This TV Geek Army Roundtable features a discussion of television series finales. Check out Part I here and Part II here.
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 dénouement. 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.
