The OP. What raised the question was all the Blackadders. Including the specials. The final episode of each series completed the main character storylines, some rather terminally.
The Big Bang Theory wrapped things up pretty neatly, except I don’t remember if Raj ended up with a girlfriend.
To me, the Friends finale kind of sucked because it was in large part about Ross and Rachel (bleccccch) but everyone got a happy ending.
Lost wrapped things up pretty much in their finale, angering a lot of fans in the process because (spoiler even if it’s been 12 years) after years of the writers telling fans that the island didn’t represent purgatory, the final scene is them all gathering in a church in the afterlife after the main character dies, a reveal that THEY ARE ALL DEAD, and then they all move on together, which is not strictly purgatory but is fairly purgatory-adjacent since it implies they were all waiting in some sort of holding pattern for the main character to join them.
I thought The Office (U.S. version at least) wrapped it all up over the last few episodes.
There was an obscure CBS medical drama Code Black that ran for three “seasons” form 2015-2018. I suspect CBS had little faith in the series, as none of the three were normal seasons (18, 16, and 13 eps). Anyway, the last ep did tie up all the storylines. (I preferred it over the competing “Chicago Med,” which is still running strong.)
Blackadder Goes Forth, surely the greatest example of a final episode (more so even than MASH, though I’m biased as Blackadder was such a part of my childhood, I can barely remember a time when I didn’t know every joke).
There were some pretty mediocre Blackadder specials made after that, but that stands as the end as far as I’m concerned.
There is also the final Young Ones, but that probably counts a mini series by US standards. I still make “look out Cliff” jokes whenever possible:
I’m surprised that didn’t lead to 10 more seasons covering their wacky adventures in parenting.
There was a British comedy called One Foot in the Grave that has a great final episode. There weren’t really any long story arcs to resolve, but it did wrap things up. The main character, Victor, has been killed, and the show alternates between flashbacks of his final days and his widow coping with his death. Ironically, it ends on an ambiguous note about whether the widow has gotten revenge for Victor’s death.
But Huell is still in the safe house!
Okay, to be clear because I’m not sure if you’re misinterpreting it but a lot of people have: Only the “flash-sideways” in the final season were the afterlife. They were very much alive on the island.
Can I say I’m little confused by the OP? It seems to be implying that shows “completing” the story in the series finale is a rare phenomenon. Really, unless the show is cancelled, it’s assumed the series finale will wrap up the story. It’s not the exception, it’s the rule.
Not implying that at all, just interested in how shows that got the opportunity to do so wrapped up their story lines.
Another one I just thought of - The Shield.
The main character/bad guy gets a one-time, get-out-of-jail-free plea deal, that requires him to confess every single crime he’d committed during the course of the show. He then gets stuck in a mindless, meaningless desk job until the day he retires.
I never found Life on Mars, but I watched the kinda-sorta sequel Ashes to Ashes. Same premise but with a woman police officer. I really liked it, and it ended with a happyish ending, but parts of it were very creepy in a good way.
I suspect it’s more common now than it used to be. I have a hard time thinking of any shows I watched growing up that filmed a farewell episode. Many of them would have wrapped before finding out if they’d even be renewed for another season.
It seems its actually quite hard to wrap up “the storyline” as for any sufficiently long running show there isn’t really “a storyline” there is just a bunch of stuff writers wrote to get a show out of the door, without paying to much attention to an over-arching story arc. That doesn’t matter so much for a sitcom where the whole point is there is a situation that has to be the same at the beginning of the episode and at the end. But for dramas it makes having a satisfying conclusion that feels like the end of a movie pretty tricky (X files is the classic example of this IMO. Where it became clear way before the end of the show that the writers were just making it up as they went along rather than there being some over arching plot behind it all).
A weird counterpoint to this question: Shows which had one episode that could have been a satisfying final episode that wraps everything up, but then the show continues.
A recent example is the current show Legends of Tomorrow. Their penultimate episode this season was (in-universe) supposed to be the end of the team, with all of them retiring to live out the rest of their lives as not-superheroes. Watching it, it would have been a perfectly satisfactory wrap-up. But then it all falls apart in the last minute, and the show continues the next week!
Another is the last episode of Season 5 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The show was supposed to end that season, but was then renewed. They had a complete ending for Buffy’s character arc, which they had to completely undo at the start of the next season.
Just finished a rewatch of all 15 seasons of ER and I’d say they did a good job wrapping it up, although technically the farewell took 3-5 episodes depending on how you look at it. The final ep brought in a sizable percentage of the original cast, wrapped it all up nicely and gave a very sweet goodbye to a very good series. Classy ending to a classy show.
Yes. Gloria takes Felix back, and he moves out of the apartment to go back home. After Felix says goodbye and leaves, Oscar looks around the pristine apartment…and promptly goes on a messy spree. He’s king of the castle once again.