The finale of Six Feet Under was the best episode, and the first one wasn’t bad either (I know other people have mentioned this one, but it’s the first thing I thought of when I read the thread title.)
The first episode was great, but I don’t remember anything special about the finale. (Do you mean the last Yes, Minister or are you including Yes, Prime Minister?)
I always wanted them to come back for one last episode, in which Hacker loses office. I think Jay and Lynn could have come up with something good for that premise. Not going to happen now, sadly.
Well, YPM didn’t really have a finale, per se, it just had a final episode. I guess I’m cheating in considering YM’s ‘final’ episode as the one-off “Party Games,” which was really a bridge episode to YPM.
OT…
Sad indeed. Reading the YM/YPM books of the series, the conceit of which being that they were Hacker’s daily memoirs published after Hacker’s death (and after the thirty year rule), they did write the fate of the three main characters:
Hacker “failed upwards” by getting kicked upstairs to the House of Lords; Sir Humphrey ended up going bonkers in a retirement home; Bernard followed Humphrey’s example and wound up as head of the Home Civil Service. Whether they’d have gone the same route with a finale, I’m not sure.
Anyway I guess calling “Party Games” the YM finale isn’t really accurate. So ignore me. 
I strongly disagree that the pilot/finale of ST:TNG were good - I thought they were both terrible. I dislike the Q character on principle as the embodiment of infantile wish-fulfillment, with the pilot episode going out of its way to be sanctimonious and the finale going out of its way to use the “temporal reset button”.
First episode of WKRP was bang-on. The unresolved cliffhanger finale promised all kinds of heavy drama… tragically unrevealed.
I agree with Moonchild on the pilot of Freaks and Geeks. It was the pilot of that series that made me think “I’m pretty sure this is going to be one of my all-time favorite series.” And the series became just that.
St. Dymphna’s Home for the Elderly Deranged, if memory serves.I think the details of that could have made a great final show. One of the things I liked about Yes, Minister is that the same characters weren’t always right, or always won; and politics was its own game completely divorced from sound policies. For the finale, I wanted Hacker to make a courageous decision, maybe for the first time in his life. It would have to be something obviously in the best interest of the nation, maybe even broadly popular, but with just enough powerful enemies and special interests to run him out of office because of it. I wish I knew British politics well enough to flesh out the details.
There is a reason, by the way, that the Seinfeld finale sucked, and it’s subtle. The whole series, up to that point, thrived on its own screwy, but internally consistent, logic. When Kramer hits a golf ball into the ocean, of course the whale is going to wash up on the beach as George is trying to impress a girl by being a marine biologist. But consider the final episode. Jerry, et al., are on trial for violating a town’s good samaritan law; and the prosecutors bring back lots of former characters to testify what awful people they are. But think about it, they should have all been witnesses for the defense. Jerry tried to help a restaurant owner and got him deported. Elaine got a free armoire from the Soup Nazi and probably used the recipes to drive him out of business. The best thing that ever happened to that mugging victim was when they all decided to keep out of it. As a wise cartoon dog once said, “it just don’t add up.”
And may we please not see a finale for this show for a VERY long time.
I remember the pilot for ST:TNG rather well.
And I hated it. I know that Q became one of the most well-loved characters from the series, and later on, from what I heard, he/it became much less obnoxious. But my reaction when I saw him/it in that pilot was, “My God, they’ve stolen one of the villians from Lost in Space!” I made a crack about, “If Q comes back, I’m gone.” He/it did, and I never really regretted stopping watching the show.
In the realm of good pilots and finales: Firefly’s pilot, Serenity, was excellent, and a hugely complicated one, too, when one considers all that was introduced to the audience with that show; the finale for MAS*H was good, I’d thought.
I can think of a number of anime, too, that had excellent first episodes, but since often the pitch is based on an already existing manga, it’s harder to say which is an actual pilot vice a first episode. Other routes to TV exist as well. I believe that the first episode of the original OVA series of Patlabor counts as the pilot, and was a pretty good introduction. But when they came to retell the origins for the TV series they made a much better story - but it was no longer a pilot episode.
The episode of F&G they wanted to go out on (the last on the DVDs) was one of the great last episodes. How many series end with the main character going off to follow the Dead?
The pilot for the new Battlestar Galactica series is among the best television I’ve ever seen.
Thirding Freaks and Geeks pilot. I think it was absolutely brilliant.
I checked out the Frasier pilot just to see how bad it would be. It had me ROLLING on the floor with laughter when they panned to Frasier’s father’s roommate that had to go: Eddie the dog.
Season finales often suck too, particularly if they end on a cliffhanger. West Wing Season 1, I’m looking at you. BSG Season 1, I’m looking at you too.
If you write the movie like a tv show then…yeah.
well, no one mentioned any anime shows so I’ll go ahead and drop one.
Full Metal Alchemist
This is one of my favorite, if not most, anime shows of all time. It was a great begining that caught you up to speed very well.
Now the final episode kinda sucked because it was a definite cliffhanger. But the movie that immediately followed the series finale ended perfectly. I really couldn’t have asked for more. In my heart, the series finale was the movie.
Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire…
I was coming into this thread to use that as my prime exception. I’m not going to spoil it for those who haven’t seen it, but the ending of the pilot of The Shield left me with my jaw wide open (something that very seldomly happens to me) and thinking “holy shit, FX is finally going to become a real channel!” … and this was before NipTuck, Rescue Me, 30 Days, etc came along.
Well, Seinfeld’s full of crap, isn’t he? I’d forgotten about most of the good pilots and finales mentioned.
I thought the pilot of Deadwood was excellent. Milch had a lot of characters to introduce and put personalities on, and he did it really well. The final episode of Deadwood doesn’t count as a finale. (The less said about that, the better.)
How about Buffy? I remember the first episode as being pretty good, and the finale was fine.
The Queer as Folk pilot was one of the best episodes of the series. The finale, not as much although the entire last season was not up to the standards of the other seasons.
I liked the pilot episode of Northern Exposure a lot, though the finale episode was anti-climactic, unless you count (as I do) Joel’s final episode as the finale. Steve Martin once remarked that “chaos amidst order is comedy, chaos amidst chaos is just a mess” (or words to that effect), and without Joel’s ‘fish out of water’ conflict the show was more the latter.
The finale of Good Times was a bit deus ex ghetto, but it wasn’t the worst episode of the series and it was nice to see the Evans clan get a break (or actually, several breaks). I’m not sure which episode was the pilot.
Many classic sitcoms never had a finale: All in the Family, Sanford & Son, even the ‘stupid but still iconic’ shows like Brady Bunch and Gilligan’s Island, just ended.