OT - Favorite Series Finale?

[Apotheosis]

My favorite finale has to be MASH! Tear jerker all the way! To bad they couldnt have fit Radar in somewhere or even Frank Burns!

 

Getting Radar in there would have been the cherry on top.

 

I didnt see anyone mention FRIENDS....I wasnt a fan, but I thought people liked the way it ended.

 

It's because Friends was almost as bad as Seinfeld

 

The Practice finale was the worst ever!! Talk about your promo for the next show that replaces the old show!! They barely showed the original cast and the goodbye scene lasted less then 10 minutes! ABC really dropped the ball on that one!

 

Agreed... I loved that show and ABC just srewed the pooch on the finale. I know that the final scene with Bobby in the office was supposed to be touching, but it did nothing for me. It just sucked all the way around

[Apotheosis]

I realize the cast hates it, I happen to really like the finale for The Wonder Years...

 

I forgot all about that one. I agree with what you said... the ending was perfect because it didn't seem forced.

[THE_BEYONDER]

Although the final episode of Seinfeld wasn't the overall best episode....I loved the montage they put together. Good Riddance(Time of your Life) was an awesome choice of song.

[deathlok]

Series say their final goodbyes

By CHARLIE MCCOLLUM

Knight Ridder Newspapers

Last Updated: April 29, 2003

 

TV: Memorable farewells and disappointments

 

A series comes into viewers' homes on a weekly basis and the characters become invited guests who over the course of time become friends.

 

"We invest a lot of emotional and temporal equity in a series," says Robert Thompson, the director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University. "If you've been watching a show for five, six, 10 years in some cases, these characters become a part of the fabric of your daily life."

 

When a series ends, says Thompson, viewers want the show "to provide some kind of closure. People really do want these stories to end."

 

American television today is in the midst of a unprecedented flurry of farewell. In recent months, "Providence," "Sabrina, the Teenage Witch," "Oz," "Farscape" and, last weekend, "Touched by an Angel" - all fairly long-running shows with loyal audiences - have had their series swan songs. In the next few weeks, "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Dawson's Creek" will end.

 

Several other series facing cancellation - "Ed," "The Practice," "Just Shoot Me" - have had or will have "season" finales that could stand as goodbyes.

 

In the next year or so, four of TV's most influential and popular comedies - "Friends," "Frasier," "Sex and the City" and "Everybody Loves Raymond" - will call it a day. Chances are they will be joined by HBO's "The Sopranos," a cultural touchstone during its five seasons on the air.

 

The first finale

There was a time in television when none of these shows would get a finale. In the first three decades of network TV, just one major series was allowed to conclude: "The Fugitive."

 

The show was one long chase with a doctor wrongly accused of his wife's murder trying to track down the real killer, a one-armed man. In August 1967, the doctor, Richard Kimble, finally caught up with his wife's killer. Nearly three-quarters of all the TV sets in America were tuned to the finale.

 

But despite the ratings for "The Fugitive," the networks continued to avoid final episodes. The reason was financial, Thompson says, with networks fearing that "if you ended it, if you put some closure to a series, it would reduce the value of its syndicated broadcasts."

 

That changed in March 1977 when "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" not only had what stands as perhaps the greatest finale of all time but afterward flourished in syndication.

 

"That's when the floodgates really opened," Thompson says. The final chapter of Mary Richards and WJM "got so much attention, it was so beloved, it provided so much closure for viewers that everyone after that started looking to do it."

 

That finale and, perhaps more importantly, the last episode of "M*A*S*H," which shattered viewership records in 1983, has led to what New York Times writer Mark Levine once called "the phenomenon of the highly promoted adieu."

 

When good shows end badly

The makings of a memorable finale have often proved elusive. Some final episodes - "Mary Tyler Moore," "Newhart" - are still fondly remembered. Others, such as the ones for "St. Elsewhere" and "Seinfeld," outraged as many viewers as they engaged. Even some great series - most notably "Hill Street Blues" - had such low-key departures that, today, few remember how they ended.

 

When he knew his series was coming to an end, "Buffy" creator Joss Whedon looked back on the finales of favorite shows and got more insight into how not to close things out than into what works.

