Best series finales

[BYH]

Damnit Simon Pube. Why must you remind me you like Freaks and Geeks as well?

I'd say that's my favorite series finale. The sight of Lindsay getting on that van is haunting. She's done something she can't undo. She's not an innocent kid anymore. Things will never be the same for that family. And yet...I'm glad it's left lingering. Of course it's left lingering because NBC Cleveland Steamed the show from start to finish.

I think Sopranos would have made the list if Sunday's episode was the finale. How great would that have been?

 

[John]

Good ones:
1. Cheers
2. Newhart
3. The Wonder Years

I'm indifferent on The Cosby Show and Friends.

Bad ones:
1. Roseanne
2. Seinfeld
3. Dawson's Creek

I completely disagree on The Wonder Years, and so would most of the cast. The network chose at the last minute to discontinue the show so the writers had to quickly cobble together a series finale.

From what I remember, the finale went like this: "This is what happed to Wayne, this is what happened to my hippy sister, this is what happened to my mother and my dad died."

Cheers was one of my favorite shows of all time but I can't remember what happened in the finale.

Sam almost married Diane. Rebecca married Tom Berrenger. Norm reminded Sam that the bar was Sam's one true love. Final line -- "We're closed." Then Sam walked alone into the back room.

 

[suburbanite]

Beltran frozen on strike 3 from Wainwright. [/BYH]

Oh, you meant TV series finales? :D

OK, Newhart blows everything away. Outstanding.

M*A*S*H sucked and epitomized why the show had gone downhill. In the early years, they entertained first, and let the messages come through naturally. By the end, it was all about putting the message first and the comedy/entertainment a distant decond. As someone said, I'll admit the Hawkeye/Margaret kiss was funny.

I didn't like the Cheers finale that much, just didn't connect with me for whatever reason. Maybe I wanted Sam to marry Diane, I don't know.

Write-brained makes a good point about Wonder Years. Even though the Daniel Stern narration was a major part of the show, that particular sequence seemed tacked on.

I liked The Odd Couple finale a lot. Tied everything in a neat, but somewhat plausible bow [it had been made clear that Gloria still cared about Felix as a person, she just thought he was a pain in the ass] and the final scene is actually funny.

 

[Write-brained]

Beltran frozen on strike 3 from Wainwright. [/BYH]

Oh, you meant TV series finales? :D

OK, Newhart blows everything away. Outstanding.

M*A*S*H sucked and epitomized why the show had gone downhill. In the early years, they entertained first, and let the messages come through naturally. By the end, it was all about putting the message first and the comedy/entertainment a distant decond. As someone said, I'll admit the Hawkeye/Margaret kiss was funny.

I didn't like the Cheers finale that much, just didn't connect with me for whatever reason. Maybe I wanted Sam to marry Diane, I don't know.

Write-Brained makes a good point about Wonder Years. Even though the Daniel Stern narration was a major part of the show, that particular sequence seemed tacked on.

I liked The Odd Couple finale a lot. Tied everything in a neat, but somewhat plausible bow [it had been made clear that Gloria still cared about Felix as a person, she just thought he was a pain in the ass] and the final scene is actually funny.

Fixed.

 

[BYH]

Beltran frozen on strike 3 from Wainwright. [/BYH]

Oh yeah!!!! :D

And Gutter's a doodoo head for not liking the Dawson's Creek finale. The finale was the only decent episode they aired in the last two years. That was an exceedingly well-done finale.

 

[suburbanite]

Sorry about that, Write-brained and Gutter. You'd think I'd have the hang of figuring out the quote inside a post by now. I fixed it on the original post.

 

[Piotr Rasputin]

I'll throw in with those who say Cheers was great. My favorite part was whe Sam, just before going to the back, stopped to straighten the photo of the Indian on the back wall. On the 100th episode, they had a tribute to Coach that ended with a closeup of that photo. For Sam to adjust it as his last act before walking off was perfect, and a nice nod to Nicholas Colasanto.

