Good Endings and No so Good Endings

[puppetmaker]

A number of TV series are finishing up this year. Currently ER is getting the most ink but there are a number of other series that are hanging up their hats this year. Peter and I were talking about the endings to series both good and bad and speculating what the best ending for the series we like might be.

We started watching Monk because we both like the body of work of Tony Shalhoub that we had seen. He was an actor’s actor. I had met him once years ago when he came to see his sister in a play I was stage managing. Both Peter and I weren’t sure how they could do a series with the premise of an ex-cop with a series of OCD issues and maintain it over time. But a fine cast and good writing will out. This year Monk finishes up its seventh season which is currently slated to be its last season. Peter thinks, and I agree, that the last episode should be that Monk finally solves Trudy’s murder and finds some peace in that. The writers have jerked us around on this subject a couple of times but it would be nice to have an answer as Monk goes off into the Sunset touching each parking meter along the way.

We got into Scrubs late in the game. Peter started watching it while exercising since it was on before the repeat of the Daily Show on Comedy Central. After watching it for a while, it grew on him and we started watching it together. It is a lovely little series with a find ensemble cast and good writing. It was suppose to be done last season but got a little bit of a reprieve this year on another network. So far it has been good and there have been episodes that reminded me of the better days on the series. And anything that uses Muppets has my attention. But I think it is time for JD and the gang to ride off into the sunset.

Battlestar Galatica is down to its final two episodes. Overall I have found this series very satisfying. It has had some twists and turns that have made it a fun roller coaster ride. It also has been frustrating at points but I let that go because their explanation is pretty good to great in the end. My biggest bug-a-bear right now is Starbuck and I want to know what happened to her before the series is over. That is the one loose end I want tied up. Peter pointed out the obvious ending which the pipework has been laid for. The end of the series is the end of the ship. The series is called Battlestar Galatica. In two weeks we will know all or at least more than we know now.

Boston Legal was always a fun series and the ending of it was one of the more logical endings to one of the most illogical law firm series to air on Network TV. There are people who are going to remember William Shatner for Denny Crain before they think of Kirk now. It was an excellent ensemble cast that seemed to challenge each other to be better actors. The additions to the cast brought the bar up even higher but everyone cleared it.

Stargate Atlantis was a mess after Stargate finished shooting and I don’t think it ever right itself. Which was kind of sad for me since I liked the cast a lot and they had a good writing staff. I just felt like they had to rush their way to a conclusion and there were too many characters left with serious loose ends. They honestly had more characters than they knew what to do with.

Then there are the cancelled series which leaves you with more questions than answers. The two I will miss the most out of all the series cancelled are Eli Stone and Pushing Daisies. Both shows were out there in a good way. Both had strong writing staffs and interesting storylines that were going somewhere. I wish each had been given the time to at least wrap up their stores and give us a good ending but it was not to be.

So what do you think was the best and/or worse ending to a TV series? I am honestly curious. I’ll tell mine later so not to color anyone’s opinion.

I am grateful for good endings that leave me with fond memories of the show.

Comments

[jenny_evergreen]

I was very satisfied with SG1's ending. I'm still really ticked off at Xena's ending.
I agree with you about Monk!

[popfiend.livejournal.com]

Xena's ending wasn't an ending. /my 2 cents

And if they end Monk without solving Trudy's murder that would be a travesty.

That would be like ending Burn Notice (which will have to end at some point) without Michael finding out precisely why he was burned.

[roina-arwen.livejournal.com]

I really enjoyed Michael Shanks on Burn Notice... *swoon*

As far as Monk, I definitely hope they solve Trudy's murder, and I'd like to see Monk get his badge back, too.

[chris-walsh.livejournal.com]

A slightly frustrating wrinkle: seeing what you think is the perfect ending in what's not the last show.

I was a big fan of Max Headroom. The last two episodes aired months after the rest of the series, as ABC burned off the show. The actual last episode -- which I don't think was designed to be the finale -- was decent but nothing to write home about (it was set during a city-wide celebration coinciding with a periodic knocking of obsolete satellites out of orbit, so the city had an artificial "meteor" shower).

