Reese is content being roomies with Craig and putting his cooking skills to good use. Dewey and Jamie bond, and if his parents’ plan comes to fruition, he’ll wind up being rich and famous. And Francis, after all his rebellion, is happily married with an office job just like Hal, though he never tells Lois just to mess with her.

Everyone is happy except for Hal and Lois, who wind up with another surprise pregnancy. I loved that bit of dark irony.

[Hiyo]

Both Star Trek: The Next Generation and ER had satisfying finales. I also liked how Friends and The OC ended.

[Danielg342]

On 9/20/2020 at 10:53 PM, ParadoxLost said:

How I Met Your Mother was worse than Seinfeld by far because it rendered the entire series meaningless. They couldn't let go of the ending they crafted at the beginning despite spending too many years doing too good a job convincing viewers that Ted and Robin didn't belong together.

I've said this before but I thought Seinfeld's finale was quite clever because it rendered the entire series that was famously about nothing entirely about something.   Frankly, it struck me a bit like a punchline to one of Seinfeld's jokes.  One long drawn out piece of observational humor.  But since I don't find Seinfeld's stand up particularly funny, I liked the series better than the punchline.

I remember thinking when it first aired that the Seinfeld finale was just too ridiculous for its own good. Even for the show's crazy standards, it didn't at all feel realistic. The characters were also sentenced to just a year in jail which is a pretty minor punishment, especially after the theatrics of a trial they just went through. It hardly felt like a concluding note at all.

Now, that I've had time to think about it and maybe come to terms with it, I've said it in other threads and I'll say it here- I just think the finale was too clever for its own good, and maybe the show was as well. Seinfeld turned on its head the idea that the protagonists of the episode are supposed to be the "good guys" or were somewhat sympathetic, because there was hardly anything "good" or sympathetic about the four main characters.

Which was lost on the audience, for two reasons. One, even though the show was never at all hiding from the audience how unsympathetic the characters were, the natural tendency to find a protagonist sympathetic confused a lot of people when that was laid bare by the finale.

Secondly, since the show spent a lot of time making fun of mundane, annoying "life situations" (like waiting for a table at a restaurant), and since that was, by and large, the central appeal of the show, the nastiness of the characters drifted into the background. Seinfeld, arguably, only got to succeed because it made its characters reactive instead of proactive, because I hardly doubt a TV series that's all about how mean the lead characters can be to each other and to other people would be one a lot of people would want to watch.

A TV show that does things like putting those annoying telemarketers in their place? That's an easy sell.

So when it came time to put the nasty characters in their place, it really just felt off. Not just because of the shock of realizing the characters really were terrible human beings but also because, in some cases anyway, the characters felt heroic for putting down others who were similarly nasty or annoying. It's not like many of the guest cast were upright human beings themselves (e.g. the Soup Nazi).

Plus the finale really went overboard showing just how evil the main characters were. At least when the characters were mean beforehand they had their reasons. In the finale? Why'd they target the fat guy? Because they can?

That's just me. When I compare it to How I Met Your Mother, that finale at least was a bit more logical and rational in its narrative, even if the story choices they did make were contrived and heartless. It's not entirely impossible that Barney and Robin would divorce, that the Mother would die and that Ted and Robin would end up together again. Stuff like that happens all the time in life, even if we can't understand why.

The failure with HIMYM is more that those story choices were not the right ones (considering just how great a character the Mother was once we actually got to meet her) and that they didn't set up those story points properly. We spent an entire season at Barney's and Robin's wedding, and that wedding was undone in one line. We also spent an entire season meeting and getting to know Traci McConnell and she was offed with just a brief scene and one line. Ted going back to Robin was also just a scene too, even though the entire series was supposed to be a "meta setup" for that moment. Each one of those moments could have been an entire episode, and maybe even should have been an entire episode. The fact that those moments were reduced to merely a line went a long way in making them come out flat.

