Ranking drama series finales

The Ringer ran a fun piece this month, since revised, ranking the forty best series finales by TV shows of any kind—bar miniseries—since the turn of the century. Some of the choices were head-scratchers, though. Parks and Rec? Lost?? New Girl??? The Good Place???? They also included both comedies (Friends, 30 Rock) and reality/other (Nathan For You, The Hills). But the move to limit the options to the post-Sopranos prestige/peak TV era was smart. And they ranked a couple episodes usually overlooked in these debates (though they missed one big one). Overall it’s a solid list.

Here’s mine, following the conclusion to Succession Sunday night. Like many, I’ve soured on the TV hype over the last few years. Partly just because I want to spend my time doing things other than keeping up with the latest shows. But mostly because Peak TV was excellent at creating B-level series with A+ production and unreliable at creating A+ series of any kind—especially ones that made it to the end, rather than starting with a bang and ending with a whimper.

With the end of Better Call Saul last year and Succession this spring, I expect to limit my TV viewing going forward to occasional/pure-fun shows: basically, blockbusters or popcorn fare that involve cooking, spies, or galaxies far, far away. And any series that gets a lot of attention out of the gate, I’ll wait till the start of season 4 (I’m looking at you, Last of Us and House of the Dragon). If everyone still swears by it at that point, I’ll give it a look.

Having said that, the following is a list of shows I don’t regret watching, because each of them stuck the landing. Though first some criteria followed by honorable mentions.

First, I’m only ranking dramas.

Second, I’m only considering finales aired after the year 2000.

Third, I’m considering the finale in the context of the final season. No “good” finale of an otherwise dispensable or poor final season qualifies.

Fourth, while I’m not prioritizing unhappy endings, I am giving the nudge to conclusions that avoid the sitcom trap of giving everyone an (unrealistically) happy ending, because these are people we (and the writers room) love, and we can’t allow ourselves to imagine them unhappy once we say goodbye.

Fifth, I’m also (and therefore) giving the edge to finales that simultaneously (a) work as episodes of television, (b) conclude the overall story of the season/series, and (c) do not in any way swerve from the story the show was always telling, but are clearly an organic and fitting and thus (in the Aristotelian sense) necessary way of completing the story.

Full disclosure: I’ve seen whole seasons of Girls, Atlanta, Half & Catch Fire, and Deadwood, but not finished any of them. I’ve not seen more than a scene or an episode of Six Feet Under, Dexter, Sex & the City, Barry, and Ozark. I’ve always heard wonderful things about the SFU finale, as well as Deadwood’s. Perhaps one day I’ll make it to the latter; I doubt I’ll ever get around to the former.

Honorable mention: Battlestar Galactica (a wild ride, but a bit too hand-wavy even for this Christian Luddite), Mr. Robot (somehow successful, if dragged out there in the final episodes), The West Wing (good for CJ! But all around too much, even for this show), Parenthood (melodrama is as melodrama does), The Expanse (an action-packed blast, but too premature—given how much more story there was to tell), Boardwalk Empire (so good! Almost cracked my top 10), Breaking Bad (excellent, obviously, but still too happy and action-hero-ish for Walt), Mad Men (one or two seasons too late, and too enamored of its two leads to see them as the sad, artless, tragic souls they always were), Hannibal (off the deep end … and also in need of that Clarice sequel!)

Dishonorable mention: Lost + Game of Thrones (no comment necessary)

Now to the top ten … (Minor spoilers ahead, though I’ve tried to be vague.)

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10. Friday Night Lights. Unlike all that follow, this one partakes of the happy tradition of TV dramas and sitcoms giving everyone the happy ending the audience wants them to have. But because that was always the nature of this show, as a high-production soap opera about high school Texas football and the perfect marriage at its heart, this was never going to be the wrong call. Our heroes ride off into the sunset—the bright lights of Philly, that is.

9. Rectify. Somehow not on The Ringer’s list! The best TV drama of the 2010s. It ended in just the way it ran from the beginning: beautiful, ethereal, contemplative, ambiguous, honest, hopeful. This is the only show I recommend to anyone without reservation. A lovely and humane work of art.

8. Justified. Like Star Trek movies, the best Justified seasons come in evens: two, four, six, followed by five, one, three. The finale hits all the beats, while providing surprising catharsis between the star-crossed hero and villain. I’m not a re-watcher of TV shows, but I look forward to going back through this one with my kids once they’re old enough.

7. The Leftovers. Had the finale of season two been all she wrote, it would have been higher on the list. As it stands, the third season is good but unnecessary. I’ve long wanted to write something about the finale, which has something to say about religion. It’s the wrong thing, but it’s something all the same. You can’t help but cry in those final moments. And it doesn’t spoil a thing in the previous seasons. It even brings a measure of closure to both leads’ stories, along with a question mark the viewer can’t answer for himself. We just have to trust Nora’s word, too. (Or not.)

6. The Wire. Dinged for the final season going a bit haywire. But still a magnificent final two episodes. A sort of sitcom finale, except without making everyone’s ending happy. Feels epic the way the whole show was epic: a story about a city and the lives and institutions that make it endure, for all its dysfunction. And that last Irish wake…

5. The Americans. They were holding out on that U2 song. When it hits, you know why they were so patient. In a sense, this finale was “happier” than expected. But not all happy. And no corners were cut getting there. And when you realize what the leads have lost, you realize it’s not happy at all. But that final confrontation! A whole series building to one single moment in a parking garage. Marvelous performances. When The Americans was on, it was the best show around.

