Four of my favorite TV series recently completed their runs, all within a week of one another. Some of them went out with a bang, others with grace and heart. While a full-stop has been added to their respective stories — well, maybe just a semi-colon with one — they are worth the hours of investment in their characters and worlds created.
While it seems like it was , they went out in their prime rather than clinging to life support. I will try and avoid major spoilers, but there will be some plot details about the final seasons of each show listed below.
â€Âٳܳ¦³¦±ð²õ²õ¾±´Ç²Ô†— The bad-people-behaving-badly genre got a big boost when the Jesse Armstrong-led drama premiered in 2018. For four seasons, the Roy family continued to build up a great amount of schadenfreude for the audience. We watched with churning stomachs this ultra-wealthy media conglomerate-owning family with its , news networks and real-world events as they fought with one another over the thought of succession, and with the world at large.
In its final season, the final knives were plunged deep as the Roy kids, Shiv, Roman and Kendall (Sarah Snook, Kieran Culkin and Jeremy Strong), scrambled to keep or take control of the company from patriarch Logan (Brian Cox). Each episode slowly and clearly built to an emotional finale that left me breathless. Somehow Armstrong and company also managed to foster sympathies for these devils as the show drew to a close, even though my middle-class, liberal heart wanted nothing more than to see them all fall. Truly a masterpiece in writing and acting from start to finish. Stream it on Max.
“B²¹°ù°ù²â†— For a show that started out as a dark comedy, this final season was considerably lighter on laughs than previous seasons had been. It also cemented director/star and co-creator Bill Hader as one of the finest artists out there. Hader launched the show in 2018 with co-creator Alec Berg focusing on Hader’s Barry Berkman, an ex-Marine turned hitman who decides to try for a career change while on a job in LA: actor.
The final season saw him behind bars as his old life and attempts to hide it all finally caught up with him, but that’s not the end of his story. The season is split into two distinct parts, with the second half jumping forward in time, creating a far more impressive and introspective ending to each and every character, some shocking and some predicted, but all of them fitting.
In the final episode, Hader, who directed every episode of the last season, sucks the air out of the room with the provocative ways in which he guides the scenes. And the performance we get from TV legend Henry Winkler is something that any actor of a certain age should aspire to. Hader’s showcase of his triple-threat talents will no doubt be heading to the big screen, and I can’t wait to see what weird and wonderful projects he does next. Stream it on Max.
“Ted Lasso†— The Apple TV+ show was one of the streamer’s first big hits racking up a ton of awards in its wake. The show focuses on kindness through the lens of good-natured, human-to-his-core American football coach Ted Lasso (Jason Sudeikis, who co-created the show with Joe Kelly, Bill Lawrence and Brendan Hunt, the last of whom plays Coach Beard in the series). In season one, Lasso picks up and moves to London to coach football (or soccer in the U.S.) despite knowing nothing about the sport.
The show allowed each of the characters to grow through the kindness their coach showered on them; it also touched on topics such as mental health as well as equality, all while wrapping it in a show that felt like a warm hug each episode.
The final season was certainly not perfect, but as Ted himself says in one of the final episodes, “Perfect is boring.†It wrapped up every storyline in a mostly satisfying way (with a couple of exceptions) and delivered some of the most emotionally impactful scenes of the series.
Apple and the producers and cast have been notably cagey about whether or not this is the last season, but with that finale out, it certainly felt final, at least for Ted’s arc. That’s not to say a spinoff isn’t possible, and I would very much like to see something more from this team, but it would inevitably be a different show. Stream it all on Apple TV+
“The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel†— In this quick-witted show, ‘50s housewife Midge Maisel (Rachel Brosnahan) goes from a privileged Upper West Side Manhattan life to a divorcee who discovers her love for stand-up comedy. It made a splash when it premiered in 2017 thanks to a funny story courtesy of creator Amy Sherman-Palladino and starring duo Brosnahan and Alex Borstein, who plays Midge’s manager, along with great supporting performances from Tony Shalhoub and Marin Hinkle.
Each season lost a bit of luster from that initial, nearly perfect initial season, but the story of Midge’s rise to fame, or more accurately attempts and falls and then more attempts, was still worth coming back for each season. We rooted for her through it all, including watching her have to work 10 times harder as a woman in a male-dominated career, in a society on the brink of a feminist wave.
The final season changed the pacing by peppering each episode with brief looks into the “future†for the characters, showing the audience in the first few minutes of the first episode that Midge does in fact “make it†and that that success also came with drawbacks in her personal life. We still get a bit of the “how it happened,†too. I personally felt it moved a little too fast, which didn’t allow certain stories to conclude as well as they should have. Despite that, the series finishes strong and warm, with its primary friendship and family themes tying up very nicely. Stream it on Prime Video.
Honorable mention: “Star Trek: Picard†— This actually finished up over a month ago, but with such a stellar final season I felt the need to mention it. Not only did this season completely turn around the lackluster series, but it also concluded the entire decades-long arc of the crew of Enterprise from “Star Trek: The Next Generation.†It was a perfect final (frontier) story for all of those characters we love so much and even still leaves a little more to be explored by a potentially new crew. Stream it on Paramount+.
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