A deep dive on TV series finales, from the TV Geek Army archives.
In the life of every TV show there are always two episodes that are more important than all the rest by a significant magnitude. The first of these is, of course, the pilot episode. This is the episode that a potential viewer is first exposed to and as such it needs to be something that catches the viewer’s attention and makes them want to a) come back to watch the next episode and b) tell other people to do the same. But of even greater importance is the series finale. The finale is an episode that rewards the fans and long time viewers — it’s the final pay off and when done correctly it’s the moment that people will remember long after the show has finished.
Finales tend to land in one of four categories depending on the lifespan of the show. You have the narrative ending — this is when the show comes to a halt due to a decision from the writers. It’s a natural ending that only leaves plots and questions hanging if that was the intent. You then have the rushed ending, which is an ending written because the writers realize that the show isn’t getting another season partway through. While these endings can feel a little forced they do normally address most of the points the writers wanted to close. Then there is the open ending — this is written in a ‘well we’re not sure if we’re getting another season, so just in case we’ll leave it in a semi-resolved/semi-hanging fashion’ and then there is the cancellation ending — when the series is canned after it’s closed out its season and as such is left without any sense of closure. These can at times be the most frustrating of finales, but they can also be the most fun to speculate about.
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Though it’s often unfair, I can’t help comparing television series finales to those of The Sopranos, The Wire, and The Shield. The three represent brilliant shows that were allowed to end largely how the creator(s) envisioned and take their own deliberate and original steps in getting to the finish line.
The Sopranos is of course arguably the greatest television show of all time, and manages to pull off a truly controversial final moment (and we mean final: don’t stop…) without tarnishing its legacy in the slightest. The cut to black from Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) showing his amiable side, his family man (as composed to family man) side, waiting for Meadow to get to the dinner table at a Jersey greasy spoon perhaps even raises the level of mystique (and certainly debate) after a final season that raised the stakes across the board and pushed the boundaries and buttons of anyone who dared to lazily “root” for “hero” Tony (goodnight Chrissy, as one mere example). So The Sopranos ending was a “shocking” ending in a sense, and while some call it a sell out or a disservice to loyal viewers, I think it’s a terrific and fitting ending.
And because the ending is totally left up to the opinion and the mind of the audience, here’s my take: I think David Chase and company went out of their way to foreshadow that there’s no way Tony and his family were going to see a happy ending and ride off into the sunset. Nearly everyone close to Tony’s nuclear family has been killed off or badly maimed by the end of the run, and we’ve also seen relative devastation in the New York family, to say nothing of the peripheral damage and “friendly” fire that went down over the run of the show (I love thinking about Tony-as-devil, by the way: everything he touches becomes corrupted, whether he intends it or not). Therefore while there’s no clear indication that Tony, Carm, and the kids get clipped at the restaurant, I think the implication is that that level of luck (and it is luck in many ways, as competent a mob boss as Tony turns out to be) can’t go on forever.
Then we have The Wire, which ends on gorgeous and gritty and melancholy and bittersweet tones, perfectly wrapping up the Dickensian story that played out over five seasons in the mean streets of Baltimore. There was nothing entirely unexpected in the series finale, but it rewarded viewers wonderfully for the time they had invested in the show. We saw a level of redemption for some beloved if flawed characters (McNulty, Bubbles), but I particularly appreciated that there was not a tidy wrap up of the Marlo (Jamie Hector) storyline. In some ways, Marlo’s fate is similar to Vic Mackey’s (more on that fellow in a moment): he’s been “freed” into a life that is absolutely contrary to his character and makeup and therefore finds himself trapped in a virtual life sentence in prison. The cool thing is that in Marlo’s case we got to see Lester Freamon (Clarke Peters) use his crafty genius to bust his crew and saw some of its major players taken out in various ways, but it’s absolutely obvious that the beat goes on: Baltimore’s institutions are still broken (if not totally corrupted) for all the good people who struggle within them, and the streets are still overrun with drugs and despair. So while the “camera” of The Wire fades out we feel a satisfying summing up of a huge cast of characters while understanding that the players (or their real life counterparts) and the setting aren’t going anywhere.