The second-to-last one, though, was (in my opinion) a wonderful mind-screw: cynical but in a way appropriate to the series. A product (basically a small headset) becomes available that allows people to experience easy and vivid virtual reality, but the product has a drug-like effect that Edison Carter starts investigating. The company making the product, wanting to get Carter out of the picture, ensures that the headset he tests for his report knocks him so thoroughly into his personal VR that he can't get out. (He keeps imagining driving a sports car with a beautiful woman all over him saying "I know what you need. I know what you want.") It's his alt-personality Max Headroom who has to go into that VR to convince Carter to get out: it's a perfect role reversal, and clearly Max has trouble being the responsible one. What's been going on in the background, though, is the VR company is angling to take over Carter's employer, Network 23, and late in the episode Carter finally breaks out of the VR to find that the hostile takeover is about to happen and everyone he knows at the network is about to be fired. They get a reprieve -- "for now," says the CEO of the company that attempted the hostile takeover -- but I remember thinking A little bit of editing and that could've been the finale. Kind of like a darker version of the last Mary Tyler Moore Show where everyone except that one idiot anchorman got fired.

I'm not doing the episode justice with that write-up, but I loved the episode's mood: we see Carter taken advantage of in a way we hadn't seen before, we see Max straining to Do Good, and we sense that everything's going to hell but the people using the VR don't give a rip. I saved that episode on tape and watched it a bunch of times. Max Headroom was often a dark show, and that as the ending would've made it darker.

[chris-walsh.livejournal.com]

And to be lighter, of course I appreciated the much funnier mind-screw of the last episode of Newhart. (I'd heard, and I wonder if this is true, that to keep people from finding out how Newhart ended the producers planted a story that Newhart would die, go to Heaven and meet God, who'd be played, of course, by George Burns.) The actual ending, in the bedroom with Suzanne Pleshette, collapsed me. "I was the innkeeper in this...this crazy town in Vermont! Nothing about it made sense! The maid was an heiress! Her boyfriend spoke in alliteration! The handyman kept missing the point of things! Then there were these three woodsmen...but only one of them talked."

(And to dredge out more memories, I remember that Newhart then did a special that took the conceit of that last episode even further: Newhart goes back to his The Bob Newhart Show psychiatric office to reorient himself to his old reality. Meta, dude!)

[thetripper]

Bob Newhart is an absolute genius! I was rolling on the floor after "Newhart" ended with Susan Pleshette saying "Blonde?"

[chris-walsh.livejournal.com]

Oh, now I'm laughing again.

[popfiend.livejournal.com]

Newhart and the last episode of M*A*S*H are my favorite series endings. For different reasons.

[paigemom.livejournal.com]

Oh, M*A*S*H definitely. It's been what, 26 years? And I still remember it like it was last week.

[popfiend.livejournal.com]

Makes me cry ever time.

Thank you TV Land.

[paigemom.livejournal.com]

Me, too. And the first time I just lost it about halfway through and never did stop crying until it was over...

[thetripper]

Ending before their time:

Firefly, but there is something poetic about what happened next.

Star Trek, TOS. 'nuff said.

Battlestar Galactica, TOS. Yeah, it was rooted in the seventies and the Reagan era "Family Hour", but it was an honest to God SF show on prime time network television. And from the script treatments I have seen for the third season, it was getting better.

Star Trek TNG. Went out on a high note and is still highly relevant and watchable.

DS9. Absolutely, hands down, the best Star Trek after TOS and TNG and probably one of the best ensemble casts assembled on TV until Joss Whedon brought Buffy to TV. In credibly underrated and I cannot understand why it's not in syndication more. SciFi needs to have this on instead of Enterprise.

Voyager & Enterprise. Oh, such high hopes I had. They didn't just jump the shark, they came back for another run and fell in.

[popfiend.livejournal.com]

DS9 was the awesome of awesome.

I miss it.

:(

BSG and Starbuck

[thetripper]

Here's my take and Ron Moore says we'll find out by the end of the show on March 20th.

The piano player in Starbuck's head was her father (safe assumption) and he was Daniel, the seventh Cylon humanoid model. So Starbuck is the first human-Cylon hybrid and she can resurrect as she did when she blew up on the gas giant and the remains were moved to Earth.