[Egg McMuffin]

Best

• Friday Night Lights
• Mary Tyler Moore
• The Carol Burnett Show (not seen in syndicated reruns, but if you’ve ever seen Carol paying tribute to her colleagues and then singing her theme song one last time - through her tears - you know what I mean. It’s on Youtube.)
• Friends (yeah, a little goopy, but effective)
• The O.C. (Loved Seth and Summer parting, and the flash forwards)
• Star Trek: The Next Generation (gotta love the last scene where Picard joins the poker game, and the crew tells him he was always welcome)
• The Dick Van Dyke Show (VERY clever finale that brings the show full circle)

Flawed

• Newhart (loved the last three minutes, but the rest of the episode suffered from the plot absurdities that plagued the show in its last two seasons).
• Cheers (too long, too many subplots, pointless return of Shelley Long, boring section with character ruminating on the meaning of life)
• M*A*S*H (too much Hawkeye; cease-fire comes too late in the episode and then they rush the departures)
• St Elsewhere
  Spoiler

  (Good Times syndrome, where an unrealistic amount of life-changing events happen in one episode: Phil quits medicine; the residents leave St Eligius; Auschlander dies; the Craigs reconcile and decide to move away).

   

• The Sopranos
• The Fugitive
  Spoiler

  (two part episode: first part where Kimble is finally apprehended is excellent, but the second part where a previously-unknown witness comes forward is too contrived.

   

• Mad Men

Terrible

• How I Met Your Mother
• Lost
• Dallas (a ridiculous It’s a Wonderful Life takeoff that didn’t wrap up anything)
• Seinfeld (in fairness, I don’t know how you’d effectively wrap up an unsentimental show like Seinfeld)
• Maude (she becomes a Congresswoman and they try to introduce a whole new show)
• Three’s Company (too much focus on Jack’s spinoff, no previous cast members at Janet’s wedding)
• Roseanne (a lazy way to try to wash the terrible taste of the last season out of our mouths, and what’s with that pretentious TE Lawrence quote at the end?).

[DrSpaceman73]

Breaking bad and 6 feet under belong in the best. Though for breaking bad the penultimate episode ozymandias is the best episode. 

The closing montage of 6 feet under is hard to beat. 

[BlackberryJam]

I can’t decide which was worse, Game of Thrones or the original Dexter.

[Mabinogia]

On 3/25/2022 at 4:53 PM, DrSpaceman73 said:

The closing montage of 6 feet under is hard to beat. 

That is one of my favorite finales. 

The Good Place is another of my favorites, and I will always love the end of Newhart for one of the best callbacks of all time. 

[andromeda331]

On 3/25/2022 at 12:59 PM, Egg McMuffin said:

Best

• Friday Night Lights
• Mary Tyler Moore
• The Carol Burnett Show (not seen in syndicated reruns, but if you’ve ever seen Carol paying tribute to her colleagues and then singing her theme song one last time - through her tears - you know what I mean. It’s on Youtube.)
• Friends (yeah, a little goopy, but effective)
• The O.C. (Loved Seth and Summer parting, and the flash forwards)
• Star Trek: The Next Generation (gotta love the last scene where Picard joins the poker game, and the crew tells him he was always welcome)
• The Dick Van Dyke Show (VERY clever finale that brings the show full circle)

Flawed

• Newhart (loved the last three minutes, but the rest of the episode suffered from the plot absurdities that plagued the show in its last two seasons).
• Cheers (too long, too many subplots, pointless return of Shelley Long, boring section with character ruminating on the meaning of life)
• M*A*S*H (too much Hawkeye; cease-fire comes too late in the episode and then they rush the departures)
• St Elsewhere
    Reveal spoiler

  (Good Times syndrome, where an unrealistic amount of life-changing events happen in one episode: Phil quits medicine; the residents leave St Eligius; Auschlander dies; the Craigs reconcile and decide to move away).

