The 40 best TV finales of the 21st century ranked.

[Chuck]

I was sad when they killed off Dickie, though, low life that he was. He was good comedy relief.

Meh, make that Dewey Crowe. Got him and Dickie mixed up. Him and Badass Constable Bob were my recurring favorite characters in that series. along with Raymond's Boss.

[Standing Wolf]

Meh, make that Dewey Crowe. Got him and Dickie mixed up. Him and Badass Constable Bob were my recurring favorite characters in that series. along with Raymond's Boss.

Yeah, you wrote "comic relief" and I was sure you meant Dewey. I was kind of sorry to see him go. The actor who played him, Damon Herriman is Austalian, and was a regular on that great Australian series 'Mr. Inbetween'. If you remember the episode ("Cornered") of 'Breaking Bad', where Mike and Jesse go into the meth house after Jesse tricks the one meth-head into digging a hole in the front yard, and they confront an angry, paranoid meth-head with a long gun...that was Herriman. He was also seen briefly in the role of Charles Manson in Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood, and also played Manson in the t.v. series 'Mindhunter'.

[Peter1469]

I am mildly amused when people, often lots of people, get really triggered over the ending of TV series. GoT was classic.

Wolf mentioned The Shield. That was a great ending. And remember the pilot. Mackey shoots the undercover fed who imbedded in his task force and was investigating the team for being bad. So right off the bat you know these guys are way crooked. And season 1 makes you like them.

[Standing Wolf]

I am mildly amused when people, often lots of people, get really triggered over the ending of TV series. GoT was classic.

Wolf mentioned The Shield. That was a great ending. And remember the pilot. Mackey shoots the undercover fed who imbedded in his task force and was investigating the team for being bad. So right off the bat you know these guys are way crooked. And season 1 makes you like them.

Exactly right. There's just something in the nature of most people that can't help but admire and root for the bad guy in some stories. We watch "caper" movies like Heist - the 2001 version, with Gene Hackman, one of the greatest - or Oceans 11 and its sequels, or The Italian Job (either one), and how many of us are wanting them to get caught and go to jail?

I'm reminded of something Brother Dave Gardner said on one of his albums, back in the '60s: "Did you ever get to watching 'The Untouchables' and catch yourself pullin' for the fuzz?"

One of the senior writers on 'The Shield' was Kurt Sutter, who went on to create 'Sons of Anarchy' - another show where the main characters were, by their own admission, criminals. In the course of SoA's seven seasons, those guys killed hundreds of people - most of them other bad guys - in the pursuit of money, revenge, etc. They made Ron Perlman's character such an incredible $#@! that by the time he's finally killed by his own stepson in season six, Perlman wasn't talking to anybody. Yet to this day millions of nice, mentally okay and law-abiding people find it in their hearts to love those characters.

On a completely separate note, if the writer hadn't restricted their list to the 21st Century, I'm sure that two shows that would have appeared on it are 'Newhart' - in the final episode of which, Bob wakes up in bed with Suzanne Pleshette, his wife from 'The Bob Newhart Show', to find that the second show was all a dream - and 'St. Elsewhere', whose final scene reveals the entire series to have occurred entirely in the mind of an autistic child.

[Chuck]

On a completely separate note, if the writer hadn't restricted their list to the 21st Century, I'm sure that two shows that would have appeared on it are 'Newhart' - in the final episode of which, Bob wakes up in bed with Suzanne Pleshette, his wife from 'The Bob Newhart Show', to find that the second show was all a dream

^^^ This. An excellent ending indeed.


I've never seen many of the shows on the OP list, or even heard of half of them.


Re Sons, the only characters I liked were the retired sheriff guy and 'Bobby'. The rest I didn't really care about much. 'Bobby' was a close composite of people I know or knew in real life. Most of them are dead now.

[Standing Wolf]

^^^ This. An excellent ending indeed.


I've never seen many of the shows on the OP list, or even heard of half of them.


Re Sons, the only characters I liked were the retired sheriff guy and 'Bobby'. The rest I didn't really care about much. 'Bobby' was a close composite of people I know or knew in real life. Most of them are dead now.

Mark Boone Junior, who played Bobby, pops up in a lot of things. Of course he played Harvey Bullock in Batman Begins. He was in a movie I was just watching last night, called Life of Crime; he played an anti-Semitic nutcase who gets gunned down by the police while wearing Nazi regalia. (Of course in 'SoA' he was Jewish.) I was watching that Will Forte show, 'The Last Man on Earth' and somebody shows up just in profile and I said, "That's Bobby!" (The shape and the hair are a dead giveaway.)

He and Tommy ("Chibs") Flanagan were here in town at some biker rally and I was supposed to be there and get some photos signed, but there was some confusion and I missed it. A couple of months later I walked into a Salvation Army thrift store and sitting on a shelf was a nicely framed autographed 8x10 photo of Junior for just a few bucks. I have met Ron Perlman and Kim Coates - both nice guys, especially "Tig". He appeared at the grand opening of a huge Harley Davidson dealership in Scottsdale, and they gave him a table to sit behind to sign autographs, but he ignored that and stood out where he could shake hands with all the guys and hug all the women.

As for Chief Unser, after watching the entire series several times I've come to the conclusion that all the bloodshed and chaos that happened in season 7 was his fault. He knew Gemma was drunk and didn't like Tara anyway, but he felt like he had to pass along his (unfounded) speculations that Tara was making a deal with the D.A. to put Jax away - like some lovesick schoolgirl passing along some piece of gossip that her intended might want to hear. What did he think she was going to do? He started that bloody snowball rolling.

[Peter1469]

The ending of the Battlestar Galactica remake was awesome.