Snakkle Flashes Back Through Television’s Best and Worst Series Finales

Though series creator Mitchell Hurwitz will be revisiting the Bluth family for Netflix soon, the acclaimed Arrested Development did receive a proper send-off on Fox with a final episode (“Development Arrested”) that finally allowed closure in George Michael’s potential incest fantasies and Buster’s rivalry with a seal, and revealed the true mastermind behind the company’s legal troubles.

The personal and professional struggles that plagued the Fisher family were always set to poignant music that made you feel that much deeper for their problems, but the final few moments of Six Feet Under elevated that to a whole other level. Flashing forward in “Everyone’s Waiting,” we got to see the rest of the lives, and eventual deaths, of each main character so we could properly say good-bye to them the way they had helped so many countless families do.

Normally it is a cop-out for a character to wake up from a dream at the end of a series, basically negating the importance, let alone reality, of every episode that preceded it (see Sunset Beach), but every rule has an exception, and Newhart is that exception here. In the series finale, “The Last Newhart,” Dick Loudon (Bob Newhart) gets hit on the head with a golf ball, but instead of dying and ending on a somber note, he wakes up in bed as Dr. Robert Hartley, from his previous sitcom The Bob Newhart Show, saying to his on-screen wife, “You’ll never believe the dream I just had!” Sure, it may have negated some pop culture characters, but it solidified the importance of others even deeper in the zeitgeist.

Though the series finale of Cheers (“One for the Road”) featured quite a few wackadoo character moments (Woody started working in government, really?), some very powerful lines of dialogue were delivered as well. The show about the bar where “everybody knows your name” set itself apart by creating a family in a nontraditional location. When Sam flicked off the lights at the end and straightened the photo of Geronimo on the wall, you couldn’t help the tears from welling in the corners of your eyes.

Lost started and ended with one man’s journey to find purpose and come to terms with what it meant for him. It may have been big and at times overly complicated, but in “The End,” it went back to its roots of being a deeply emotional tale of how important the relationships in our lives are. Though we didn’t get to see what happened to every character leading up to their death, there was an oddly peaceful sense of closure in knowing that no experience, and no people, meant more to them than the ones we had spent six years with on the island.

Bill Lawrence created the most beautiful, emotional, and poignant good-bye to J.D., Turk, Elliot, and the whole Sacred Heart team at the end of their eighth season. In “My Finale,” fans were treated to J.D. stepping outside of the hospital at which so many important, defining moments in his young adult life occurred, only to imagine his future in a scored montage. Was it his hopes, his dreams, or actually a flash-forward into the future? You could make cases for all, depending on what you wanted it to be, but no matter what, it sent him off on a high, mature note. Until season 9 rolled around and ABC granted the series one more short season, which meant that "My Finale" was only the final episode of the season, not the series. So Lawrence was tasked with writing a whole other good-bye… and for a bunch of one-season-only characters who we could never attach to as deeply or as quickly. “Our Thanks” wasn’t poorly done, but it has the unfortunate placement in history of following “My Finale,” which renders it, and the whole season that preceded it, completely unnecessary.

Remember just a few slides ago when we praised Newhart for using the “it was all a dream” factor? Well, Roseanne’s series finale, “Into That Good Night,” proves why that was one in a million. After an off-the-rails season in which America’s favorite blue-collar family wins the lottery and actually becomes affluent and, you know, Dan has a heart attack, the final episode revealed it all to be a figment of Roseanne’s imagination, as she desperately tried to reinvigorate her boring life. Or something. We never could get past the God complex this seemed to imply.

Sorry, genre fans: “The Truth” may be out there, but it didn’t look good for The X-Files. The series that was such a fan favorite—and created the first shippers ever—went out with a frustrating whimper, rather than a bang, by wrapping up a number of its plot holes off-screen. Not to mention Mulder’s murder trial and subsequent conversations with ghosts. Sure, Mulder and Scully were together at the end, but it left a lot to be desired and didn’t instill a lot of confidence that the invasion, if and when it actually came, would be handled properly.

While we have to applaud Seinfeld for parading every guest star of note through its series finale, aptly titled “The Finale,” we couldn't get behind the fact that the four friends got arrested, stood trial, and ultimately ended up in jail for the very behavior the audience spent nine seasons laughing at and, at times, identifying with. Suddenly, the show was asking us to sober up and realize the consequences of our actions, or lack thereof? No, thanks!

Should Persons Unknown be cut some slack because it was a series canceled without the writers and producers getting a chance to properly wrap up? It’s hard to make that case when the writing was on the wall for it for so long, and in “Shadows in the Cave,” they still chose to basically reset the characters back to exactly where they were in the pilot, when they faked their deaths to take charge of their fates and futures and escape their entrapping ghost town experiment, only to end up… trapped on a ship in the middle of the ocean. And we still had no idea what the “Program” even was.

Entourage started with one movie star and his three tagalong friends, and when the series ended years later, it had only “evolved” to a movie star, a successful suit, and their two tagalong friends. The character-defining moments in the finale—a marriage for Vince and a resignation for Ari—were so impromptu and out of character they made some fans wonder if they were born out of a bout of mania. But the real problem with this finale was that even though they promised it was “The End,” it was really created to be an appetizer for a potential feature film, so it really didn’t provide emotional closure at all.