The Shield.
I think that JK Rowling did pretty well with her Harry Potter series.
The two examples that I would like to cite, admittedly do have issues of their own.
Key: The Metal Idol ended up getting cancelled after the first season, so they had to compact everything they had planned for season 2 into two movies, with the former of the two consisting mostly of two men having an expository dialogue with each other, in a park. On the other hand, this meant that the second movie was, effectively, the ending that they wanted (i.e. the last four episodes of the TV show, if they had been able to create season 2). It is perfect.
The manga, Karakuri Circus (not translated to English), has an amazingly intricate story that spans some 40 books and only just finishes telling everything that there is to know getting towards the end. Unfortunately for it, the crescendo of action (not story revelation) occurs around book 25. Then the last 5 books or so seem to have been pulled back into being fairly youth-oriented, even though all of the ones before are quite grim and dark. So, the story itself is amazing. I don’t think that there are any particular plotholes, despite the vastness of the backstory. The implementation, though, does have some issues in places, as noted.
Robert Hans van Gulik’s Judge Dee series actually has a progession in it, following the real career of the historical Judge Dee. moreover, I didn’t realize until I read thvolume Judge Dee at Work (not chronologically the last, but I believe the last published, and the last one I read) that there is also a lot of long-range storytelling and foreshadowing throughout the series. Van Gulik pulls this off better (and with less audience dissatisfaction) than J. K. Rowling did with her harry Potter series.
(hijack) Have you seen the new Judge Dee movie from Tsui Hark? AWESOMESAUCE!!! (/hijack)
No, but from what I’ve seen and read, I probably won’t like it.
Judge Dee with wirework. (shudder)
I started a thread about it last week, but no one responded
We now return from this hijack to our regularly scheduled thread.
Gaiman’s Sandman.
Lone Wolf and Cub.
If BSG ended according to plan, then the plan sucked. It looked to me like another case of the Babylon 5 problem: They ended the series in season… Four, was it?, and then went on for one more season, and ended it again, without regard for the fact that the second ending was inconsistent with the first.
And time will tell whether it succeeds, but Order of the Stick looks on track to tie up its loose ends properly.
I think the ending of BSG is much easier to swallow if you just ignore the whole “plan” business. The cylons had their reasons for what they did, plan or no plan, and I think the show evolved and ended decently.
Honestly, I think the whole “plan” mantra was some marketing slogan early on (that made sense early on) that took on a life of its own.
That was going to be my answer: it actually does a pretty good job at the kind of thing you’re looking for.
Wait, what new story line did they start? It seemed like it was just the family sitting around waiting for Meadow. And Journey.
Death Note is hardly a long running series by anime/manga standards. Not to mention a LOT of fans agree it went rather downhill after
L died.
I mean, there’s only 37 episodes, that’s about 2 seasons (though “seasons” don’t have too much meaning in anime given how the industry works over there). If you want to make a comparison length-wise you’d probably be better off going with the more long-running series like:
Bleach (did okay for the first couple seasons or so, then turned into Dragonball Z, with a less coherent and clever plot somehow),
Inu Yasha (can’t decide whether it has an actual story arc or not half the time, quality varies wildly depending on what team is working on it that season),
Naruto (was good through the beginning of Shippuden, if you ignore filler. Then became Dragonball Z with ninjas),
One Piece (still doing okay, but they keep introducing more and more characters which could become a problem), and
Dragonball/Z/GT (when I say “became Dragonball Z” I don’t mean to insult Dragonball Z, it’s a good show, the others just don’t do Dragonball Z as well as it itself did, but most fans agree DBZ went downhill either after the Cell saga since Toriyama wanted to end it then anyway, and definitely once GT hit, which Toriyama didn’t really even work on).
In fact, probably most of the critically acclaimed anime are either really short OVAs (we’re talking 4-6 episodes), small self contained series (usually about 12-13 episodes for whatever reason) or ones about the length of Death Note (40-50). Occasionally you’ll get the odd one 100-110 episode outlier, but I can’t even think of any examples, given it’s so rare.
I think American cartoons fare a bit better, a lot of the old Cartoon Network cartoons didn’t really go downhill too much, the only long running one I can think of that did is Dexter’s Lab after they had what was possibly the oddest animation shift choice in history.
My standards must be low, I’m completely fine with the conclusions to Battlestar Gallactica and Lost.
True, but in those 12 volumes a lot of stuff happened. It was extremely intricate and well plotted and full of insane details. Plus I’m one of those who don’t think it ever went downhill. 
That’s what I’m saying and then the guy walked by, the scene went dark and millions of viewers were outraged. I’m saying what happened right then and there is basically the beginning of a new story line as opposed to them not answering something that we’ve been invested in for the past 3 years.
To give a different example, I don’t know if you watch Breaking Bad, but for those who do, if something similar happened in that show right now, it would be a bigger deal. That is, if Gus or one of his goons would knock on Walt’s door*, reach under his jacket and the show just ended right there we’d be left with all kinds of loose ends and it would ultimately leave the series unfinished and looking back at it years later people probably wouldn’t be all that happy with it.
Sopranos got away with an ending like that because we weren’t in the middle of anything major (that I can recall). Nothing huge needed to be resolved. Whether Tony lived or died didn’t really have an immediate impact on anything so far as we could tell. So, in effect, his death was basically a new story line if the show would have gone forward (which made it a good ending point) Does that sort of make sense?
*For the purpose of this example, I mean for this to be happening right now. Right now being just after Episode 4.11 the one that left us with the shot of him laughing in the crawlspace.
I guess. It’s sort of hard to see it as the beginning of a new story line when nothing actually happened. I mean, what made it the beginning of a new story line as opposed to just part of the old story line? How do we know anything is going to happen?
My humble suggestion, an 18-part series released over the course of a year and a half: The Count of Monte Cristo. You can’t get more intricately plotted than that, and you can’t get better storytelling than that anywhere.
[spoiler]You fool! Just because there was discussion of God and Angels in the pilot miniseries of BSG is no reason to assume that the phantasms claiming to speak for God were angels. It was all a lie! LIES!
Or something. I was fine with it. [/spoiler]
-Joe
Definitely. I’d rank it up there with Lord of the Rings. Yes, I just said that.
Loved BSG’s ending. LOST’s was OK, though LOST wrote even bigger checks it couldn’t cash.
I’ll add one:
**
Mistborn **- It’s a trilogy from Brandon Sanderson. It opens with mysteries, develops them, advances the plot in interesting ways, and wraps pretty much everything up in three books. A total success.