Another huge vote for Six Feet Under - truly inspired finale that still give me chills when I think of it.
The Shield also wrapped things up - I would say “nicely” but it wasn’t particularly “nice” - but it did do a good job of wrapping the show up.
Mary Tyler Moore Show ended really well, as well as Newhart.
Seinfeld had one of the worst series finales of all time - just stooopid and a huge letdown. However, The Soprano’s went out with a sour note that seemed lazy and uninspired for what had been, up to that series finale, a really well-written show.
BTW, tonight is the series finale of Dexter - so even if you are not a huge fan, you might want to tune into Showtime tonight to see how it wraps up.
Good call. I think they handled the end of Monk perfectly.
Although I thought they did a good job on Angel it suffered from the fact they did not know it would be the final episode until relatively late. The episodes leading up to it seemed forced and rushed.
Unsatisfying: Star Trek: Enterprise. They basically turned it into a ST: TNG episode with Jonathan Frakes and Marina Sirtis trying to look 15 years younger and killed off the most popular character, to boot. The series was off to a rocky start but started getting decent in its fourth season and the finale was a slap in the face to the fans. Scott Bakula was reportedly livid and even the rest of the cast thought it was crap.
I’m not going to count series that were abruptly canceled at the end of a cliffhanger episode. That’s a different category.
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):
Even though it wasn’t intended as such, I thought the final episode of Men of a Certain Age was good. It was canceled after the episode aired. Joe (Ray Romano) won the qualifying round for the pro-am golf tournament and strengthened his relationship with his son. He also seemed to be getting a handle on his gambling addiction. Terry (Scott Bakula) found a new passion for directing and seemed to have found a steady girlfriend. And Owen (Andre Braugher) was given a free hand in running the car dealership by his father and was making plans to expand. All the characters seemed to be in a happy place in their lives and seemed satisfied in the way their lives were going.
I just wanted to add that someone who hadn’t seen the finale wanted to know how the series ended, so I started telling him. “You know those wipes his long-suffering assistant is always handing him? Well, before he can solve the latest murder, the killer starts putting a weak poison ON THOSE WIPES! So the worse he feels, the more he tries to get clean, the faster he’s KILLING HIMSELF!”
His reply: “Natalie murdered someone, and decided to kill Monk by poisoning the wipes?”
Had they ended Magnum PI when they thought they were going to, the final episode would’ve been excellent. Unfortunately they added another season and ended that one horrendously.
A case of a star/showrunner with an out-of-control ego and nobody with the power to tell her “No”. The entire final season, save maybe the first couple of episodes and the one where the baby was born, was a waste.
DEADWOOD deserved a much better finale than it got.
Another vote for Babylon 5- the whole series was supposed to be a contained story; JMS (the show’s creator, and writer of more than 100 of 110 episodes) boasted that after the last episode, your only question would be “Now what?”. It didn’t quite work out that way (for reasons too numerous to list here), but I still rank it as one of the better finales I’ve seen.
Lots of interesting answers, but this one was interesting because I agree with one and disagree with the other. Seinfeld’s was terrible; I thought the Sopranos finale was superb.
BSG and LOST had bad endings, but had been on a long downhill slide. What might be a more fruitful question: what shows have defied expectations? That is, they emerged with strong, redemptive finales after seeming to have jumped the shark; or failed to stick the landing after a great final season? I agree with the ST Enterprise nomination in the latter category; I’m drawing a blank in trying to come up with examples of the former (I should try The Office though to see; I think often after I leave a show I don’t ever see the finale).
Yeah, that was good. I saw both the UK and US versions, and I rather preferred the US version (although I suspect that may not be the norm for fans of the UK version). The US version put an interesting twist on it that I really liked.
There’s a sequel of some kind for the UK version that isn’t available on Netflix yet. I may revise my opinion once I get to see that.