Finally, The Shield’s final episodes stay with me and even haunt me like nothing I have ever seen on television. For all the praise and credit that I give to The Sopranos, this is the ending that I had actually hoped Tony would get: everything — and I mean everything — stripped away: family, friends, honor, dignity, respect. And then it gets even better/worse: Vic Mackey (Michael Chiklis) is almost literally handcuffed to a desk, forced into pushing paper for the feds as part of a plea bargain that bargained away the remaining bits of his soul, sending his only remaining friend Ronnie (David Rees Snell) down the river while protecting an ex-wife who had rightfully written him off for good.
It’s a completely engrossing and dark-as-night and satisfying ending because this is exactly what our most anti of anti-heroes deserves. And what’s so delicious about it all is that everything that happens through The Shield’s long run basically goes back to the murder of a cop during the series pilot. Basically Mackey’s corruption was complete from the first moments we met him, and we were witness to his long and slow decline over the show’s run. Not puppy dogs and ice cream, but a tremendous achievement as dramatic fiction.
I think I just voted for The Shield as greatest series finale of all time then?
That, or the one where Ross and Rachel finally get together.
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The Wire, The Sopranos and The Shield are certainly three great shows, but I would disagree that they all contained great finales. Disregarding The Shield for the moment (I’ll touch back to it in a later post), I’d argue that both The Wire and The Sopranos failed to deliver on many — but not all — of the promises both shows offered to the viewers.
The Wire is guilty of this in part because of the entire fifth season, a final season that attempted to close out the series and complete the cycle but unfortunately it didn’t manage to connect with the vast majority of its viewership on airing. There’s an abundance of great moments throughout the season, but there’s an equal amount of questionable ones. This is not to call the season bad — but when compared to the quality of previous seasons it did lack. This, of course, had an impact on the finale.
The Wire’s season finales have all been comparatively weak and this is because of the show’s structure. The huge events tend to occur in the antepenultimate and penultimate episodes, leaving the finale to work as the denouement. This is unsurprising when you consider the nature of the show — one season, one linked story — but it does mean that the final episodes were often weaker than their immediate predecessor (the exceptions to this being Seasons Three and Four). Add to this the exceptionally “neat’ nature of the closing montage and you end up with a finale that felt “off note”. It just didn’t sit right with the rest of the picture painted by The Wire’s previous fifty-nine episodes.
It did manage to nicely sell the cyclic nature of the show’s story (modelled after the Greek tragedies) without the ham-fisted crowbar forcing that Battlestar Galactica’s finale resorted to. So it wasn’t a failure by a long shot, but it’s just not one of the best finales (For the record The Wire is one of the best shows though).
I’ll have to touch on The Sopranos later also, because I want to move onto what I do feel is the greatest finale of any show. A finale so pure, complete and utterly on target that it achieved a form of transcendence; now I’m a die hard Shield watcher, but this show is the only one I’d consider to have ended in a stronger fashion. It remained as true to the series message and closed with a perfect note that really paid off every season previously.
I refer to the episode “Everyone’s Waiting” from Six Feet Under. The 2005 series finale that came into focus when Alan Ball decided it was time to move on from Six Feet Under and start other projects. Initially there was some discussion about continuing the series without his involvement, but fortunately for us all the decision was made to close the book on the Fisher family for once and all. The episode opens unlike every episode previously, with a birth instead of a death, and it pushes forward with great care and love for its characters (and respect for viewers of the show). The events of the episode remain strong throughout, but they’re overshadowed by the final montage; a collection of milestone events for each of the main characters in the show, revealing that beyond the finale each character lives a full life. It then has one final twist for the viewers, closing each and every one of their lives by showing us the circumstances of their death.
Six Feet Under began with the death of Nathaniel Fisher Senior and it ended with the deaths of every member of the family and their closest friends (ending with Claire). Closing the cycle completely and staying true to the core concept of the show, it reveals that death comes to everyone and all lives are lived towards the point of their ending.
It’s a beautiful, heartrending episode that haunts long after you’ve finished watching it and as such it remains still my quintessential show finale.
