After years of watching Will and Grace bicker, sabotage, and reconcile, we instead see their friendship turn tense and awkward. Unbelievably, almost two decades pass before they meet again... when their children Ben and Lila unwittingly meet at college, just like Will and Grace did. Aww!
Arrested Development is the best example, as it is now officially being made into a brief fourth season and a big-screen movie!
Although the show stumbled a bit in its last season or two, the ending seemed to hit all of the high points: Have Julia finally decide that she needs neither Christian nor Sean; have everyone fly off to different locales to start new lives; and finish with an elderly Japanese porn star in a giant American orgy. Yep, that's probably everything Ryan Murphy envisioned.
Monica and Chandler have kids? Check. Phoebe gets married? Check. Joey's as lovable as ever? Check. Rachel and Ross finally get together? Check.
Ideally, Dollhouse could have used a few more seasons to slowly lay out the conspiracies at the heart of Rossum Industries and its plan to turn the world's population into zombies you can imprint with every personality. But when Joss Whedon and co. found out that they were done after season 2 -- and they only got 13 episodes that season, instead of the standard 24 -- they condensed years of mythology and awesome reveals into just a few episodes. "Epitaph Two" reveals a devastating future and the hope that we can move beyond it. (It also killed off a bunch of people, because that's how the Whedonverse works.) But even as the world was being changed on a grand scale, the final scenes were so personal and gave us incredible closure for this strange, compelling hero Echo.
After years of watching Will and Grace bicker, sabotage, and reconcile, we instead see their friendship turn tense and awkward. Unbelievably, almost two decades pass before they meet again... when their children Ben and Lila unwittingly meet at college, just like Will and Grace did. Aww!
This sort of happened twice with Buffy. Many argue that the season 5 finale "The Gift" was the best ending to the show: Buffy learns that her gift, death, means that she can sacrifice herself to save her little sister Dawn and the rest of the world from destruction.
As I remember it, Whedon was happy to leave things that way, but contracts (or something) pushed Buffy over from The WB to UPN, where it had two less-well-received seasons. However, season 7 also reached a reasonable conclusion that gave fans plenty of conclusion, as the Scoobies gave the Slayer power to millions of girls worldwide, destroyed Sunnydale, and started a new life.
This is more of an assumption since the series finale hasn't aired yet, but from the first few episodes we've seen of season 9, it's clear that Mark Schwahn is bringing One Tree Hill to a sweet, thrilling conclusion.
