There are some TV finales that ended up helping make their shows even better than they already were when all is said and done. This is not always easy because, as many TV fans know, shows often aren’t even allowed to have a real finale, and many are canceled before they ever reach their planned endpoints. That said, there are also many shows that get their planned endings, and all it ends up doing is frustrating fans. Game of Thrones is a good example of a very popular show with millions of fans that ended to universal disdain from those who followed the story to its conclusion.
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That said, there are a lot of TV shows that stuck the landing, and their finales were perfect, making the shows even better. However, in a couple of cases, not all fans were behind these great endings, with some considering a perfect ending to still be a disappointment.
10) Angel
If there is one complaint about the final season of Angel, it is that Joss Whedon had to fight for his final season and then was told it would be shortened. This meant that he had to rush the ending and put the finale in place quicker than he had hoped. By the time the show ended, fans sounded off, claiming disappointment with the final scene of the series, even though it was a perfect moment.
That finale had some disappointing moments, such as when Lorne (Andy Hallett) killed Lindsey (Christian Kane) in the most uninteresting manner. However, even that was made great when Lindsey whined that Angel was the one who was supposed to kill him. However, the final moment, with Angel, Spike, Gunn, and Illyria (Fred) standing to fight the demon apocalypse in the rain, was perfect. The entire theme of Angel was that the fight never ends, and the ending slamming that home made it a perfect ending for a great series.
9) Star Trek: The Next Generation
There is little doubt that Star Trek: The Next Generation is one of the best shows in the franchise. It has an almost impossible task of creating a new crew and hoping fans of the series would buy into them, and they are now as popular and beloved as the TOS counterparts. They had great adventures, and the cast was magnificent, making the show’s finale a perfect goodbye for the series.
In Season 7, “All Good Things” ended the series with a touching story that saw Capt. Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) finds his mind jumping to three points in time: the present, seven years in the past before his first mission, and 25 years into the future when he has retired in France. It was a love letter to fans and was the perfect ending for a perfect Star Trek series.
8) Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD
It isn’t just the finale, but the entire final two seasons of Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD that made the show better, and actually improved on it dramatically. That is because, for the first two seasons, the showrunners were beholden to the MCU and had to follow those storylines with the TV show, hindering them from actually building the show’s world.
However, once Agents of SHIELD started to move into the multiverse and jump to different Earths, it got so much better because it no longer had to care about the MCU storylines. The final season put the team on a different Earth, far away from the MCU, and it helped create the best stories of the show’s history. Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD ended with Coulson sitting and speaking to his team about the future, and everything ended masterfully.
7) The Americans
The Americans was always an interesting show because it featured the bad guys as the main characters, although they really didn’t see themselves as bad people, although they did a lot of bad things throughout the seasons. Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys played a married couple who were KGB officers sent into the United States to live as sleeper agents.
The series showed them interacting with their long-time neighbors and friends and raising their children, none of whom knew the truth. The Americans finale then made the entire series better by stripping the couple of everything they had grown to love, and leaving them even without their lives. Not a single character in this series got a happy ending, and none of them deserved it, making it a perfect way to wrap up their story.
6) Breaking Bad
It was clear from the start that Walter White was not going to have a happy ending in Breaking Bad. However, through the series, he kept lying to himself that what he was doing was for the best to help those people he loved. He kept lying to himself to the point where he became a monster and destroyed everything he touched, even those people he loved.
The Breaking Bad finale not only paid off his delusion, but it made him pay for it in the most devastating way possible. The finale allowed Walter to take care of his family, like he always professed that he wanted to do, and it allowed him to set Jesse free. However, it also destroyed him, and seeing Walter White lying on the floor, watching his story end, was the best possible conclusion to this amazing show.
5) Lost
One of the most polarizing endings to any show in television history was when Lost finally said goodbye to the characters fans had followed for six seasons. However, when the finale aired, it received almost universal backlash from critics and fans who hated the ending, seemed confused at what it was trying to say, and seemed to have a million other complaints about the story.
However, this was the Lost ending that it was always set up to have. When the first season was working its way through, plenty of people had theories, and many of those were true. The characters were in their own version of purgatory. They had unresolved conflicts to deal with. However, the sci-fi elements of the series confused these fantasy themes. The finale showed the characters all crossing over into the afterlife, which tied up the entire series’ overarching themes perfectly.
4) MASH
MASH was a long-running television series that masterfully combined clever comedy with touching stories about life and death during the time of war. The series is a spinoff from the 1970 Robert Altman film of the same name, which follows doctors at the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital in South Korea during the Korean War.
The series had some intensely dark moments, including the death of beloved characters, along with the humor that came from the wisecracking star of the show, Alan Alda, as Hawkeye Pierce. That made the ending one that needed to stick the landing, and it did. The war was ending, and it was time to go home, but each person took this news differently, and the life of the party, Hawkeye himself, was mentally distressed by the end. It was the most-watched finale in TV history, with over 105 million viewers, and followed the theme that “war is hell.”
3) The Sopranos
The Sopranos is another show that had an ending that angered a lot of viewers. However, when looking at how the show was set up, it makes perfect sense to end things this way. The HBO mafia series was about Tony Soprano, a man who had two families, his mafia family and his real family, and the series showed how he balanced those two worlds. One thing to note is that The Sopranos was always from Tony Soprano’s point of view. Whether he was in the scenes or it was something where he was calling the shots or had schemes planned against him, this series followed the highs and lows of his life.
The ending had many viewers believing he was finally going to die, and it ended with him in a diner with his family. People came and left, and fans waited to see who was going to pull the trigger. Then, the screen went black for long enough that people thought their cable had gone out. People complained that the show had no ending, but there might be a good explanation. This show is from Tony’s point of view. If he gets unexpectedly killed, he wouldn’t know what happened, and the show going black could easily represent that. If that is the suggestion, it was a perfect ending to a masterful HBO series.
2) The Shield
The Shield’s finale destroyed every main character. The series followed a team of tough cops in Los Angeles who brought down the worst of criminals. However, these cops were also crooked. They saved lives and took bad guys off the streets, but they also profited from it, protected criminals who could make them richer, and had schemes to set them up for life when they retired. Shane, Vic Mackey, and Ronnie were the three cops left standing before the finale.
When Shane killed their fourth member, Lem, earlier in the series, he sealed his fate. However, the finale just rocked this entire team. Shane knew there was no way out and died by suicide after killing his family, which was shocking in itself. Ronnie went to jail, even though he was likely the least guilty of them all. However, what happened to Vic made this a perfect finale. He didn’t go to jail, and he lived. But the tough no-nonsense cop was given a desk job and benched, putting him in his own form of Hell. It was a perfect punishment.
1) Six Feet Under
HBO had a lot of great shows over the years, but Six Feet Under remains one of its greatest. The series follows a family that runs a funeral home in Los Angeles. While the show follows their lives, and the lives of their friends and lovers, it is also a show that has death as a significant focus of the storylines, thanks to the funeral home setting.
That made “Everyone’s Waiting” a perfect finale that made this TV show even better. The series starts with Claire saying goodbye to her family and leaving, and then there is a time jump to show the future of all the main characters, the good and the bad, and then all of their eventual deaths. The recounting of all the deaths in rapid succession, from Ruth just one year later to David dying 20 years down the road, is just heartbreaking. However, it also ties in with the show’s themes and might be the greatest TV finale in history.
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