Seinfeld was indeed horrible. Wonder Years was OK. Newhart's final shot, with Suzanne Pleshette in the bed, was an absolute masterstroke.

Alias was a nice end to a meandering final season, Gilmore Girls was a merciful end to a horrible final season, Sex and the City was boring.

On the late 1980s, early 1990s nerd front: Twin Peaks was okay and appropriately freaky, but the lack of resolution irritated me to no end.

And Star Trek: The Next Generation had a very good finale. Picard jaunting between time periods, then, realizing life is indeed short, joins the poker game for the first time at the end. The "Yeah, right" look Riker and Geordi shoot each other when Picard announces what a great card player he was in his youth was priceless.

For that matter, the Deep Space Nine finale was quite good, very fitting for the show's main themes regarding religion and such.

 

[ifilus]

No love for Mary Tyler Moore or Barney Miller final episodes?

Skipped page one?

 

[lantaur]

Not sure if makes a top 10, but not wanting to copy everyone else so I'll throw out there Magnum P.I.

Funny, thinking about it, most shows don't get a shot at a series finale.

 

[bueller]

As a Trekkie who has watched all the shows but owns no merchandise or has ever dressed as a character, I agree that the Deep Space 9 and Next Generation finales were excellent.

The Voyager finale is on right now (thank you, Spike TV) and today is the first time I've seen it since it aired. It's also very, very good, but they wrapped up way too much in the final 15 minutes.

Voyager, like the other two shows, got much better after a few years. Jeri Ryan had a lot to do with that, but the plots improved, too.

 

[Write-brained]

Can't believe no one mentioned the end of St. Elsewhere where it turns out the entire series took place inside a snow globe and its characters were all part of the imagination of an autistic child who held the globe in his hand.

 

[Double J]

Double J, congrats for mentioning "The Fugitive." Wasn't it a two-parter on a Monday and Tuesday? Couldn't have been more dramatic. In 1967, this just wasn't done. Plus running it in August, after a summer's worth of reruns, and as the last network telecast before it went into syndication.

Right, it was a two-parter. The Tuesday was in fact the date mentioned in the closing narration, as Kimble walked out of court a free man at last - "Tuesday, August 29 - the day the running stopped."

Supposedly the producers had wanted the show to keep going but David Janssen was just too worn out. From what I've read, he worked upwards of 60 hours a week in order to produce 30 one-hour episodes in each season (today's shows produce 22 per season, on average).

He appeared in pretty much every scene of every episode and it must have been incredibly taxing. If he were working like that today he'd be getting $5 million per episode and be worth every penny. Unfortunately, all Janssen got was old before his time - he never even won an Emmy Award - and he was dead at 48 (although he looked a **** of a lot older than that by the end).

 

[suburbanite]

Can't believe no one mentioned the end of St. Elsewhere where it turns out the entire series took place inside a snow globe and its characters were all part of the imagination of an autistic child who held the globe in his hand.

Yeah, that was some pretty dumbass ****.

I liked the final scene of NYPD Blue. After all the tragedy Sipowicz had gone through [enough so that Job would've felt sorry for Andy] the show ended with him at his desk, finishing a report on some collar. I thought the message was simple, but effective--this is who he is and this is who he'll continue to be, a cop.

Charmed had a dumbass finale where the three gave themselves totally different faces so nobody would hassle them anymore. The show had sucked for years anyway since Shannen Doherty left. SD being a witch is still a great job of casting. :D

 

[Double J]

Well, it wasn't much of a stretch for her, we'll say that.

 

[EStreetJoe]

The Happy Days finale was fair-to-good, not great, and could have done without Tom Bosley (Mr. Cunningham) toasting the audience in the final scene.

Agree that the Cheers, ST Next Generation, and ST Voyager finales are up there.

Mixed on the MASH finale... I loved the show, but thought Alda overacted with Hawkeye's crying breakdowns. In short, it was a solid finale, but short on the laughs that MASH is best known for and too much time on the war is hell message.

