Forgot about that. One of the great instrumental theme songs in TVLand!
Don’t know what they were thinking!
That was maybe about the time Billy Gibbons remastered ZZ Top’s first records from the 1970s…so…maybe it makes some sense, in a perverse way.
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Best: MASH’s finale was pretty depressing in a lot of ways, but it felt true and real. That was how it was always going to end; anything else would have been a copout.
And while not really a series finale, the 7th season finale of Elementary was everything I wanted. Then they got a surprise 8th season, and while I LOVE this show and was happy with more episodes, damn, the last 10 minutes of S7 really was a perfect bow.
Worst: The Golden Girls; while I love where Dorothy ended up, the last scene is so tonally strange and a major downer. Just a really odd note to end on.
And Glee, while a trainwreck, was an entertaining trainwreck at least, but the last season and the season finale just infuriated me. UGH.
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Okay, who’s got the best Star Trek series finale? Which Sci-Fi Channel series got the best series finale movie: Stargate SG-1 or Farscape?
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TNG with “All Good Things.” Wrapped up so many strings, and the poker scene…ALL THE FEELS.
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Brilliant finale. Equal parts awesome and heartbreaking.
That was a bitter pill to swallow. We NEEDED one more season to tie things up, which was apparently the setup there. As per Wikipedia:
“A few years after the airing of the finale, a script for an alternate ending was leaked on the internet. It implied that Al, through encouragement of his wife Beth, would become a leaper… and that they would be leaping into the future.”
Aaaaaaaaand we never got that because they dropped the axe in a hurry.
They couldn’t even be bothered to spell Sam Beckett’s name correctly in that denouement text that they threw together all slap-dash-like!
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Co-signed.
Winchester’s subplot. Damn. THAT hit hard.
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Ooof. Yeah. And Mulcahy. But again, so true…no one makes it out of war unscathed, and GF&A brought that across beautifully.
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I like DS9’s the most but certainly won’t argue against TNG’s. Lucifer’s finale recently reminded me of it. And of Arrow’s. Saying it reminds me of The Good Place’s might be too on the nose.
Also, Trollhunters Rise of the Titans has the burden of wrapping up three series (88 episodes), and ends up making a very frustrating plot turn to end the movie on. An experience-souring one
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There’s a fanfic out there somewhere in which an aged Winchester lectures and mentors (in his chilly way) young promising surgeons. (He has arthritis or a neurological ailment and can no longer perform operations himself.) One day, a young House shows up at a gala and tries, from the audience, to badger him with questions about his time in Korea. Winchester bawls him out, big-time. 
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The show was inconsistent and went all over the place quality-wise, but the finale of The Shield, “Family Meeting”, was one of the most brilliant and brutally effective things I’ve ever seen.
There were a few ways that I predicted that finale to go, and yowza, the finale didn’t go in any of those directions.
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Though Diagnosis: Murder isn’t much of a continuing story (episodes are generally self-contained and vary wildly in tone over time) there are two TV-movie-length episodes which could be said to finish the series. They’re “A Town Without Pity” and “Without Warning” and they’re both very good. The first one in particular. It’s much bleaker than most of the episodes. Most hardcore fans seem to hate it. But it takes chances and gives the characters more dimension than is customary. I like it a lot.
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I forgot about Quantum Leap. That one was truly awful.
Also nice to see someone else love Batman: The Brave and the Bold. Love that series!
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I think LOST did answer most, if not all, of the ‘questions’, they just did them in more subtle ways (which goes with the whole ‘figure it out’ vibe they had going the entire time) - and most people hated those answers.
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I did a post-MASH finale fanfic in which Charles meets up with the wounded concert pianist he mentored (who is now a composer) and gets some healing from the trauma the finale inflicted on him.
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DM me a link to that baby when you’ve got some time, please. 
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My personal webpage is katehalleron.com - click through the first page and there’s a listing of all my fanfic and some original writing.
I only have two MASH fics, and that story is the second one.
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Best: Superman: The Animated Series. Though the story continued into Justice League and Justie League Unlimited, it was incredibly poignant and notable in that, in almost every respect, Superman lost the war even as he saved the Earth from Darkseid.
Worst: Forever Knight. The finale was so awful that it inspired two distinct sub-genres of fan fiction to correct it. I wrote an article about it for Screen Rant.
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I’ll also throw in a personal Worst vote for Night Court.
They had originally planned to end the series with Season 8 only for it to be renewed at the last minute. They ended Season 9 in a rush after hurriedly trying to reestablish the status quo Season 8 had destroyed and the cast were reportedly informed of the cancellation during what turned out to be their final filming session through a memo that also asked them to have their dressing rooms cleared out before the end of the weekend.
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Far and away, Newhart is my favorite series finale! Not sure how that could ever be topped!
For worst, I agree with Lost. That ruined series finales for my wife and I to the point that if we are getting tired of a show, we just quit watching and look for the finale later (i.e. The Office, Walking Dead).
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Wow. I thought Night Court’s last season was pretty lousy at the time. Now it makes sense.
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