Best and worst TV series finales

Reading this thread, I was wondering when this was going to pop up ... and I could not disagree more.

This was one of the biggest cop-out endings in the history of the medium. I remember watching this and asking "Are you fucking kidding me? An autistic child in a working-class family was the basis for one of the most brilliant TV series ever?" Sorry. Not buying in.

But yes, the Seinfeld and Entourage endings were worse, since at least Bruce Paltrow and Co. tried with St. Elsewhere.

On the flip side, chalk up another vote for Newhart. The execution, writing, acting, surprise factor -- none better. Not even M*A*S*H or Cheers.

 

I'd vote for M*A*S*H, but it had a built-in advantage of being a two-hour movie.

At the time I loved The Wonder Years and really thought they executed the finale well. Wasn't aware that they were planning on another season when it got cancelled. The thing about The Wonder Years for me is that I loved it when The Hub started running the reruns. But seeing an episode a night on The Hub, I started to realize what a jerk the Kevin character had become. About the second time through the nightly rerun run I couldn't watch it any more. He shit on a lot of people and it just seemed to be more noticable watching the show on a nightly basis vs. a weekly basis.

The Newhart finale and the MTM finale were great, but I have to admit that I stopped watching Newhart in the last couple seasons. Seemed they were trying to be quirky for the sake of being quirky.

The Cheers finale was well-done. It was refreshing to see a finale where we were left to believe the characters we loved would keep going on, we just wouldn't get to see them.

The Seinfeld finale was only saved by the great number of cameos and their comments. The virgin with JFK, Teri Hatcher's character ending up with Jackie Chiles. I liked that. But the plot for the main four characters was lame. They did fool me, though, in that they had me believing in the possibility that they might just be taking a year-long break from the show and come back a year later.

 

I'm not sure if the producers realized it was the last episode at the time, but "The White Shadow" seemed to do a decent job of wrapping things up in that last season finale. The four guys who graduated the year before -- Hayward, Reese, Golsteyn and Gomez -- were coming back for an alumni game and the episode focused on what each of them were up to their subplots before they reunited with the rest of the gang at the end.

 

Yeah, sorry. Forgot to use blue text. Been away from the SJ game for too long.

 

Kevin Arnold always was a self-centered jerk, but you could relate because every teenage boy is a self-centered jerk. The Wonder Years does get really, really frustrating — never more than the episode when he shows up at Winnie Cooper's house and yells, "PAUL TOLD ME YOU LIKE ME!" — but it was true to life and endearing, in my opinion.