TV shows that have satisfying final episodes, and shows that didn't.

[Lamia]

@Lynn_Bodoni

I liked the ending of Monk. Monk isn’t completely sane, or normal, he’s still obsessive, but he’s happy again.

The Monk finale was just on in reruns last night. I’d never seen it before, but I thought it was pretty good. I knew most of what would happen because some time back I’d read the Wikipedia article on the show, so I can’t say how surprising any of the revelations would have been had I seen it when it first aired. But even having been spoiled, I liked that, similar to the Cheers finale already mentioned, they didn’t shut down the show – we see that Monk, assisted by Natalie, will continue his work as a detective. We also see that all the other major characters are at pretty good places in their lives, some continuing along as they have been and some moving on to bigger things.

On the unsatisfying front, it’s been more than a decade and I’m still ticked about the Xena finale. I’d been a big fan of the show in the early seasons but really disliked the direction they went in later seasons and mostly quit watching by mid season five. But I tuned back in for the finale, and…well, I’ll just quote a post I made a couple of months ago for another series finale thread (spoilers below):

@Lamia

The Xena finale was so bad that the brutal death of the heroine wasn’t even the worst part. I’d say the worst part was that it seemed like a totally unrelated film script had been slightly revised to include Xena and Gabrielle. The plot, setting, supporting characters, rules for the way the supernatural operated, etc., had virtually nothing to do with anything that had happened previously on the show. Had this been a midseason episode (that didn’t end in Xena’s permanent death) that would have been okay, although even then it would have seemed like a retread of season three two-parter The Debt with added ghosts.

As things were, the finale struck me as being created by people who didn’t care about the show or the fans, and as a nasty little bonus decided the throw in a “moral” that ran counter to the basic premise of the show. Instead of continuing to try to redeem herself through good deeds, Xena finally had to die for her sins…even though the specific incident in question was something from her past that had never been previously mentioned and that turned out to have been largely accidental. In retrospect I wonder if someone high up was deliberately trying to kill the franchise. Xena had recovered from death and near death multiple times before, but in the finale went out of its way to make it clear that she was really and truly dead this time and darn well going to stay that way.