There’s rarely an episode of any television show that receives more hype than a series finale.
Passionate fans of long-running TV series want to see the characters and stories they’ve followed for years reach meaningful and satisfying conclusions.
Not every fan-favorite show has been able to live up to those desires, but the few that do are remembered for going out on top.
Now, Watch With Us is sharing our picks for the 10 best TV finales of all time — with one honorable mention we just couldn’t leave out.
Honorable Mention: ‘Frasier’
Series Finale: “Goodnight, Seattle Part 1” and “Part 2”
By the time Frasier wrapped up its 11-season run, Kelsey Grammer had been playing the title character for 20 years. Frasier Crane may have originated on Cheers, but the series truly gave the character a life of his own. The show is widely regarded as one of the best sitcoms ever made, regardless of its spinoff status.
For the series finale, almost everyone gets their happy ending, including Niles Crane (David Hyde Pierce) and Daphne Moon (Jane Leeves), as well as Frasier’s dad, Martin Crane (John Mahoney), and his new love, Ronee Lawrence (Wendie Malick). With everyone else starting a new era, Frasier has to choose between a lucrative new job or taking a chance on love with Charlotte (Laura Linney).
10. ‘The Fugitive’
Series Finale: “The Judgment, Part 1” and “Part 2”
Before The Fugitive, it wasn’t common for long-running TV shows to get a final episode that wrapped everything up. That may seem counterintuitive to modern viewers, especially since the lack of a series finale would have left the murder of Helen Kimble (Diane Brewster) unresolved.
Through four seasons, the wrongly convicted Dr. Richard Kimble (David Janssen) searched for the One-armed Man (Bill Raisch) he saw on the night of his wife’s murder. At the same time, Richard had to elude Lt. Philip Gerard (Barry Morse), who chased him across the country. The two-part finale put Richard and Gerard on the same page as the trail leading to the One-armed Man revealed who was really pulling the strings and why Helen was murdered.
9. ‘Newhart’
Series Finale: “The Last Newhart”
To understand the legendary series finale of Newhart, you need to know that Bob Newhart had previously headlined a hit sitcom, The Bob Newhart Show, in the ’70s as Dr. Robert Hartley. In Newhart, the actor played a complete separate character, Dick Loudon, who was married to Joanna Loudon (Mary Frann), and they co-owned a ski lodge in a small town.
In “The Last Newhart,” Dick and Joanna were dismayed when all of the quirky residents they met sold out to the town’s new Japanese owners. When Dick was accidentally knocked out late in the episode, he woke up back in the world of The Bob Newhart Show in bed with his wife from that series, Emily Hartley (Suzanne Pleshette). The entire series was just a bizarre dream that Robert Hartley was having. That’s still one of the most famous series finale twists over three decades later.
8. ‘Cheers’
Series Finale: “One for the Road, Part 1, 2 and 3”
Few series have successfully survived the loss of an original star the way that Cheers did. The first five seasons were largely centered around the love story of bartender Sam Malone (Ted Danson) and Diane Chambers (Shelley Long), before Long left the show. Casting Kirstie Alley as Sam’s new love interest, Rebecca Howe, powered the show through an additional six seasons. The chemistry between Danson and Alley was arguably even more engrossing than his pairing with Long.
“One for the Road” finally brought Diane back into Sam’s life well after his courtship of Rebecca had ended. It also gave Sam and Diane a chance to make up for lost time and finally run off together. But in the end, Sam decided to stay with his one true love, and it wasn’t either of the women in his life.
7. ‘The Sopranos’
Series Finale: “Made in America”
Out of all of the series finales on this list, “Made in America” is the one that made viewers genuinely angry. The Sopranos creator David Chase largely tied up the series’ loose ends by bringing the mob war between Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) and Phil Leotardo (Frank Vincent) to a definitive conclusion.
But Chase just couldn’t stop there, and the finale ends on an ambiguous note as Tony is surrounded by his wife, Carmela (Edie Falco), and their children, Meadow (Jamie-Lynn Sigler) and A.J. (Robert Iler), for a family outing that has some tense moments before the show ultimately cuts to black. There were a lot of viewers who were upset by that at the time. To this day, there’s still debate about whether that abrupt ending meant that Tony was murdered in front of his family.
6. ‘M*A*S*H’
Series Finale: “Goodbye, Farewell and Amen”
M*A*S*H was such a smash hit that this comedy/drama about the Korean War lasted longer than the war itself. That also made the series finale an event unto itself when season 11 concluded with a movie-length episode, “Goodbye, Farewell and Amen.”
Series star Alan Alda directed and cowrote the finale, which has some final touches of tragedy before the war comes to an end. Hawkeye Pierce (Alda) is forced to deal with his severe PTSD, while Charles Emerson Winchester III (David Ogden Stiers) and Father John Patrick Francis Mulcahy (William Christopher) are both greatly affected as well. It’s a bittersweet ending, but the way that B. J. Hunnicutt (Mike Farrell) chooses to say farewell to his best friend, Hawkeye, is still emotionally affecting.
