Here are the 12 best TV finales we’ve ever seen. Spoilers follow, obviously. They’re ranked from least to most great.
12 — The Good Wife
The Good Wife stunningly called back its excellent first episode — when Alicia (Juliana Margulies) slapped cheating husband Peter (Chris Noth) — by having Diane (Christine Baranski) slap Alicia.
It was payback for a courtroom betrayal that marked Alicia’s transformation from aggrieved spouse to shrewd operator — and neatly set up Diane as the star of the Good Wife spinoff The Good Fight.
It’s one of the best TV finales, and one of the best setups for a continuation.
11 — Barry
Bill Hader spoke for all of us as Barry went out with an “oh wow.”
Did anyone else see Barry (spoiler alert) buying the farm? We did not. But we loved how the show investigated its own investigation of fantasy versus grim reality in a movie within the show that cast indie film star Jim Cummings as Barry.
The Barry finale also deserves credit for commitment: It made clear that there will be no more Barry. We love a TV finale that leaves nothing unanswered.
10 — Game of Thrones
We know, lots of people hated this finale. To which we say: Did you watch Game of Thrones? A good finale is both unpredictable and inevitable, and that was certainly true of the rise and fall of Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke).
Of course power would corrupt Khaleesi. And of course expectations would be subverted. That’s the whole game of Game of Thrones.
But the biggest, coolest twist was that it all resolved with the key characters — after so much bloodshed — just talking out their problems and coming to a somewhat boring, but actually quite reasonable, solution. The game ended with a talk instead of a battle, which no one could have anticipated.
9 — The Wire
The Wire gets points for resolving everything — and realistically. No tacked on happy endings here.
McNulty (Dominic West) had a bittersweet, long-overdue exit from the police department, Bubbles (Andre Royo) got sober, the scheming Carcetti (Aidan Gillen) got elected governor, and good guy Carver (Seth Gillam) got deservedly promoted. But we also saw a young life lost to addiction.
There were never any easy answers on The Wire, and it stayed true to that with its final episode, one of the best TV finales.
8 —The Americans
The 2018 end of the FX spy series is devastating and hopeful at the same time. As Philip and Elizabeth Jennings (Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell) make an against-all-odds escape from the United States, they realize at the last moment that their freedom comes at a horrible cost: Their daughter Paige (Holly Taylor) won’t be joining them.
Her future is full of promise. Theirs seems bleak. The mixed emotions are very much in keeping with the spirit of The Americans.
7 — St Elsewhere
The ’80s NBC hospital drama blew viewers’ minds with the last-second implication that the show’s entire six-season run might have taken place in the mind of an autistic boy staring into a snow globe. Yes, really.
It spent years as the gold standard of stunning TV finales.
6 — The Office (Original British version)
Ricky Gervais’ David Brent got most of the laughs on the original version of The Office, but the show’s emotional core was always Tim (Martin Freeman) and Dawn (Lucy Davis), the inspiration for Jim and Pam on the American The Office.
It’s kind of impossible not to cry at Tim and Pam’s final scenes, because the show skillfully sets you up to expect the exact opposite of what happens.
And we love that it all ends with a simultaneously poignant and crass observation about the great Dolly Parton.
5 — Succession
The ending of one of the all-time best TV shows felt both completely unpredictable and exactly right: Shiv (Sarah Snook) finally reaches a detente with Tom (Matthew Macfayden), Roman (Kieran Culkin) admits that his and his brother Kendall’s whole act is nonsense.
And Kendall (Jeremy Strong) shows the depth of his desperation by shouting “I’m the eldest boy!” It’s funny, it’s sad, and everyone gets better than they deserve.
Succession made a brilliant and laudable decision to wrap things up after four seasons and leave everyone wanting more. One of the best TV finales in every sense.
4 — Better Call Saul
After the fireworks of the Breaking Bad finale, this spinoff led by Bob Odenkirk went in the opposite direction, with an often-bad man doing the right thing. It was a moving and kind counterpoint to the brilliant ruthlessness of the show that inspired it.
Vince Gilligan, who co-created Better Call Saul with Peter Gould, is the only creator to land two different shows on this list.
3 — Six Feet Under
It’s impossible to forget the 2005’s finale’s cathartic, wrenching, astonishing final moments, as we see every character we’ve grown to love experience exactly the fate that we all will, in a sometimes tragic, always humbling combination of ways.
As sad as the Six Feet Under finale ending is, it’s beginning is filled with hope: It is the only episode in the HBO drama’s five-season run to begin with a birth instead of a death.
We know many people who cried at the conclusion of the episode, and rightly so.
2 — Breaking Bad
Going into the 2013 final episode, it seemed impossible that creator Vince Gilligan and his top-notch writing team could possibly tie up the countless threads he and his team had spun over five spectacular seasons.
But somehow they did. The show was thrilling to the very end, with Walter White (Bryan Cranston) getting just about everything he could ever want, while getting exactly what was coming to him.
The film El Camino, which followed Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) after the events of Breaking Bad, was a fun revisiting of the Breaking Bad world, but the finale stands just fine without it. Similarly, the prequel/sequel series Better Call Saul stands alone just fine without Breaking Bad, and Breaking Bad stands alone just fine without Better Call Saul — but the whole Breaking Bad universe also gels together nicely.
1 —The Sopranos
At the top of our list is the most talked about finale ever.
The Sopranos went out in 2007 with a cut to black that said everything, whatever you think happened.
What’s most impressive is that the TV show that reinvented TV shows went out with no sentiment and no patting itself on the back. It kept taking risks to the very last second.
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And you might also like this list of the 12 Best Sitcom Casts in TV History or this list of the 12 Best Lost Episodes of All.
Main image: Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys in The Americans. FX