   

• The Sopranos
• The Fugitive
    Reveal spoiler

  (two part episode: first part where Kimble is finally apprehended is excellent, but the second part where a previously-unknown witness comes forward is too contrived.

   

• Mad Men

Terrible

• How I Met Your Mother
• Lost
• Dallas (a ridiculous It’s a Wonderful Life takeoff that didn’t wrap up anything)
• Seinfeld (in fairness, I don’t know how you’d effectively wrap up an unsentimental show like Seinfeld)
• Maude (she becomes a Congresswoman and they try to introduce a whole new show)
• Three’s Company (too much focus on Jack’s spinoff, no previous cast members at Janet’s wedding)
• Roseanne (a lazy way to try to wash the terrible taste of the last season out of our mouths, and what’s with that pretentious TE Lawrence quote at the end?).

I do love the Dallas one because it wasn't an angel but the devil. Of course, the devil wanted JR. That just cracked me up and still does. 

[Spartan Girl]

The Better Call Saul finale was brilliant. 

Vince really had me going in thinking that Saul had successfully weaseled a sweetheart deal and would go as far as to throw Kim under the bus for ice cream. Everything we had seen him do as Gene up to that point made me think he was beyond redemption. But then, dressed in his flashiest Saul court suit, he willingly fell on his own sword, owning up to everything he ever did and and reclaimed Jimmy McGill, even though it meant 86 years in a county prison. The heel turn felt a little rushed initially, but I’ll take it.

That’s the kind of villain redemption arc I like: one with actual accountability and consequences.

[Affogato]

On 9/21/2020 at 11:58 PM, ParadoxLost said:

The perfect example of this is BSG's first season finale.  Ron Moore had the dumb idea that they should cast Dirk Benedict as God (or a character claiming to be God) and have him meet Baltar in the Opera House.  I thought he was joking about this until he named the Sci Fi executive that stopped him.

That put me in a very uncomfortable place.  I had become hooked on a show run by one of the two people that ruined Roswell. And I was grateful to a Sci-Fi network executive  for reigning in Moore's worse impulses. I was relying on the Sci-Fi network to not allow this show to go totally off the rails.  The Sci Fi network.  At that point Farscape was the only dead show heaped at their feet and still I knew this was a no good very bad place to be.

And the cyclons didn't have a plan.  And I still don't understand how they found Earth twice.  And they dumped all their tech and wandered into the woods just so Moore could have a Hitchcock cameo on "our" Earth,

At that point the tech they abandoned was done. Old, used up. There was an implication the necessary knowledge was in their heads, Baltar knew agriculture. Also this was not a hugely religious show but it was a religious story, a religious frontier story.a legacy of the original.  Yeah, the ending of bsg makes sense. It started in ‘the book of Joseph’ when a flying saucer lands on his front lawn and tells him to take his group west, eventually to Utah. It is an act of faith. In the TV show they are casting their bread upon the water, and they do make it. 

Edited February 23 by Affogato

[Affogato]

I vote for Deep Space 9. The goodbyes and decisions were all earned and relatable, and there were so many complex relationships in that show. After nine long seasons I imagine the work goodbyes were as rich as the fictional goodbyes. 
 

i vote for Roseanne, for reminding us who the story was about. Also for reminding us that we change our narratives for a variety of reasons, to protect ourselves, but also for others.  

 

[Raja]

The Hawaii Five-O finale had a long show of McGarrett being a spy without his squad with a return of Wo Fat after years of absence.  I am pretty sure that Wo Fat's house in the finale later became Robin's Nest in Tom Selleck's Magnum P.I.

[Palimelon]

Quote

I vote for Deep Space 9

That and The Next Generation both had great finales. I was fine with the BSG finale. A Different World also had a good finale. As did Mary Tyler Moore. ER and The O.C. both had a satisfying finales.

The Lost finale really sucked. As did How I met Your Mother's. Six Feet Under, yeesh, what an overrated show, and an overrated finale.