Some Finales Deserve a Hug and Some Deserve a Subpoena: My Sitcom Goodbye Report Card

Somewhere around two in the morning last Tuesday, I found myself sitting in the dark watching a bunch of New Yorkers carry a piano up a staircase for the fourth time. That's when it hit me: I've been carrying grudges against sitcom finales for decades, and I never once went back to check if those grudges were earned.

So I did what any reasonable man with a streaming subscription and no self-control does. I re-watched them. All of them. Every finale from every sitcom that ever meant something to me, from the black-and-white reruns my mother had on during dinner to the streaming-era send-offs I watched on my phone in a hospital waiting room. Then I ranked them. And friends, I owe some apologies.

The Ones I Was Too Hard On

Let's start with my mea culpas, because my pride can take it.

There's a certain finale from the early 2000s that I trashed in a letter to the editor of my local paper. An actual letter. Printed it out, licked a stamp, mailed my complaint like it was 1953. I called it "a glorified clip show with a laugh track for a pulse." Re-watching it now, with twenty years of perspective and considerably less hair, I get it. The show was about people stuck in one place, unable to move forward. Of course the ending was about them finally leaving the building. I was too busy mourning the show to notice it was handing me a gift.

Same goes for a certain bar-based Boston classic. I remember being furious that the ending was quiet. Just a guy, a bar stool, and a door with a sign on it. But quiet was the whole point. That show was never about the jokes — okay, it was partly about the jokes — it was about a place where everybody knew your situation. The finale didn't close the door. It just said the door would keep opening for somebody else.

I've written formal retractions in my notes app. It's the best I can do at this point.

The Ones I Let Off Way Too Easy

Now the flip side of the coin, and this is where it gets uncomfortable.

There's a certain friends-in-a-loft finale that I defended like a family member for years. I told anybody who'd listen that the ending was perfect, that the empty apartment was a gut punch, that I wasn't crying, YOU were crying. Re-watching it last week, stone sober and alone with my thoughts, I noticed something I'd been ignoring for twenty years: the last season was a whole lot of plot machinery grinding toward a conclusion nobody needed. The finale wasn't the problem. The problem was that the show had already ended, emotionally, about eighteen months earlier, and we were all just attending the paperwork.

And then there's the one I cannot name without my blood pressure doing something my doctor would frown at. You know the one. The castaway reveal. The dream sequence. The line that launched a thousand Halloween costumes and a thousand therapy sessions. I spent years calling it "bold." It's not bold. It's a show throwing its own legacy out a window and then billing the audience for the glass.

What I Learned From My Little Marathon

Here's the thing nobody tells you about re-watching finales: you're not really watching the show. You're watching yourself. That New York finale I loved at twenty-five? I loved it because I was twenty-five and everything was ending — college, my first apartment, a relationship I won't get into here. The finale wasn't good. I was just sad, and it matched my mood.

The ones I hated? Some of them I hated because they ended on a note I wasn't ready to hear. Shows about growing up, moving on, letting go. I was thirty and furious at the very concept of letting go.

The late-night epiphanies are real, by the way. There's something about watching a finale at 2 a.m., when the house is quiet and the refrigerator hums like it's judging you, that peels back all the internet discourse and the hot takes and the rankings you read in magazines. You're just a person in a dark room saying goodbye to some fictional friends one more time.

The Final Rankings, For the Record

I'm not going to list all forty-something of them here, because nobody wants that and my editor definitely doesn't. But the broad strokes, for the curious:

The top tier goes to finales that trusted the audience. Quiet endings. Doors closing gently. A last line that lands like a handshake from an old friend.

The middle tier is full of shows that tried something weird and half of it worked. I respect the swing, even when it's a foul.

And the bottom tier? That's reserved for finales that betrayed what the show was about. Not endings I disliked — endings that broke the promise. Every sitcom makes a promise in episode one. The good finales keep it. The bad ones laugh while they shred the contract.

One Last Thing Before the Credits Roll

I'm going to keep the apology list short: to the piano movers, the bar flies, and the alien-obsessed newscaster whose ending I called "a war crime" in 2019. You deserved better from me. And to the shows on the other list — the ones I defended with my whole chest — I'm not saying sorry. I'm saying we need to talk.

Sitcom finales are the only art form where the audience gets to be mad at the ending forever. Movies end when they end. Books close. But a sitcom finale lives in reruns, in syndication, in that weird corner of your brain where the theme song never stops playing. You can renegotiate with it your whole life.

And apparently, so can I. Pass the remote. I've got about twelve more to re-watch before I finalize the rankings, and my notes app is already judging me.