Mad Men sort of did this. You got an idea of what direction their lives were taking at the end but there weren’t any promises that anyone’s particular endeavors or relationships would ultimately work out.
My memory of Seinfeld, and I haven’t seen it since its initial airing, was that the court room had all minor characters from the show’s time giving their complaints about the foursome. So it wasn’t really a clip show but sort of was… you know how it’s implied in a real clip show that the person who says “Remember when…?” and it goes to clip is narrating the event? In this case, it was a clip show where they actually narrated the event.
I could not disagree more. None of the Treks have ended on good notes, though DS9 was as close as any of the series have managed thus far. (Well…I haven’t seen the Voyager finale since it first aired, so I suppose it may have been more toward Year of Hell than Threshold, but I doubt it…it didn’t stick in my head as terrible, like Turnabout Intruder, The Counterclock Incident, All Good Things… or These Are the Voyages…, though, so…)
All Good Things… was one of the worst episodes of the series. A time travel plot where the time travel made no sense can be forgivable…if the time travel nonsense at least makes sense within the framework it sets up. AGT did not.
What You Leave Behind wasn’t 100% terrible - if it were a regular length episode, excising all the Pah Wraith stuff (to be fair, impossible given that crap infected the season as a whole), it would have been fine, but… Pah Wraith.
The Showtime drama series Dexter had a final episode that tied things up nicely, until a final scene that untied everything and left things uncertain. I read somewhere this was because the network wanted to preserve the option of reviving the series.
It depends if the show was conceived with an ending in mind from the beginning, or if it just keeps limping along until it finally it gets cancelled. It also depends on the quality of the writers.
Some recent (ish) shows with great finales: Breaking Bad, Six Feet Under, Boardwalk Empire, Bates Motel.
For years, TV shows, American ones anyway, made sure that nothing ever changed for the characters. The Skipper could find a boat, maps, satellite radio, and GPS, and by the end of the episode they’d all still be stuck on the island. They had to be, because whoever was writing the next episode, and the one after that, had to start out with all the characters stuck on the island. Shows weren’t constructed with change and a finale in mind.
That has changed a great deal, lots of shows have story arcs, changes, and growth over the course of their runs. But I think some of that legacy still lingers. Shows are still constructed around characters who can have interesting stories every week. If you aren’t funny or dramatic for 20 weeks a year, you won’t be around long enough to worry about a finale. After seven years we all want to know what happens to these characters we care about when the chips are down; but television is created by people who can make sure the chips stay up.
Seinfeld had a bizarre ability to craft totally implausible stories that still made perfect sense. Of course George will pretend to be a marine biologist to impress a woman, and then of course he’ll wind up in a situation with that woman where a marine biologist is required to save a whale. It’s like the physics in cartoons; it has nothing to do with the real world, but it’s consistent within the Seinfeldverse.
Which is why the last episode was so backwards. That guy that Jerry, et al. watched getting mugged? The best thing that could have happened to him was that they stayed out of it. Every time they tried to help someone they screwed up their life. That should have been their defense at the trial, and all those former guest stars should have been prospective witnesses for the defense. And they would have all refused to testify. Let Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer end the series in jail for the one time they did the right thing and stayed out of someone’s life; that would have been the right ending for Seinfeld.
And while we’re discussing endings, I have to mention One Foot in the Grave; that had a great final episode.
I’m thinking Gilmore Girls. This may not count because it wasn’t the season finale, but the special they did, A Year in the Life. I thought it was supposed to provide closure. For the most part, imo, it just led to more questions.
There was also a sequel episode, the Bob Newhart Show 19 1/2 anniversary reunion. Everybody gathers in Bob Hartley’s office, where he recounts his dream from the previous night.
We’ve done this before, but there are shows with top notch finales. I think the following were excellent:
Babylon 5 - Really just pure amazement. A perfect finish.
Battlestar Galacitca - I know, this one was divisive.
Angel - a lot better than the Buffy one, which was not that bad.
MAS*H - Helps that I actually like the later seasons of the show.
Cheers - I’m glad that life at the bar will go on after the show.
Scrubs - I know it came back for one more season as Scubs Med, but the core show finale was a lot of fun.
