Series finales (1 Viewer)

With Sex and The City last night (I don't get HBO anymore; I've only seen the first few seasons) and the apparently lukewarm response it has gotten, I got to thinking about the finales for shows, which ones worked and which ones didn't. So considering shows that either finished on purpose or knew they were probably not coming back:

Worked
Newhart
Star Trek: The Next Generation
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Felicity
Roswell (mostly worked)
Sports Night (sorta)

Did not work
Seinfeld
The X-Files

I must be forgetting a bunch. There are also a few shows that ended in unresolved:

Cliffhangers
Soap
Now & Again

Sex and the city got a lukewarm review? The posts Ive read on here are quite positive as are the opinions of people I have talked to today.

Possibly THE best series finale ever: St. Elsewhere.

Also, when you say Newhart, do you mean his Saturday night show or his later Monday night show. Don't remember the finale to the earlier, Saturday night show, but the finale to the Monday night show was very good with a funny little twist.

st elsewere is my favorite.

one ended with the young girl star of the show returning to her childhood home as an adult,and remembering her childhood.

wish i remembered what show that was.

wonder years ended on a bit of a sad way for me.

with him and his best friend playing basketball in the driveway, and a voice over teliing us what happened to them when they grew up.

Cliffhangers/Unresolved shows which pissed me off

Farscape-Thanks god they are making a miniseries to end it
Nowhere man
John Doe
Earth 2
Space Above and Beyond
Firefly


Just to name a few

I never followed Felicity, but I knew the premise of the show and had stumbled upon a few eps here and there. But the finale may have been the strangest of any show I had ever seen.

Series that seemed fairly grounded in reality, like My So Called Life, Dawson Creek, or Everwood style (not that I ever followed those shows either) ended with the weirdest, most unexpected twist ever for a story of that type: Time Travel!

[??!!]

--
H

The reoccurring plotline of series finales having the main characters put on trial seems to strongly reinforce what the series was all about. TNG, X-Files, Seinfeld all had their main theme questioned at the end, with mixed results...

Mary Tyler Moore and Barney Miller were two of the best finales.

holadem, i didnt follow your post.
are you saying all those shows ended with i time travel ep?

as i didnt see any of those shows could you give a short synopsis of how they eneded?

M.A.S.H.

The series finale to Roseanne was just on last week, I remembered what a shock it was when it originally aired (and somewhat sad)...

-Dan really died when he had his heart attack
-Jackie (Roseannes sister) was really gay
-Mark actually married Darlene
-David actually married Becky
-They never won the lottery (like they did for the last season)

But my ALL TIME favorite final series finalle was Cheers - good stuff! I liked how they didn't really end it, it lead you to believe that things went on just like they always had. I also liked how they ended with Sam Malone walking down the hallway away from the bar and into the pool room as the last visual (as opposed to the start of the very first episode where he walked down the halway from the pool room into the bar)

"Dawson's Creek" ended by fast-forwarding to something like 10 years into the future, and showing us how all the characters ended up.

Jack and Pacey's brother Doug are in a relationship, Jack teaches at the old high school. Jen dies, but Jack and Doug take care of her child. Dawson doesn't end up with Joey, no, it's Pacey that ends up with Joey. Dawson does gain fame by being the creative force behind a teen show that mimics his own life.


"Everwood" is still on the air. Never did watch "My So Called Life".

I didn't really think that the ST:TNG finale worked. I thought they could have done so much more with Q.

I thought the series finale for Roseanne was a piece of crap, I pretend it doesn't exisist.

ok so those shows didnt time travel ala back to the future but did fast forward to the future of the characters.

Didn't work for me:
Twin Peaks
Xena
Kung Fu

Mediocre:
Buffy
Babylon5


Rob: How did Mary Tyler Moore and Barney Miller end?

In MTM, all of the newsroom (except for Ted) got fired and they kind of did a comedic group hug thing to the tune of "It's a long way to Tipperary" (excuse the spelling). Pretty good ending...

I liked the MTM final episode, and the M*A*S*H finale when I finally saw it (I was like 2 when it originally aired) and Cheers had a good finale also.

I didn't care for the Rosann final episode, the Home Improvement final, or the Married with Children final.

Looks like Joey and I watch the same shows
Farscape is off my list only because they are making the miniseries. But I was particulary pissed when Space Above and Beyond and Earth 2 were cancelled.

[url=http://members.aol.com/nightdog35/spidey_smiley.gif] [/url]

Barney Miller - the precinct house was declared a historical landmark and everybody was reassigned. In the last scene, Capt. Miller walked around the empty room and remembered all of the past detectives like Fish, Yemana, and Chano, then turned out the lights for the last time and left. Perfect.