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I think that The Wire ended on strong notes all round but can understand that some people saw a falling off. I greatly enjoyed the examination of journalism and the media as an institution that fails in many ways to address the tragic problems that plague America’s inner cities (and Baltimore in particular, of course). Unlike any show I’ve ever seen, The Wire had the ability to pull back its storytelling camera, shift, and focus on a new subculture and new set of characters within Baltimore, all while keeping the plot threads and lives we’ve been shown prior in mind.
Now, granted, McNulty’s (and, later, Lester’s) manufactured serial killer storyline was a somewhat significant shift tonally from what we had seen during the prior seasons of the show. However, I was both entertained by it (McNulty, Bunk, and Lester throughout are alternatively engaging and hilarious and always spectacular in interacting with each other) and impressed in the sense that I “bought” that McNulty could be pushed over the edge by budget cuts and lack of priority to do “real” police work to attempt that level of insane stunt.
All of that being said, it wasn’t the best season of The Wire. If forced I’d have to place that honor over the umbrella of the first two seasons or so (I’m cheating a bit, but then again, I’m making up the rules!) with the intensity of the investigation into the Barksdale crew and the initial revelations and learning process the audience goes through with regard to the culture and characters and process of the drug trade (and attempts to combat it) in Baltimore.
But because I did greatly enjoy Season Five, I was able to deeply appreciate the craftsmanship of the series finale, which I feel did quite a job of wrapping up a huge number of storylines in a realistic and satisfying way, while also completing the framework of the many questions (political, societal, and so on) that the series expertly poses.
Even though RevViews doesn’t think that The Wire produced one of the best series finales of all time, we agree that a great finale is one that is in tune with the aesthetic of the series, wraps up the overarching story in a satisfactory way (or better), and leaves things on a note that enhances the overall quality of the show.
A new area to explore in this regard are shows that “tack” on a movie or more (made for TV or theatrical release) after its initial run. I’d say for starters here that once a show gets made into a movie, the initial series finale changes greatly in terms of its contribution to the series as a whole. That is, it is no longer “the end.”
Let’s take Firefly for example, one of the best short-lived shows in the history of television, I’d wager. If Firefly had not been translated into a film (the good but not great Serenity), we’d have to go in and figure out what actually constituted the show’s series finale (the episode that was last aired on television during its initial run was not the last episode that was produced — all episodes are available on DVD, and they all rock as a side note). Because we have Serenity though, we have a good sense that this is the final word on the universe introduced to us by Firefly. Unless… of course, a new film is made or the series is brought back to television, but that doesn’t look likely at this point.
I’ll leave Firefly there for the moment, and we can easily include a bevy of shows in this category such as Extras, Sex and the City, Dead Like Me, and a bunch of crappy shows from the ’80s that are being made into crappy film versions today.
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There’s a real frustration for any dedicated viewer of a prematurely cancelled show. Often storylines are left hanging and there are strong negative feelings fostered due to lack of closure. It is a very human desire to seek closure. It’s this desire that leads me to the TV Show Movies I’m still hoping for: The 4400 and The Dead Zone movies. The cancellation of both of those shows still hurts.
There have been a host of these TV Movies made over the years. Family Guy returned after “The Stewie Griffin Story’, Futurama returned after no less than four of them (there’s more I’d like to write about Futurama’s finales but it will have to wait).
Eric mentioned Firefly and Serenity in the previous edition of this roundtable, and it’s a fine show to start with. Firefly was one of those shows that burned briefly and brightly, and it remains one of television’s finest shows. Serenity was an attempt at re-birthing the show and continuing the existing stories. It’s a great example of the TV Film because it both succeeds and fails at the same time. Don’t get me wrong; I do love Serenity, but I much prefer Firefly and the fact that I’m even able to make a distinction like that between the two shows the size of the disjoint between them.
There is a lot to like about Serenity, but there were also a lot of decisions made during the writing and production process that were quite simply bad. The change in lighting onboard Serenity, the retardation of character growth (including setting back relationships between the characters), the discarding of previous threats and also the rather dubious decision to “retell the meeting of the crew’ in order to make the film more accessible to new viewers; these are all decisions that quite frankly pander to human sloth and really treats the audience with a fair lack of respect.