Now, who did this? I think that Daniel was so loved by Ellen Tigh, that early models before Cavill damaged them weren't boxed, but remained free and have been manipulating things in the background to put a stop to Cavill. And that there is resurrection tech is still working out there somewhere.

Re: BSG and Starbuck

[thetripper]

And now a wrench in that theory. Look at the IMDB credits for Tobias Mehler (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0576425/) as "Zak Adama". He's in "Islanded in a Stream of Starts" and "Daybreak I & II".

I missed him in "Islanded".

[chazari.livejournal.com]

I agree completely on Eli Stone and Pushing Daisies. I swore after Lost and Scrubs, I would never watch ABC again because of that awful decision. Then I watched Castle last night. So I'm a hypocrite.

[paigemom.livejournal.com]

What did you think of Castle? I watched the first 10 minutes and was not that impressed. Guess I've lost my taste for "witty for the sake of being witty."

[roina-arwen.livejournal.com]

I liked Castle, personally. You have to watch the whole episode - I think it gets better. Also, for the sake of all new series, if the first episode is mediocre or better, I'll give the series 4-6 episodes to see if it improves; if not, no big loss. If the first episode is godawful, I may or may not (depending on the cast) give it a second episode just in case the first was a fluke. Sometimes the writers change enough to make a second episode watchable.

I adore Nathan Fillion enough (and liked the first episode enough) that I'm willing to see this series through at least a few more episodes (and hopefully Nathan will get a good run out of this series)!

[chazari.livejournal.com]

I really liked it and giggled through most of it, but I think that is mainly because I kept thinking Castle was Captain Hammer and Mal Reynold's love child.

[paigemom.livejournal.com]

Well, maybe as Dancing With the Stars gets shorter, I'll give it another chance. I did like the premise...

[querldox.livejournal.com]

Have to disagree about all the Boston Legal stars clearing the bar. That show had the biggest turnover in opening credits cast over its five seasons that I've ever seen, almost always losing 2-3 such a year. And save for the last one, taking a role as a newly minted lawyer associate should've qualified as temp work given the job's average life expectancy.

BSG I'll actually be glad to see go, as it's perhaps the most frustrating show I've seen for a while. In general, the character writing and execution is good (with the exception that multiple people in the society they've set up would've put Baltar out an airlock long before now, even if not the result of a trial, if not for writer's fiat). But they dropped in way too many mystical plot fiat elements that don't mesh with the hard sf setting. And while they've made attempts in the last few episodes to rationalize Cylon culture and motivations, overall that's been so poorly handled (and, clearly based on statements by Moore, made up as they went along) that it's driven me up the wall.

Speaking of ER ending, I'm putting odds on a 3 second or so appearance by George Clooney this Thursday. The promos I saw last night mention the prominent first season docs who haven't shown up yet except him, but then make a point of saying "all" of them will be back, with just a slight emphasis on the word. Either their deal with him prohibits explicit promotion of the appearance and they're trying to hint at it, or they're doing a major fakeout.

[trinalin.livejournal.com]

As mentioned by some of your other readers, Newhart had one of the best endings for a series. It was a spoof of one of the worst series endings: St. Elsewhere.

I liked how Babylon 5 ended, for the most part. Disliked the Buffy ending but only when I actually THOUGHT about it. (It was exciting when I was watching with my brain turned off.)

Daria concluded nicely. Wish they'd put that entire series on DVD.

Here's hoping Monk gets something akin to a happy ending. (Trudy closure would be good.) I need to order season 6 one of these days. (I never remembered to watch the show, so I just buy the DVDs when they come out.)

[ghilledhu.livejournal.com]

ST:TNG may have had my favorite series ending ever. It tied in beautifully with the series opening, and felt like it was an organic culmination of the series as a whole, rather than something tacked on or an arbitrary ending. It also gave us lots of tantalizing glimpses of a possible future that we would never see, leaving us to wonder, "How much of that would ever really happen?"

Plus it had Q. Everything's better with Q.

I remember turning to my friends afterwards, deeply satisfied, and saying, "If it had to end, I'm glad it ended that way."

[queenanthai.livejournal.com]

Best ending ever to a series? Mystery Science Theatre 3000.

Seriously.