![]() Most of the dudes have mullets or crazy mushroom cuts. Looking at them sitting there after 11 years on the air, they’re a motley crew. Everyone’s holding their beer mugs by the handle at a late-night tilt. It’s late at night, and everyone sits around sharing cigars. He returns to the bar with a box of Cuban cigars, and after making him think that they somehow no longer had time for him even though he’d barely been gone, his coworkers and friends welcome him back. It will not surprise you to find out that Sam has a change of heart before he even gets to L.A. It’s a major life change, but change is, we’ve been taught, always good. ![]() He’s initially uncertain, and then he decides to go for it. After years away, Diane Chambers returned to the bar to whisk Sam Malone away from Boston for a new life in sunny, utopian Los Angeles. The last episode of Cheers fits firmly in the good finale category. Good shows make for good finales some of the time. In other words, bad shows make for bad finales all the time. The worst wallow in their messy pasts, dredging up just about everything in service of artificial closure. The best finales celebrate the long, beautiful history of the show. They’re showing up, but they’re otherwise checked out. In many cases, I imagine that the cast and crew are plagued by adult-onset senioritis. Why weren’t these shows taking more risks? The safest part of any sitcom is its last episode. Friends and Boy Meets World are just a couple more shows that spend their last few minutes in basically the same way. In the final episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Will Smith echoes it, gazing at the blindingly white living room of the Bel-Air mansion he made a home in. In fact, it worked so well that sitcoms would go on to repeat it endlessly. It is what I like to think of as a classy ending. Before she does, she smiles, hits the lights, and closes the door. In the final episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Mary is the last person to leave the office. It’s almost fan fiction: What do you want for the people you love but can never really know? Happiness forever. When sitcom finales follow a template, that template usually involves everyone getting the happy ending they deserve. They stick close to their core plot, which can be boiled down to a family or group of friends hanging out in a single room in perpetuity saying funny things about awkward situations. ![]() Maybe it’s that most sitcoms are not in the business of being unsettling. I’ve always been a fan of that final episode, so I can only guess at why so many were not. The only difference is they’ve traded Jerry’s Upper West Side one-bedroom for an eternity in prison. Instead, they discuss their daily lives in excruciating detail. The camera pans back and they seem almost oblivious to their situation. After being arrested for being terrible (seriously), the four of them are stuck in a tiny jail cell. It distilled the show to its essence - four friends who could not cope with the outside world, who found comfort only in each other - and the final moments offered up a concrete ending. I imagine that David has spent a whole lot of time thinking about why people didn’t like the Seinfeld conclusion, when it did everything it conceivably should have done: It paraded just about every character from the past into a courtroom to give Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer their comeuppance for being generally awful people. In an interview with Bill Simmons, David says of the final episode, while discussing how to bring Curb to a close, “Well, you know, I got so much grief from the Seinfeld finale, which a lot of people intensely disliked, that I no longer feel a need to wrap things up.” 1 I have no doubt many people choose to view that season as the true capstone on one of the most consistent network television comedies ever. He even devoted an entire season of Curb Your Enthusiasm to exploring how and what a Seinfeld reunion would look like. Since it aired in 1998, Larry David has had to explain why Seinfeld ended the way it did whenever he does an interview. If I had all the time in the world, I’d sit down everyone who hated the Seinfeld finale and ask, one by one, what was wrong with them. ![]()
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