 

"Most of the lessons I've learned are cautionary tales," says Whedon. "It's very hard to pay off something that has meant so much in a way that is really going to cover everybody."

 

Tom Fontana - who co-wrote the finales of "St. Elsewhere," "Homicide" and "Oz" - says that any good last episode has to be the product of the people who began the show.

 

"The essential thing is that the writing be done by the people who started it or who have been there through the run," he says. "I think it's very hard for people who join a series later to sum it up. You look at the classic ones - like 'The Mary Tyler Moore Show,' 'The Fugitive' - there was a clear point of view about what the point of the overall series was and how it should end."

 

Keeping it real

Fontana thinks the creators need to be involved even if - as is the case with Kevin Williamson, the creator of "Dawson's Creek" - they haven't been around for years.

 

Williamson hasn't written an episode of his influential teenage soap opera since the first season, but he returned to write the two-hour finale. This is fine with Fontana, because "it came from him so he should be the one to send it off into TV heaven."

 

But often, says Thompson, "what producers and writers are dying to do in their final episodes is something they could never do before. . . . The temptation on the creative end is to do something outrageous.

 

"The problem is that the viewers have been living with one set of rules for eight, nine, 10 seasons, and the final episodes that break those rules are very disturbing to people. It may be fun for the producer, but it's not so much fun for the people watching."

 

Fontana admits that was the case when it came time to end "St. Elsewhere." Since the show was always on the verge of being canceled, he says, the writers had compiled a huge "joke list" of last episodes.

 

The ending that the writers finally came up with was one of the most controversial in TV history, suggesting that entire series had taken place in the brain of an autistic child who spent his days looking into a snow globe.

 

"The end of 'St. Elsewhere' was probably more for us as writers than it was for anybody else," says Fontana. "We had lived with this thing in our heads for so long that the only way to exorcise it from our minds was to say, 'OK, the whole thing was a fantasy in the mind of an autistic child.' We needed that kind of distance from it."

 

That approach doesn't sit well with other creators.

 

"I've noticed that in some finales, they seem to be saying, 'Well, this is my last hurrah so I'm going to go do that thing they would never let me do,' " says Martha Williamson, creator of "Touched by an Angel." "That's a very selfish thing because you have a loyal audience who wants the opportunity to say goodbye."

 

Whedon says he's trying to keep the final "Buffy" within the confines of what has come before.

 

"If you spend your time going 'This line has to be great,' you never write anything," he says. "So in a way, you have to think of it as just another episode."

 

In the end, Whedon says, "I tried to save enough for the last episode that people would really feel, 'They really went out with bang, but they didn't go out banging their drum. They just went out making their show.' "

[Ze-man]

Ok.. I will most likely get shot for this vote..

But I say.

Little House on The Prarie

 

And here is why..

 

I remember watching this when it was first aired.. and was floored..(litteraly.. I was stoned , at Ball State Campus 1984 watching this..)

 

here is the episode synopsis.

 

The people of Walnut Grove learn that somebody else owns the town and this person wants everybody to leave Walnut Grove. Everybody in the town decides that the person can have the land, but he can't have the town. The townspeople blow everything up to prevent anybody else from using their creation.

 

How freaking cool is that..

Walnut Grove goes Medieval.. and blows stuff up.

[s-man]

Good Riddance(Time of your Life) was an awesome choice of song.

 

Agreed! Its the perfect ending song!

[PovertyRow]

The people of Walnut Grove learn that somebody else owns the town and this person wants everybody to leave Walnut Grove. Everybody in the town decides that the person can have the land, but he can't have the town. The townspeople blow everything up to prevent anybody else from using their creation.

 

I've seen enough of Prarie t visualize this (never saw the finale) but yeah - that is definitely freaking cool!

[FlyingDonut]

I loved the last episode of Newhart, where he wakes up next to Susan Pleshette. It worked, it was a total surprise, and it was funny. I thought the Wonder Years finale was also quite good, especially the little twist at the end where he greets her at the airport with his wife and son. Oz was good.

[Mephisto]

Rosanne The last episode was the only way the last season could make any sense. I still can't figure out that episode where she thought she was Steven Seagal.

