The old saw is that all good things must come to an end, but for many great television shows that end is the hardest thing to pull off. If it’s not surprising enough the show will fade from memory, but if it’s too crazy then fans will turn on the show forever.  These days, shows have even longer shelf lives thanks to Netflix and other forms of binge watching, making the finale is more important that ever. Look at all the controversy that The Sopranos finale is still kicking up, even seven years later.  HBO’s Boardwalk Empire starts its final season in the US on Sunday, and FX’s Sons of Anarchy will follow on Tuesday. (For UK audiences, Boardwalk returns to Sky on 14 September, and Sons will be available via iTunes within hours of the US premiere.) Here are some things that they can learn from both good and bad series finales of the past.  **Spoiler alert: this post contains details about the series finales of Six Feet Under, Breaking Bad, Lost, The Sopranos, Seinfeld and The Wire  For my money the best series finale of all time was Six Feet Under’s, where Claire Fisher rides off into the desert and we see what happens to each of the characters through little vignettes about how each of them dies. I still get chills thinking about it. This technique not only encapsulates a theme from the show but answers the question that keeps every fan tuning into their favourite shows year after year: “What happens next?”. The Wire didn’t trace every one of their dozens of characters until their final days, but it did give us a closing montage to let us know what they were all up to, good and bad. For a show what was built on a huge cast, this was the perfect way to end.  There are only so many ways to end something, but the best series finales are ones that find a whole new way to say goodbye. The Cosby Show had Bill Cosby and Phylicia Rashad walking out into the studio to greet the audience that loved them. The Hills (the only reality show with a brilliant finale) pulled away to show the cast on a sound stage, hinting that the whole thing was constructed and scripted, something fans always believed. As I mentioned before, The Sopranos violent cut to black in the middle of a scene was the most original finale to date and one that still gets people talking. Personally I think it’s brilliant, especially when considering TV critic Matt Zoller Seitz’s brilliant theory that Sopranos creator David Chase “whacked the audience” so the story continues but it’s us that are really dead. No matter what it means to you, it is the ultimate fill in the blank, something that had never been done before and probably will never be again.  Breaking Bad is essentially a character study about Walter White. It’s about how one man went from being a teacher trapped in a life he never wanted to a sociopathic monster. While many criticise the finale (myself included) for being a little bit too macho – Walt guns down his competitors, saves Jesse, and sets up his family – the finale is just what the show was all along: all about Walt. Seinfeld also did this brilliantly, where Jerry and his crew were put on trial for being jerks and convicted. The final scene is them in prison behaving as they always have. For a show about semi-awful people who never learned anything, staying true to the tone is the best thing it could have done.  Just a few weeks ago True Blood gave a master class on how not to have a series finale. Most of the episode was taken up with the marriage of Hoyt and Jessica, two characters I have a very hard time caring about. Even when it was about Sookie deciding whether or not to kill her longtime love Bill, their death scene seemed to stretch longer than a vampire’s life span. What viewers always cared about wasn’t answered. The show was so much about who will Sookie end up with: Bill or Eric or Alcide. Then, in the final scene, we find out she ends up with some dude with a plaid shirt whose face we don’t even see. Who cares?  I’m still mad at Lost for wasting five years of my life pondering mysteries that they set up that the writers had no intention of answering. The finale, instead, was everyone going to heaven, even though the show’s creators promised us in season one that everyone wasn’t dead/in heaven/in purgatory. The unwritten promise they made viewers was that everything would be explained and then everything was not explained and I’m still pissed. The same thing goes for How I Met Your Mother, whose promise is right there in the title. We were also told again and again that Robin was not the “mother” but we find out in the finale that the kids’ mother has been dead all along and this was really a show about Ted getting together with Robin. Again, not what we were promised and makes the audience feel duped and like it wasted its time.  St Elsewhere famously turned out to be about a kid imagining the lives of all the characters living in a snow globe. The finale of Roseanne also showed that the awful finale season, about her winning the lottery, was also a dream. No, please don’t. We already know that this a fictional universe, there is no reason to go layering fiction on top of fiction. I will give a special dispensation to Bob Newhart who showed us that his second series was really a dream had by the character in his first series, but that’s only because it was a small gag and was pretty darn brilliant. Other than that, everyone else better be wide awake.
How you end a beloved TV show can delight or disappoint viewers. Here are some of the best and worst ways to bow out