It started with a reference to Star Trek TNG so my eyes must have glazed over… 
Overlong, I grant you, but if you’re going to stack Alda’s Hawkeye in the TV series against Sutherland’s [note the correct spelling] Hawkeye in the movie, the weeping would have started with season 1, episode 1. The Hawkeyes were totally different in every respect.
Count me as another who thought Six Feet Under’s finale was one of the finest moments in television history.
The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Newhart were also great finales.
As much as I loved the show Seinfeld, Jerry is right about one thing - his own show had the worst pilot and finale of any show.
Isn’t it the case the the first show of a series is not necessarily the pilot episode? I think sometimes they touch up the script and/or reshoot the whole thing into an official “first episode”
Another one who thinks that both ends of Six Feet Under were fantastic - the finale had me in buckets of tears!
I agree that the pilot of ST:TNG was pretty lame, and in fact the whole tone and presentation of the first series wasn’t that great in my opinion - it got considerably better in series two. I thought the finale, however, was excellent. The pilot for DS9 was brilliant, although I thought the finale was weak, and the pilot for Voyager sucked ass whilst the finale was good (so no real pattern going there).
“Cartman Gets an Anal Probe”
ER had a strong pilot. Too bad they didn’t end that thing years & years ago.
True. Specially if the “real” pilot gets clobbered in the focus-group screenings.
Similarly the last show out is not necessarily a “finale”.
But yes, there is a difference between a “pilot”, a “chapter one” and a mere first-show-aired. A show can have a single episode be all three, or split it between two, or split it between three, or redo one as the other. In most American TV, until the 1980s there was NO sense of there needing to be a proper “chapter one”: you’d go right into airing what shows you had in the can, and told the writers to be a little heavier on exposition during the first half of the first season.
There’s also, I’d expect, a difference between a pilot primarily intended to pitch to “the suits”, and one intended to test the general audience. IIRC, pre-1980s there basically was no intent to ever air the first kind if it got sold, except in a reshot form of a regular episode. And it was not unusual to do the second kind of pilot in such a way to be able to use it as a a stand-alone TV-movie (e.g. Hill Street) or chapter of another show.
Now, as to finales, there are first of all those mere last episodes that happen when the network simply pulls the plug. The show ended, no wrap-up. Good bye.
Then there are premature finales such as the before-mentioned Magnum P.I. situation, where you THINK the show’s going to end, but then, surprise, it keeps going. :o Now what?
There are rush finales, where the writers find out the show is cancelled before it was expected, and now you have to hurry up and tie up loose ends and bring in the grand climax you were building up to. One major pitfall of this is that if the rush finale is too succesful, the suits may change their mind and then it turns into a premature finale :o . BTW some rush finales are also “oh crap, we’ve written ourselves into a corner” finales, wherein the writers realize they had made no plan at all for how to end it.
There are on the other hand “good gods, be done already” finales where you draw it out and build it up to the point the audience is exhausted BEFORE the final hour, or even worse, where the audience feels some episode halfway throught the last, or even worse, next-to-last, season was the note on which it should have ended. Sometimes this is no fault of the writers because they were pushed into a near-premature finale, and then told never mind, we have the whole season anyway.
It’s tough to do a good closing to a piece of work!
This is why I’m hopeful for BSG S4: they’ve got the whole season to work up to the series finale.
And then there’s Babylon 5. JMS shot a show finale for the end of Season 4, when it looked like the show was going to be canceled, then shot a new Season 4 finale and saved the show he had already shot for the end of Season 5.
Worked into the theme song of the next Black Adder, which was also nice: His great-grandfather was a king, although for only thirty seconds… Blackadder, Blackadder etc.
No mention of Quantum Leap’s finale? Shame on you all.
And the finale was also great. Not a popular opinion but I stand by it.
I think Jerry Seinfield’s trying create forced aphorism – unlike Oscar Wilde, he’s not good at it.
Of the shows I’m thoroughly familiar with Six Feet Under and The Sopranos were the two that had truly excellent pilots and seried finales.
Although some of the latter SFUs were not that great, I felt a tragedy sense of loss as I knew this show leaving the air forever (well, no new episodes to be seen anyway). I was already crying while watching it, several episodes before the finale.
I didn’t watch TS at the beginning because I thought it had to be one of the stupidest premises for a TV ever. I ran across it channel surfing one night (second season, I think) and I was hooked. Right before the start of the last “bonus” episodes I watched some of the first season, including the first episode on DVD. It was high quality from start to finish – though the last season was quite a bit uneven.
Despite what has been said since, I think the final episode of TS ended the only way it could – deliberately confounding all expectations and artfully leaving the actual ending for each viewer to finish as he sees fit. Briilliant, in my book
Sounds to me like Seinfeld was describing *Seinfeld * and trying to excuse the suckiness of its finale by overgeneralizing about all finales in general. “See, my finale may have sucked, but since they all suck, so what?”, when in fact as has been pointed out here, many finales do not suck.
There was no finale for Quantum Leap. The episode of which you speak never aired, as the writers were unable to come up with a satisfactory way to end the series.
I don’t remember the pilot for The Larry Sanders Show, but the finale was probably the best episode of the series. In an ideal world, that’d be the norm.
I think I’m one of the few people who like the way The Sopranos ended.
Real life doesn’t necessarily have a big finale… you just keep living life day to day. That’s how the show ended and I liked it.
So what was that episode when he met “God” about then? Considering it had the whole bit with Sam changing Al’s past and the screen saying “Sam never came home” I think that’s a fairly definitive ending. Or maybe it only aired in the UK.
I also liked the Roseanne finale. I think she had a brilliant show and she used her time on television to really make a point about class in America, which she says in interviews on the DVDs was exactly what she was trying to do. The finale brought all the outlandish lottery stuff back to earth and really brought her point home. It was nice to see a show that actually had a point but also managed to be really funny at the same time.