Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Outrage

Here's a ridiculous list of the ten best series finales.

It includes the controversial ending to The Sopranos.

It has the special Christmas episode of Ricky Gervais' The Office, which I thought sold out the series by making David Brent self-aware.

It has the Battlestar Galactica finale, which I liked, but which a lot of fans found insultingly bad.

It has the M*A*S*H finale, which, though it was one of the most-watched events in TV history, is arguably the worst ending to a good show ever--everything we liked about M*A*S*H was shoved to the side, and all its worst tendencies were on display for two and a half endless hours.

The #1 choice is the extremely dull last episode of Six Feet Under.

But all these picks are nothing compared to what's missing.

First, they don't have the last episode of Mary Tyler Moore--funny and classy to the end.

Worse, there's no space anywhere on the list for the greatest finale any show ever had, Newhart's.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Lawrence King said...

Buffy had an incredibly powerful, stirring, and emotional finale, that included really deep insights into each of the main characters, and ended in one of the noblest sacrifices ever seen on TV. That was the ending of Buffy, Season Five (which was also when Buffy ended on the Fox Network).

The finale of Buffy Season Seven, after two years on UPN, couldn't hold a candle to that one.

Interestingly, this guy (who I agree is utterly wrong, esp. on the awful MASH finale) apparently was forced to mention the end of Season Five (the fight against Glory) in his praise of the end of Season Seven. Maybe because he too knows it was better?

He's right about the Angel finale though.

And, pace L.A. guy, he's wrong about BSG. If indeed, the show had from the beginning had the theme of "All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again", he would be right. But it didn't. In fact, they were forced, in the next-to-last episode, to introduce brand new backstories for Baltar and Six solely to justify the denoument that resolved their characters' now-retconned personalities. (The real Six from the first episode, who casually snapped a baby's neck for no reason, was conveniently overlooked.)

11:59 AM, March 31, 2009  

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