I know that sounds exceptionally harsh; Serenity isn’t that bad and in truth, it’s actually quite a good film. It just lost sight of what the show was in an attempt to scale up for the big screen.
Another show that ended prematurely was Dead Like Me. Eric briefly mentioned it in his previous post and I wanted to touch on it a little deeper. DLM was a beautiful show that remains one of the greatest portrayals of depression on television (Vincent and the Doctor surpassed it recently) with a lighthearted story, a lead you just can’t help but fall in love with and none other than Inigo Montoya himself (Mandy Patinkin)!
I was both saddened and uplifted by the end of DLM. The cancellation of the show was somewhat surprising, but the show did manage to end on a perfect note and as such I didn’t feel too let down. But I was still exceptionally excited when I heard that a DLM movie would be coming to the small screen via Showtime.
Excited I was… until various details started to come out, and sure enough when I watched the film the issues I’d noted were indeed a problem. First and foremost was the loss of Rube/Mandy Patinkin from the group dynamic. Mandy is a fantastic character actor and as such Rube brought a great deal of gravitas to the screen. He was a deep and interesting soul who provided the perfect foil for “Peanut’ (George) to bounce off and learn from.
Losing Rube was bad news, but the replacing of Laura Harris with Sarah Wynter as Daisy Adair was hugely ill-advised. Daisy was never an essential character for the show; she was fun but not as well rounded or as interesting as the other characters. She could have been written out at the same time as Rube, leaving the remaining trio (George, Mason and Roxy) trying to move on without their friends, a concept with far more potential than the rather gimmicky part played by Henry Ian Cusick.
Dead Like Me: Life After Death did have one decent storyline – George’s unwise relationship with her sister Reggie did make for some powerful moments, so while the movie on the whole was… not good and without Life After Death the series would have closed on a perfect moment. With it the series leaves a slightly bitter taste in the mouth. It did have some brighter moments, but the show would have been better off without a film.
All of this does make it seem that the TV Show Film Finale is never a good move, but that is not always the case. There is one show that managed an incredible movie that functioned as the perfect cap to an incredible series.
I refer to Homicide: The Movie.
On the surface it looks almost completely gimmicky with its tagline of “The One Case So Important, Every Detective Is Back.” And you could be forgiven for assuming that it was an attempt to cash in all the chips and really make things “epic”.
It’s not. Really it’s not, it’s just an incredible piece that remains true to the show it closes out, as it manages to balance the presence of no less than eighteen lead characters from the show’s various seasons and still deliver a story that is poignant and entirely faithful to the main message of the show.
It’s one of the great finales and the fact that it is a TV Movie doesn’t diminish that one iota.
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It’s interesting to me that RevViews brought up both The 4400 and The Dead Zone — two solid USA shows from the past decade — in terms of movies that he’d love to see developed from now ended television series. I really enjoyed The Dead Zone in particular — Anthony Michael Hall was perfect in the lead role developed from the Stephen King novel, and the supporting cast including Nicole de Boer, John L. Adams, Chris Bruno, and David Ogden Stiers was also terrific. At its best it was a cool, quirky, spooky, and well written and produced show about a man both burdened and blessed by the ability to have visions of the past, present, and future. However, by Season Four or so the spark had clearly faded, and I had a strong feeling that a budget cut had removed some of the truly remarkable special effects that had marked the early seasons as well. I lost interest eventually and dropped out of viewing. Perhaps the magic was back by the end of its run, but I don’t have a strong desire to see a movie developed out of this series.
As a total aside, I’d venture that The Dead Zone might be the best adaptation of a King printed work to a visual medium. However, it might only be eclipsed by the fantastic 1980s film version starring Christopher Walken. A debate for another time I suppose!
Now, a show that absolutely deserved a shot at a feature-length film and failed spectacularly is Dead Like Me. In only two seasons as an episodic show, DLM carved out a unique slot in television history as an exquisite mix of drama, comedy, and science fiction. Most of all it was embodied by great characters, led by Mandy Patinkin in as Rube Sofer, a manager of sorts to a team of reluctant and often disgruntled grim reapers. So the fact that the follow up made-for-TV movie, Dead Like Me: Life After Death did not include Patinkin was not a good sign. RevViews sketches out the details of why the movie sucks, quite frankly, so I’ll just add that it seemed like a project that no one had any passion for. It doesn’t quite take away from the legacy of the show, but fans are forced to work a bit to disassociate the final chapter that we see of this universe.