5. ‘The Shield’
Series Finale: “Family Meeting”
The Shield was one of the first post-Sopranos series to truly embrace the age of the antihero on TV. Michael Chiklis‘ Vic Mackey was an incredibly compelling character, but he was a monster from the start. Calling him “Al Capone with a badge” undersold the full scope of Vic’s corruption. And yet the audience loved him despite his obvious flaws.
“Family Meeting” crafted a fitting conclusion for Vic, following the tragic end of his feud with his former right-hand man, Shane Vendrell (Walton Goggins). For once, Vic’s virtuous colleagues, Claudette Wyms (CCH Pounder) and Holland “Dutch Wagenbach (Jay Karnes), had the upper hand on him. But even they couldn’t have devised a fate worse than death that Vic endures in the closing minutes.
4. ‘The Americans’
Series Finale: “START”
There’s a moment in the series finale of The Americans that has perhaps the most emotionally devastating musical cue of the last two decades. You’ll know it when you see and hear it. This Cold War drama about Russian spies, Elizabeth (Keri Russell) and Philip Jennings (Matthew Rhys), wasn’t the kind of show that needed a flashy finale. Instead, it featured an emotional confrontation between the Jennings and Philip’s best friend, FBI Agent Stan Beeman (Noah Emmerich).
Neither of Elizabeth and Henry’s children, Paige (Holly Taylor) and Henry (Keidrich Sellati), was initially aware of their parents’ true nature. Henry finds out the hard way in this episode, while Paige had learned the truth during the previous seasons. That leads to some hard choices and heartbreaking decisions before the show fades to black.
3. ‘Better Call Saul’
Series Finale: “Saul Gone”
Better Call Saul was a prequel to Breaking Bad that also served as a sequel series. The show took its time fully transforming conman-turned-lawyer Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk) into the more criminally inclined Saul Goodman. He didn’t go down that path of darkness alone, as his lover, Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn), stayed with him as long as she could.
Season 6 brought the prequel story to a close, and left a few episodes in the present to offer some closure to the Breaking Bad universe. The show pulled off the neat trick of letting Jimmy avoid the consequences of his crimes, only for him to embrace his punishment if it meant ensuring that Kim could live her life in peace. It’s almost a happy ending, and it’s the one that feels just.
2. ‘Breaking Bad’
Series Finale: “Felina”
Judging from this list, you may think that great series finales are common in television. Rest assured, they aren’t. It’s rare for a creative team to come up with an ending for a series that’s better than the ones fans imagined in their heads. Breaking Bad was one of the few to surpass expectations while bringing the story of Walter White (Bryan Cranston) and Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) to a conclusion.
By the end of the show, Walt had become both a shell of his former self and a monster who was capable of doing unthinkable things. In “Felina,” Walt is determined to settle all of his scores, provide for his family and to secure one last meeting with Jesse. It’s arguably a redemptive turn for Walt, even though it comes over the corpses of his enemies in the show’s final minutes.
1. ‘Mad Men’
Series Finale: “Person to Person”
The best TV finales offer some sort of closure while leaving the door open for interpretation — and maybe a sequel series down the road. Mad Men‘s final episode, “Person to Person,” certainly does both, but like the previous 91 episodes, does so elegantly, with just a touch of comedy, pathos and mystique.
Don Draper’s (Jon Hamm) season-long spiritual quest has led him to a hippie retreat in Big Sur. All alone and without any of his vices like alcohol and womanizing to fall back on, he’s finally able to face and accept his failures as a husband and father. In a quick montage, the series says goodbye to most of the show’s regulars, leaving Peggy (Elizabeth Moss) finding true love at work with art director Stan (Jay R. Ferguson) and Joan (Christina Hendricks) coming into her own as an independent movie producer. But Mad Men begins and ends with Don, and the show’s final sequence finds him dressed in all white and meditating in a zen-like pose with the vast ocean behind him. As the camera zooms in on his contented face, it abruptly cuts to a real 1971 Coca-Cola commercial, where people from every nation on Earth, in an oceanside location not unlike where we left Don, preach about teaching the world to sing while clutching a bottle of Coke.
Has Don finally reached true nirvana? Or is he once again using his personal anguish to come up with another great idea for an ad campaign? Or is it both? The genius of “Person to Person” is that the answer could be yes to all three questions, and it would still fit with everything that came before it. Mad Men‘s series finale provides satisfying closure to its dedicated fans while also providing enough intellectual fodder for them to consume over a decade after it first aired. It’s personal, thoughtful, resonant and ambiguous — but then again, wasn’t every Mad Men episode like that?
