Friday open thread: Sticking the landing

Happy Friday! In pop culture, this has been quite the few weeks for endings. Last month, Avengers: Endgame wrapped up that particular Marvel movie story line. Last week, Veep, one of my favorite comedies, wrapped up its run, and this week, both long-running sitcom The Big Bang Theory and, on Sunday, Game of Thrones are ending.

So the question this week is simple: what are some of your favorite TV series endings? I have a few:

Six Feet Under
This is probably the gold standard for “how to end a TV series”. I don’t necessarily believe that a final episode has to tie everything up with a nice little bow, but the ending of this series was pretty much perfect. You got to say goodbye to the characters in their present day, but then you got to go forward and see how a lot of their lives played out in subsequent years as well, and it was all handled with such grace and sweetness, it was really, really well done.

The Americans
If Six Feet Under’s was the best ending ever, the final episode of The Americans is damn close to being as good. It didn’t try to do anything the series itself didn’t do, and it ended in a very guarded, hopeful way at a very guardedly hopeful moment of history for its main characters.

The Wire
Like the series itself, the final episode of the last season of The Wire was a mixed bag of happiness, despair, and unease. But despite that, it did a fantastic job of ending the storylines of characters we’d followed for five years, even if some of those endings weren’t exactly happy.

Battlestar Galactica
This was a very...divisive finale, for sure, but I have the advantage of not being a sci-fi fan, so I can evaluate it based on how it worked as a story because I don’t really care about the sci-fi of it all, and as a story, it ended really well. Everyone found their own peace in their own way, and that’s really all we can hope for out of life, right?

Halt And Catch Fire
You probably didn’t watch this show. Nobody really did, to be honest, and I can’t claim we were in on it from day one; we started watching it really late in its run. But I’m glad we caught up with it; it was a really solid show with some fantastic performances, and the way it ended was just so...nice. After all the travails its cast went through, between themselves and other people, to see them all (save one main character whose death was a big driver of the final season’s stories) get to a place where they were content and able to go on with their lives was a joy to watch.

What are some of your favorite endings? TV, book series, movies...what’s a good ending for you?