I haven’t caught any of Homicide: Life on the Street but have long wanted to because of the connection with David Simon (see: The Wire, Treme). And RevViews’ high praise only makes me want to see it all the more.
To round out this topic, Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant are connected to two shows that very successfully extended an original run of a show with a meaningful and entertaining follow up. I’m referring of course to the original UK version of The Office and Extras. With both shows, the follow up cannot be called a movie as much as a special that is essentially a longer episode that is much in line in terms of look and feel with the original series. And in both cases the follow up does provides closure to stories and characters that we had come to care about. On The Office, Dawn and Tim (played by Lucy Davis and Martin Freeman, respectively) finally getting together is a satisfying and well earned payoff. And in the case of Extras, the Extra Special Series Finale allowed Gervais to unleash an incisive broadside into our celebrity obsessed — and our celebrity-seeking obsessed — society.
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In this finale-themed roundtable we’ve touched on a host of shows, including those that ended prematurely, had a forced finale, a somewhat complete ending, and some that ended on a cliff hanger. Others had a movie to “wrap things up’ and even a few managed to end as their creators intended.
The most important part of any finale is the ability to generate talk long after the show itself has finished. Whether it’s overwhelmingly positive or even somewhat conflicted – if people are still discussing what happened during the closing moments then as a writer you know you’ve given the world a lasting creation. We’ve mentioned a few shows that have managed this in the past – including The Shield (my thoughts on that to come), The Wire and Six Feet Under. All are shows that have endings people still discuss.
But there is another show that Eric touched on that is worth looking at in some depth. In some ways it’s the best of the bunch – because of the sheer amount of discussion, thought and even outrage it’s managed to generate. I refer to, of course, The Sopranos. I can’t recall a show that managed to generate so much anger and heated criticism since Seinfeld ended – for the record I happened to love Seinfeld’s finale – the fury, rage and parody that followed it reached all the way to me and at the time I was avoiding anything to do with the show as I was waiting for the complete boxed set to be released in the UK.
You had the writer Shawn Ryan promising that The Shield wouldn’t end the same way, there was Family Guy’s take on it: “Well, at least it didn’t end like The Sopranos, where it just cut to black in mid-sen–” and Everybody Hates Chris provided an excellent homage of the scene for its own closing moments. It’s just one of those things; a finale that is quite brilliant, expertly crafted and loaded with meaning – but guaranteed to drive the vast majority of the show’s viewers absolutely insane.
It’s because – and I did mention this in an earlier roundtable post – people crave closure. Happy or sad, people need an ending. There’s a good friend of mine who hates anything being left open at the end, and as such I couldn’t ever recommend The Sopranos to him because I know he’d try and kill me after watching the finale’s closing scene.
I had one advantage when I went into watching The Sopranos: I already knew that the finale would close partway through a scene and that things wouldn’t be left all neatly wrapped up in a nice package for easy digestion. In truth I was more than fine with that, I happen to feel that a happy ending is less important than a true one and “The Sopranos” ends in exactly the fashion it should – loaded with symbolism and with a meaning that is left for the viewer to interpret over time.
It’s managed to divide people over what has actually happened and I’ve heard a lot of different theories about what the diner scene actually is. These range from the simple “it sucks!’ all the way to complex ones that look at all the deep symbolism in the series, especially the final season in combination with the last scene and conclude a number of different things – the most common one being due to the “You never hear it coming” reference, that is we’re witnessing the successful hit on Tony Soprano by the man in the Member’s Only jacket. I must admit I lean towards that theory myself; the entire scene builds to a climax that ends with the words “Don’t Stop’ and the screen cutting to black. Tony never sees it coming; neither did the audience – and that in part helps explain the sheer vitriol some viewers and critics generated right after watching it. Many people felt betrayed by the ending, especially the viewers who were clamoring to see Tony get killed. They felt robbed of their denouement, and let’s be fair – The Sopranos doesn’t have one, it just has credits and two words from a Journey song.