 

[outofplace]

I'll throw in with those who say Cheers was great. My favorite part was whe Sam, just before going to the back, stopped to straighten the photo of the Indian on the back wall. On the 100th episode, they had a tribute to Coach that ended with a closeup of that photo. For Sam to adjust it as his last act before walking off was perfect, and a nice nod to Nicholas Colasanto.

Seinfeld was indeed horrible. Wonder Years was OK. Newhart's final shot, with Suzanne Pleshette in the bed, was an absolute masterstroke.

Alias was a nice end to a meandering final season, Gilmore Girls was a merciful end to a horrible final season, Sex and the City was boring.

On the late 1980s, early 1990s nerd front: Twin Peaks was okay and appropriately freaky, but the lack of resolution irritated me to no end.

And Star Trek: The Next Generation had a very good finale. Picard jaunting between time periods, then, realizing life is indeed short, joins the poker game for the first time at the end. The "Yeah, right" look Riker and Geordi shoot each other when Picard announces what a great card player he was in his youth was priceless.

For that matter, the Deep Space Nine finale was quite good, very fitting for the show's main themes regarding religion and such.

Agreed. My only problem with The Next Generation finale was that it wasn't really the finale because of the movies, but it had a big enough story and the kind of small character moments a finale of an action series like that needs.

Deep Space Nine was excellent in that they had the "goodbye" moment with the main cast all together in the bar that would have been the ending on many shows. But they follow that up with Sisko sacrificing himself to stop Dukat in the Fire Caves (there was a lot more to it, more than we need to get into here). No neat and tidy happy endings.

 

[Gutter]

And Gutter's a doodoo head for not liking the Dawson's Creek finale. The finale was the only decent episode they aired in the last two years. That was an exceedingly well-done finale.

I agree it was better than any of the episodes in "Dawson in LA, Joey at Worthington years" (mostly because Williamson came back to direct it I believe), but I just didn't like the whole fast-forward five years part.

It was information overload in my opinion ...
- Hey, remember when Pacey was always cracking jokes on his brother about his sexuality... wouldn't it be great if we made Pacey's brother actually gay. Even better, let's have him dating Jack! But let's not have him out of the closet.
- We'll make Jen a single mother struggling to get by, because that's what we always expected to happen to Jen. And we'll give her a terminal illness ... because we need to kill off the best character on the show. I will admit ... it got dusty in the room when Grams said to Jen, "I'll see you soon, my child," just after she passed.

At least they got the Pacey-Joey pairing right for good. The best year of that show was the slow build-up between those two, then the tension between Dawson and Pacey shortly thereafter.

You're the doodoo head ... doodoo head.

 

[Gutter]

From what I remember, the finale went like this: "This is what happed to Wayne, this is what happened to my hippy sister, this is what happened to my mother and my dad died."

Yeah, I heard about how that went down as well ... but for some reason I enjoyed the simplicity of how it ended and the revelations from the narration:
- Wayne takes over the furniture plant (or whatever it was) ...
- Shortly after Jack passes away
- Kevin greeting Winnie at the airport on her return .... with his wife and children.

Then having his son saying, "Dad, want to play catch?" ....... outstanding wrap on the story.

 

[Appgrad05]

I quite enjoyed the O.C. finale this year. Liked the idea of saying 'Hey, after four years of putting these people through everything you can imagine, they're going to be ok.'
West Wing was very good, but should have been two hours. Was very, very dusty in my living room when Bartlett gave Charlie the bible.
I liked the idea of Seinfeld, but the expectations were so big it could never match them.
I think in Wonder Years they actually had Daniel Stern come in and lay down that voice-over the last montage, which was just supposed to be the season finale shot with music dubbed in. I remember watching Mrs. Arnold absolutely bawl about it a year or two ago on Vh1.

 

[EStreetJoe]

what... no comments besides mine on the Happy Days finale?
Yes, the series jumped the shark when Fonzie did (or when they had Fonzie become a teacher).. but the series finale brought everyone back together for a happily ever after ending.. or so we thought until Joannie Loves Chacci came out.