[s-man]

Rosanne The last episode was the only way the last season could make any sense. I still can't figure out that episode where she thought she was Steven Seagal.

 

The show lost me when they switched the actress who was playing the eldest daughter...to much of a weird Bewitched-Darren thing going on there!

[FlyingDonut]

Rosanne The last episode was the only way the last season could make any sense. I still can't figure out that episode where she thought she was Steven Seagal.

 

The show lost me when they switched the actress who was playing the eldest daughter...to much of a weird Bewitched-Darren thing going on there!

 

Ah, but they did have the sly allusion to it the next year, when the other actress came back (which was weird in and of itself). The grandmother said "I thought you looked different dear, did you do something to your hair?" and the girl said "no grandma, I had some changes done."

[s-man]

Rosanne The last episode was the only way the last season could make any sense. I still can't figure out that episode where she thought she was Steven Seagal.

 

The show lost me when they switched the actress who was playing the eldest daughter...to much of a weird Bewitched-Darren thing going on there!

 

Ah, but they did have the sly allusion to it the next year, when the other actress came back (which was weird in and of itself). The grandmother said "I thought you looked different dear, did you do something to your hair?" and the girl said "no grandma, I had some changes done."

 

[Mr. Zipper]

"We invest a lot of emotional and temporal equity in a series," says Robert Thompson, the director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University. "If you've been watching a show for five, six, 10 years in some cases, these characters become a part of the fabric of your daily life."

 

I took 5 or 6 classes from Bob Thompson and even TA'd a few. A very interesting guy. He's the go-to guy for Fox News now when they have a pop culture issue to discuss.

[Mr. Zipper]

I have to agree with JC here. St. Elsewhere was my favorite show of all time and I HATED that ending.

Number one, it seems intended purely for shock value. Number 2, it makes no sense because a pre-pubescent kid could never be imagining the adult goings on of the show. It just seemed very unsatisfying.

 

I thought that's what made it good... the mystery of what's really going on in the mind of an autistic kid. Under the autism, he was a genius that created a complex web of storylines and populated it with a myriad of 3 dimensional characters.

 

 

Or, maybe I'm reading too much into it.

[Mephisto]

Rosanne The last episode was the only way the last season could make any sense. I still can't figure out that episode where she thought she was Steven Seagal.

 

The show lost me when they switched the actress who was playing the eldest daughter...to much of a weird Bewitched-Darren thing going on there!

 

Ah, but they did have the sly allusion to it the next year, when the other actress came back (which was weird in and of itself). The grandmother said "I thought you looked different dear, did you do something to your hair?" and the girl said "no grandma, I had some changes done."

 

And then she left again and the 2nd one came back again. I'm pretty sure the 2nd one is the chick on Scrubs.

[s-man]

Rosanne The last episode was the only way the last season could make any sense. I still can't figure out that episode where she thought she was Steven Seagal.

 

The show lost me when they switched the actress who was playing the eldest daughter...to much of a weird Bewitched-Darren thing going on there!

 

Ah, but they did have the sly allusion to it the next year, when the other actress came back (which was weird in and of itself). The grandmother said "I thought you looked different dear, did you do something to your hair?" and the girl said "no grandma, I had some changes done."

 

And then she left again and the 2nd one came back again. I'm pretty sure the 2nd one is the chick on Scrubs.

 

Yes, Sarah Chalke and she is better on Scrubs.

[underthebigw]

I previously mentiond my favorite finale--the ending of Newhart that relegated the whole show to a dream sequence of his character on the "The Bob Newhart Show". One of the funniest scenes ever. As soon as I heard Suzanne Pleshette's (sp?) voice, I lost it.

 

The last MASH was good, as was Cheers.

[acesilver]

It is rare that I actually sustain interest in a series until its (often) bitter end... MASH, Friends and Frasier are prime examples.

 

That said, I'd have to say Star Trek: Voyager (narrowly beating out Star Trek: The Next Generation) mainly because I loved the portrayal of the older Janeway. She came across as this cynical Kirk-ian admiral that just completely tossed out all of the feel-good Trekisms and was obsessed about achieving her goal.

 

Thanks,

Fan4Fan

 

Both had very good endings and tied things up nicely!