Favorites: Fringe Chuck (I originally hated, loathed and despised the ending) Grimm Eureka Warehouse 13 The Good Place 12 Monkeys Star Trek The Next Generation The worst: The X-Files (both season 9 and then the last episode of the reboot series) Lost Battlestar Galactica (reboot)
Best: Mary Tyler Moore The Fugitive (OK, the first hour is the best, part 2 is contrived) Star Trek: TNG The Dick Van Dyke Show (cleverly comes full circle) The Carol Burnett Show (Not seen in syndication but on YouTube. Carol dressed as the charwoman thanks the audience and pays tribute to her costars, then sings her theme song one last time, through her tears. She leaves the stage and the credits roll over her mop and pail, abandoned at center stage. Perfect.) Mad Men Desperate Housewives (I love a good flash forward) Friday Night Lights (see above comment) The Wonder Years (I love finding out what happened to the characters in the future) Worst: The Sopranos Star Trek: Voyager (cmon - I wanted to see everyone celebrate and say goodbye to each other) Seinfeld Overrated: Newhart (the last five minutes are great, the rest of the episode is kind of ridiculous) MASH (too much of Hawkeye’s breakdown) Cheers (too long) St Elsewhere (unsatisfying) The finales that should have been All in the Family: The Stivics Go West (this funny tearjerker would have rated as one of the all time best if they had ended there) The Waltons: The Achievement (John Boy becomes a published writer and moves to New York, essentially winding up the series’ original premise)
Worst: Lost Dexter Game of Thrones (though we drill don’t have the book to compare it to) The X-Files (both times) Seinfeld Star Trek: Voyager Enterprise Battlestar Galatica (remake) The Americans The Wire Best: Star Trek: TNG Star Trek: DS9 The Prisoner Newhart Breaking Bad Better Call Saul The Good Place 12 Monkeys Fringe (though I disliked most of the last season the final episode was really good) Fleabag mixed: The Shield The Sopranos Luther (Though that’s come back) Fraiser
My favorites: Twin Peaks King of the Hill BoJack Horseman Atlanta The Haunting of Bly Manor The Good Place Did not like these: Gilmore Girls The Haunting of Hill House There aren’t that many that I dislike. Mostly because I just stop watching shows once I lose interest. There’s a lot of shows I just never made it to the end of. I was lukewarm on Breaking Bad. I thought the episodes leading up to the end were incredible but the actual finale didn’t hit me as hard.
Best Mad Men Chernobyl His Dark Materials Sopranos -- brilliant in spite of being on most of the "worst" lists here Game of Thrones -- ditto Entourage Boardwalk Empire Worst Mr Robot Lost X Files Dexter Seinfeld
the fugitive- that is the first series that had a well publicized/ blockbuster ending. the mary tyler moore show had a great, two hankie ending. st. elsewhere had a very surreal /wtf ending that didn't at all fit the tone of the show.
I would disagree in that I'd argue, how else could The Americans have possibly ended? The Russian agents had built up so many problems over time, there was no way to resolve everything except by <doing what they did at the end>. You could actually create a pretty good show just dealing with the aftermath of the show 10-15 years later: "The American Kids." Another show that people frequently cite as having a horrible ending was Seinfeld, but I actually didn't think it was awful. I thought it was kind of clever that they brought back just about every character who had been wronged by the cast over the previous 9 years, and established that Jerry and Kramer and George and Elaine were actually pretty terrible, selfish people. So it kind of made sense that they wouldn't have a happy ending and would instead go to jail. Note that when Larry David did the faux "Seinfeld Reunion" episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm, they didn't directly reference the original finale very much, except for him to say he liked it and just about nobody in the audience liked it. Another show that some fans cite as having a horrible ending was Jim Henson's Dinosaurs, where basically a comet hits the earth and everybody dies. But again... we knew it was coming, eventually. I worked quite a bit on the original 1990s-2000s Will & Grace back in the day, and I think the network and fans were upset that in the original 2006 finale, they'd had a huge fight, didn't speak to each other for more than 15 years, and they each had separate relationships and children... and their kids went off to college, met each other, and wound up becoming (platonic) roommates. Bizarre ending. In the first episode of the revamped Will & Grace in 2017, Karen obliquely asks about another universe where the two had kids that went to college together and laughs that that could never happen in the "real world." So I think the producers realized over time... yeah, that was a bad way to wrap things up.
There's an entire group of fans who believe that the bizarre "Snow Globe" ending of St. Elsewhere, which reveals that the entire series took place in the mind of an autistic child, which also affected scores of other TV shows that had loose connections with St. Elsewhere: The Westphall Theory of a Unified TV Universe, Explained The Show that Ruined Television | The Saturday Evening Post The Tommy Westphall Universe — Unsupervised Nerds It's enough to make your head hurt -- it's like string there and quantum physics and the multiverse, combined with a network TV comedy/drama set in a hospital. In the late 1990s, I worked on a Fred Savage sitcom that nobody saw called Working, and at the beginning of Season 2, the network fired a bunch of actors and producers, shook up the show, and made a bunch of changes. They started the first new episode on a shot of the set, cut to a "Working" snowglobe getting shaken up, and then transitioned to a new wide shot with all the new characters! Eh, it made me laugh, but I told the producer that maybe 10% of our audience would get the joke.
Oh, I loved that and thought it made a lot of sense. I had predicted months before that (in my head) Saul would go to Albuquerque and sacrifice himself to save Kim Wexler. That isn't quite what happened, but it wasn't that far off. I thought it was kind of poetic and unselfish, and there really weren't many other ways in which it could go. In a way, it paralleled Walter White's sacrifice in Breaking Bad in order to keep his family alive, get them enough money to live on (even after his death), and also save his old partner Jessie Pinkman from the rival gang.
BEST: Six Feet Under was fantastic! Breaking Bad was excellent Better Call Saul was good WORST: Dexter was abominable! Dexter: New Blood was disappointing The Sopranos was blahhhhh
BCS ending ? It was a relief that Kim survived, there was initial worry she was going to be bumped off. When questioned Goodman trying to reduce his sentence, he mentions Jessie Pinkman and bad guys still out there. Don’t know if Pinkman character will be revived for another one off/ or a series - Alaska location - cartel. Seehorn is getting her own tv series ( for 2 seasons ) don’t know if it’s post BCS or still in Kim Wexler character.