Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’s finale closes with The Dominion War ending and Sisko ascended to another plane of reality by becoming one of “The Prophets”/Wormhole Alien.
I’d say the final episode of The Prisoner ended that show’s story line pretty well too.
(Unless it’s excluded as a “limited run” series.)
Quantum Leap ended with Sam Beckett materializing in Cokesburg, PA, a coal mining town on the day of his birth. He encounters a bartender named Al, the same name as the observer at Quantum Leap who gives Sam the information he needs to accomplish his missions. He also meets doppelgangers of some of the people he encountered in his leaps. Al the bartender tells Sam he has always had the ability to return home. Sam makes the choice to keep leaping and returns to a the timeline where his friend Al was a prisoner of the North Vietnamese and his wife Beth had given up hope that he would return and was about to have him declared dead. Sam spoke to Beth and assured her that Al would eventually return. Beth waits for Al and their marriage remains strong to the present day. It’s revealed that Sam never returns home, choosing to keep leaping through time and helping other people.
The Good Place is the gold standard. The characters move on and Michael gets to say what he always wanted to say.
And everything about the afterlife is repaired.
I always thought the double resolution of Newhart was really well done.
Even without the tag scene, the series was clearly ended with the selling of the Stratford.
ABC had a series a few years back titled “Life On Mars,” an adaptation of a British series. The premise was that a present-day police officer is hit by a car and wakes up in 1973. Harvey Keitel played a major part in the American version. We loved it, but it failed to click and was cancelled. For reasons I don’t recall, ABC allowed a final episode to be produced to wrap-up the story. We’ve seen both the British and American series. The ending of the American series was considerably more upbeat than the British series, which was a real downer.
“You should wear more sweaters.”
The final episode of Leave It to Beaver had Wally ready to go off to college, and Beaver starting high school. The family flipped through an old scrapbook and reminisced via flashbacks. Some consider it be to be the first clip show.
I thought of this too. When the boys go off and Ward and June close the scrapbook they were looking at, she turns to him and says “Do you realize we just passed another milestone in raising our children?”
Quick cut to Beaver and Wally upstairs playing with an old wind-up toy monkey, and that’s the final scene of the series.
After debating the final episode of Seinfeld*, I’ve got to wonder if the first Beaver episode started with that toy monkey.
.
*The series ends with a discussion of the placement of that second button on men’s shirts… the same conversation that kicked off the first episode.
I believe the monkey was shown in the scrapbook, so there probably was a very early clip with it. Whether it came from the first episode, I don’t remember.
The monkey shuffled around while it banged cymbals together, BTW.
Define “limited run.” Are you automatically eliminating British shows?
Are you asking me or the OP?
Battlestar Galactica 2005 had a finale that conclusively wrapped up the story and tied off all the loose ends, though there are some out there who don’t like the way the ending played out.
Breaking Bad
The Last Kingdom (now on Netflix)
The Wire
I think I started typing before you finished. It took me a long time to figure out just what to say.
“Am I invisible? Am I inaudible? Do I merely festoon the room with my presence?”
—Christopher Fry: The Lady’s Not For Burning
That would leave out Blackadder Goes Forth, which pretty definitely had a ending that completed the story of the main characters.
Didn’t The Odd Couple end with Felix and Gloria getting remarried?
Gravity Falls had a very satisfying ending.
All Rise wrapped up the series nicely. At the end of it, I realized that it really was over. This was one show that definitely acknowleged the existence of Covid 19 precautions. I had really liked the characters in the first season, but was sick of seeing them in their masks and behind the plexiglass barriers by the time it ended.