Fringe - Underrated. They actually wrapped up their show! I disagree with some choices, but it was a finale that I could live with for sure. I teared up.
In the case of Everybody Loves Raymond the producers didn’t really want a finale. Their not to it being the final episode was to have the family seated around the dinner table, just as they had been in the first episode.
In other cases, I think it’s a case of the producers trying too hard to go out with a bang.
The final season of Frasier was a step up from the previous couple of years, but the producers went too over the top with Martin and Ronnie’s wedding, Daphne’s family and Daphne having her baby at a veterinarian’s office. The actual wrap-up of Frasier taking a job in San Francisco and flying off to see Charlotte was done pretty well, but lost in the shuffle.
With How I Met Your Mother, I simply choose to ignore than final 10 minutes of the final episode.
Black Sails and the other Starz gem Spartacus had amazing finales. Shows with a predetermined storyline usually have good finales, shows that are just winging it (Lost, BSG, or comedies like Seinfeld) either can’t tie everything perfectly like the audience demands because they’ve been throwing everything at the wall for years and now they have a mess on their hands or really have no reason to have one huge finale with super high expectations. Seinfeld should have ended with a run of the mill episode like any other.
Wow. Way to impress me even moreabout how old I am. I remember waaaaay back, when the network that owned it, announced that they were going to write an actual ending to the four year long series The Fugitive. All sorts of “experts” warned them that it was a horrible thing to do, because they’d never be able to resell the show for syndication if they did.
I never saw most of the shows people are referring to here. I saw a lot of Seinfeld, including the ending shows when they were originally aired. It was okay, and in keeping with the rest of the show, but it wasn’t a real “ending,” since they were all in the same prison together. They could all get out at the same time and start right back up again. In retrospect, though I liked it at the time, when I see old episodes now, I’m often annoyed with the snottiness of it all. Too much mean spirited stuff.
The end of STNG was okay. It was a very “writerly” sort of ending, bringing it all back to the beginning episode as it did.
There have been fads about how to close a series out, just as the series themselves have been created to respond to and capitalize on fads.
I agree with the folks who pointed out that a lot of series, really aren’t designed to HAVE an ending per se. I don’t think Seinfeld really needed an END show, since there was very little continuity to it. No real building of an overall story arc, as “they” say.
I don’t know. I guess the shows that had endings that annoyed me the most were the comedies that decided to try to make some poignant serious POINT in the last show, as if the writers felt guilty about all the jokes they’d told during the run.
Yes, the creators were completely wrong to stick with the original ending.
(Fortunately the DVD set has an alternative ending - which I much preferred.)
I liked the finale of That 70s Show, or at least the ending of it. If only because season 8 sucked so bad. Kitty telling everyone how much she loved them, and then Eric comes back and he and Donna kiss. sniff
I think people have expectations that run too strong and are usually really horrible. They would be better off reading bad fan fiction that gives their favorite character the perfect ending and punishing the one they hate.
It was a clip show. As much a clip show as any cheap, don’t have a budget to shoot full schedule of episodes clip show from any series you can name. It probably was their most expensive episode but that doesn’t make what they did any better. The fact that it followed a series retrospective that was little more then a bunch of clips made it all the worse.
Taking them out of NYC for some stupid fantasy trip wasn’t a good move either. It was a terrible episode of one of my favorite show.
I had zero problem with them ending up in jail though.
…all five of Leverage’s season finales were brilliant. The show-runners went in with the attitude that “every season could have been their last”, so they made sure that each season, if need be, could end with the finale without any “loose threads”. And the final finale turned out to be perfect, even though I didn’t want it to end.
Endings are the hardest part of any fictional entertainment to create. Even if you know exactly how you want your tale to end, making it structurally satisfying and still make sense after all the twists and turns the plot unexpectedly took you down is a bugger to do well.
I agree with you.
The way they ended it was unique and IMO kept with the spirit and theme with the show.
Was ever question answered? No.
In life, is every question answered? NO.
A lot of people complain about TV Shoes being too simplistic, wrapping up characters problems in a neat package, in 60 min. So now if you don’t answer every question, people complain.