4. The Shield. A pitch-perfect finale with so much plot, so many storylines built into it! So brutal, so devastating. And that final scene. Haunting. An underrated show.

3. Succession. Shows four through one on this list all have perfect finales, in my view. It’s only been twenty-four hours, but Succession belongs. They stuck the landing. They knew the story they were telling. They knew the characters they were crafting. They knew how it had to happen. And they twisted the plot in just the right—and sometimes unexpected—ways, to get there. (Tom!) I wonder how this show would play for someone watching it all for the first time, binged in a week or two? Viewers have been agonizing for what feels like ages to see how it all would come to an end. And people interpreting the finale as a set-up for more seasons or even a movie have utterly misunderstood both the show and the finale. It’s done, folks! They, and we with them, were stuck in interminable infernal circles for forty episodes—and they’re still stuck. They’ve just swapped spots in hell’s musical chairs. It’s never getting better. That’s the point.

2. Better Call Saul. I’ve written about the BCS finale at length. Whether I’m right or Alan Jacobs is right (or his amended take is right), the finale couldn’t have been better. Not only were they completing Jimmy McGill’s arc, they were also bringing the entire Breaking Bad universe to a close—not to mention the excellent-but-still-slightly-missed-opportunity of the BB finale. It’s true, Jimmy-Saul gets to shine. But not because the writers couldn’t bear to see him unhappy. Because he couldn’t help himself. And whether or not he’s happy where he landed, it’s not a happy place to finish one’s days.

1. The Sopranos. This one’s been written about to death. I’ve got nothing to add. It’s still on the throne. No dispute from me. Long live the king.

A Question for Richard Hays: Metalepsis in The Leftovers

In the finale of season 1 of the HBO show The Leftovers, Kevin Garvey reads a passage from the Bible over the body of Patti Levin, which he just buried with Rev. Matt Jamison. The whole season has culminated in this moment, which was partially the result of his own decisions, decisions sometimes made after blacking out and sleepwalking. These frightening episodes were in turn the result of dealing with the unbearable grief of losing each member of his family one by one to their own grief in the wake of The Departure (a rapture-like event a few years before)—all while serving as Chief of Police for a town that is being torn apart at the seams.

So Jamison hands Garvey a marked passage, and Garvey reads:



The passage is Job 23:8-17 (NIV). The scene is probably the most affecting—and least typical (i.e., not Psalm 23 or Genesis 1 or a Gospel)—reading of Scripture I've ever witnessed on screen.

And it got me thinking about Richard Hays. Specifically, it got me thinking about his books Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul (1989) and Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels (2016). In those books Hays uses a literary device called "metalepsis" to uncover or identify allusions to passages of the Old Testament beyond what is explicitly cited in the New Testament. The idea is that, say, if a small portion of a Psalm is excerpted in a Gospel or Epistle, the author is thereby calling forth the whole Psalm itself, and that attentive readers of Scripture should pay attention to these intertextual echoes, which will expand the possible range of a text's meaning beyond what it may seem to be saying on the surface. So that, for example, when Jesus quotes Psalm 22 on the cross, those who know that that Psalm ends in deliverance, vindication, and praise will interpret the cry of dereliction differently than those who understand it as the despairing separation of the Son from the Father.

At last year's meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, there was a session devoted to Hays's latest book. When it came time for questions, I raised my hand. I asked whether his argument rested on authorial intention, that is, whether, if we could know for certain that the Evangelists did not intend any or most of the metaleptic allusions Hays draws attention to in his book, that would nullify his case; or whether we, as Christian readers of Holy Scripture, are authorized to read the New Testament in light of the Old in ways its authors never intended. Hays assumed I hadn't read the book and that I was asking on behalf of authorial intention (i.e., he and Sarah Coakley both treated me a bit like a hostile witness, when I was anything but), but he answered the question directly, and in my view rightly: Yes, the metaleptic readings stand, apart from historical claims about authorial intention. Whatever Mark may have meant by the quotation of Psalm 22, we aren't limited by that intention, knowing what we know, which includes the entirety of the Psalm.

So back to The Leftovers. May we—should we—apply the hermeneutic principle of metalepsis to this scene's use of Scripture (and scenes like it)? What would happen if we did?

When I first watched the episode, I mistakenly thought that the famous passage from Job 19—"I know that my redeemer lives..."—followed the words cited on screen, which is what triggered the idea about metalepsis. In other words, if Job 23 were followed by words of bold hope in God, should that inform how we interpret the scene and its use of the quotation? Even granted my error, there is the wider context of the book of Job, and in particular the conclusion, in which God speaks from the storm, and Job is reduced to silence before God's absolutely unanswerable omnipotence—or, better put, his sheer divinity, his incomparable and singular God-ness. Might we interpret this scene, Garvey's story in season 1, and the whole series in light of this wider context?

It seems to me that we can, and should. But then, I'm only halfway through season 2. Job comes up again in episode 5 of that season, when Jamison is asked what his favorite book of the Bible is, and gives some trivia about Job's wife. Which suggests to me that perhaps Damon Lindelof and his fellow writers may be wise to the wider context and meaning of Job, in which case we viewers may not have to interpret against authorial intention at all.

That's a bit less fun, though it increases my respect for the show and the artists behind it. In any case, I'll let you know what I think once I finish.