That is what remains so great about it, David Chase took his vision, crafted the plotting and then edited the entire scene together in a way that builds tension with increasing strength and ends not with a climax but with a sudden cessation of movement. End of the line, last stop: this town, everyone off.
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I went on something of a Sopranos binge of late, which of course meant I had to ride that train (the Blue Comet, of course) all the way home to those final excruciating moments where Meadow seems to take a 300-point turn to parallel park her car, and Tony conscientiously orders onion rings for the table while waiting for the family to arrive for a last supper… or at least the last that we the audience will ever see of our beloved anti-hero and company.
But let’s take a little bit of a step back. As my man Rev alluded to, there are a number of signs that point to Tony getting popped at Holsten’s that are laid out throughout the series, I’d wager, and particularly throughout parts one and two of Season Six. Going through The Sopranos at rapid pace this time around, I was struck by a few things.
First of all, Tony (James Gandolfini) takes great pains — both consciously and otherwise — to alienate himself from many of the closest people to him in his life. He’s abusive to his consiglieri Sil (Steve Van Zandt) and close friends Hesh (Jerry Adler) and Paulie (Tony Sirico) for good measure, burns bridges with New York, goads his brother-in-law Bobby (Steve Schirripa) into cold cocking him over a drunken game of Monopoly, and so on.
And then we get to the bodies. By the series finale, a huge number of Tony’s closest associates, friends, and protectors — or at least the ones that we’ve been introduced to throughout the series — are either gone, dead, or incapacitated. Pussy, Ralphie, Furio, Sil, Bobby, Christopher, Uncle Junior, and Vito just for starters. I couldn’t help getting the impression that Tony is more exposed than he’s ever been, so much so that it seems insane that he’d waltz into Holsten’s alone and possibly unarmed.
But isn’t that the point? The final scene represents a typical day in the life of Tony Soprano. But again, let’s step back again for a quick moment.
Now let’s look at the supremely “bad luck” that many others just outside Tony’s orbit sees over the course of the series set against the relatively “good luck” that Tony and his immediate family sees right up until the end of the run. Johnny Sack (Vincent Curatola) gets nabbed by the feds on RICO charges after we’ve seen notorious and frequent flubs by the government in snagging Tony and those closest to him (Adrianna not withstanding). And the New Jersey crew somehow manages to hold off the New York family under Phil Leotardo’s (Frank Vincent) leadership and its reputed “200 soldiers.” Phil, a boss of a renowned New York family, gets sold out by his underlings in the name of peace of getting back to business.
So, again, we have Tony at Holsten’s with his onion rings and his look of the everyman father and husband waiting for his family and a nice cheapo dinner at a favorite greasy spoon.
The more I watch the series and think about it, the more I’m convinced that David Chase is daring us to believe that Tony doesn’t get popped at Holsten’s just after DON’T STOP and cut to black, probably by the dude in the Member’s Only jacket. He seems the most likely guy in the restaurant to do the deed and very purposefully sits at the counter and then walks into the restroom just as the family is about to see Meadow (Jamie-Lynn Sigler) walking in the front door.
But here’s what’s perhaps even more significant to me at this point in time. It doesn’t matter if Tony gets clipped that night. Not in the slightest. The point that David Chase and the writers are making is that Tony’s ticket will absolutely get punched, one way or the other. Someone will knock him out of the skip’s chair — either by his own crew or New York or somewhere else — or he will get nailed by the feds (remember that we find out right near the end that Carlo, played by Arthur J. Nascarella, has flipped and will testify, very easy to dismiss with so much going on at that point). His luck must end at some point, and we’re just not privy to exactly how and when it happens.
When I first saw the finale, I thought it was a clean finish to the series in the sense that the audience could decide what happened after the curtain closed. But no longer. I take the personal choice to believe Tony gets his right at the cut to black, dovetailing perfectly with Bobby’s infamous line about “you probably never even see it coming.” But more than anything, the intention of The Sopranos’ creator and team has never been clearer to me, and I have all the more respect for the series as a whole in addition to the still highly controversial finale.
This review originally appeared on TV Geek Army.