This Is The End

Here's a little piece on the seven worst TV finales ever.  The titles?  Lost, Seinfeld, The X-Files, Roseanne, Prison Break, St. Elsewhere and Dexter.  Note there's nothing from the first 30 years of TV. Perhaps the author doesn't know those shows, or maybe it's because that was a different era. Shows then didn't tend to have arcs and didn't generally have finales--the series would be canceled and that would be the end.

I never watched The X-Files, Prison Break or Dexter, so not only can I not comment about them, I didn't even read the material to avoid spoilers. As for the other four, they are generally considered disappointments.  Still I'm not sure the author was correct in her judgment.

For instance, we get this regarding Seinfeld:

"The Finale" episode's failure to live up to expectations was all the more surprising considering co-creator Larry David returned to write the script.

Is it really more surprising it failed because David returned?  It sort of makes sense when the original creator comes back he'd swing for the fences, so if he failed (and I agree he did) it would be a huge whiff.

Then there's St. Elsewhere:

...in possibly one of the most poorly written and cliched endings to a television show ever, the finale episode of "St.Elsewhere," explained through a strange snow globe that the entire show had been the fabrication of autistic child named Tommy.

1) Yeah, I hate that cliché of a series being the dream of an autistic child.

2)  It's not as if Tommy came out of nowhere--he was an established if minor character.

But the real shocker is about Lost:

Instead of answering the audience's questions, the two hour finale "The End" ended up smoothing over most of the show's most important and unresolved problems by explaining that they all were in purgatory, though if they had really been there the whole time, no one knew.

As I noted last week, it's hard to believe some still don't get it.  They were not in purgatory, they were on an island.  An island with many strange properties, but a real island.  Since there's dialogue in the finale saying everything that happened on the island was real, I'm not sure how anyone would miss that.  The finale was disappointing enough without getting this wrong.