TV Finales FAQ: All That's Left to Know About the Endings of Your Favorite TV Shows

Well written. It covers soon many areas that it will become the encyclopedic resource for many .

Informative and highly entertaining.

Poorly written, badly organized and full of shows I never gave a Damn about. Save your money, find the series finales on YouTube and binge watch your favorite ones.

This is an informative and useful book... despite some clunky writing, poor editing, and puzzling omissions. The writers do a good job giving detailed information on the creative arc of each series leading up to their finales, which are explored in-depth. The critical and "fan" response to the finales is also explored in detail. Series finales aren't limited to dramas or sitcoms. They cover many genres, including talk shows and soaps. Most of the content appears to be based on personal viewing and quotes lifted from previously published material...other reference books are frequently quoted and cited. Few interviews appears to have been done specifically for this book, which is a weakness and gives the book a "reheated leftovers" feel, as if its simply an accumulation of data already covered by others.. Most of the finales you expect to be discussed in a book about TV finales are discussed (NEWHART, MARY TYLER MOORE SHOW, ST. ELSEWHERE, SOPRANOS, THE FUGITIVE, etc)... but, strangely, they also include final episodes that were never intended by the producers as finales (like "The Sharecroppers" episode of GUNSMOKE) and finales for shortlived shows like I MARRIED DORA and UGLY BETTY, and yet totally omit the blockbuster final episodes of popular shows like STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION, LAW & ORDER, JAG, WHO'S THE BOSS, STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE and STAR TREK: VOYAGER. It's not clear what the authors' criteria for inclusion or exclusion was in their book. The biggest problem with the book, however, is the clunky writing and terrible editing. The listing for MAGNUM PI is a perfect example of the editorial problems that plague the book. On page 59, they mention that the original pilot featured a hero who had gadgets, "including a hand glider that doubles as a machine gun." Hand glider?? That's a typo, and could be forgiven, if there weren't so many other editorial problems with the book. On the same page as that typo, there's this inane sentence: "Selleck liked Bellisario's writing as he had read his script for a proposed series entitled 'Gypsy Warriors' (1978) in which Selleck and James Whitmore Jr. played a pair of World War II espionage agents posing as gypsies in France and Germany." Well duh, OF COURSE Selleck read the script. It would be difficult to star in the pilot film WITHOUT reading the script, wouldn't it? Lame sentence. An editor would have caught that...assuming the book was edited. There's more. On the same page, the authors write about how Bellisario purportedly rewrote Glen A. Larson's MAGNUM pilot by using a busted pilot of his own as a starting point: "A few years back, Bellisario had written a script entitled 'H.H. Flynn' about three Vietnam vets: Rick, a club owner who idolizes Humphrey Bogart; TC, a helicopter pilot; and Magnum, a private investigator who lives in a guest house on a Bel Air estate owned by the 'florist to the stars.'" Really? The hero's name was Magnum in a pilot called H.H Flynn? C'mon, guys. The book is rife with bizarre sentences like those and its a shame. Even so, I would still recommend this book for your TV reference library.

What a fun read!

TV Finales FAQ brought back a lot of fond memories for me, in two distinct categories. The first was that of watching many of the various TV shows covered. The second was when I used to scarf up books like this one, media surveys and volumes of pop culture trivia, back before we had the internet for that purpose. I’ve missed these kinds of volumes (although my slimmer shelves thank me). Stephen Tropiano and Holly Van Buren have written an overview of the last episode phenomenon, from both storytelling and historical perspectives. This chunky volume is divided into six categories: 1. The Most Watched — which includes The Fugitive (the first show to have this kind of wrap-up episode), Seinfeld, Friends, and of course, M*A*S*H* (still the most-watched, and in an era of fragmentation, likely to stay that way) 2. WTF? — the confusing or argument-provoking ones: St. Elsewhere, The Sopranos, Lost 3. Finales that jumped ahead in time — Gossip Girl, How I Met Your Mother, Dawson’s Creek 4. Daytime and Late Night — where soaps and talk shows are covered in brief 5. Saying Goodbye — which seems to be stuff that didn’t fit anywhere else but that people want to remember, including Frasier and 30 Rock. The authors describe this category as the shows where the characters “close[d] up shop and move[d] on” 6. The Best — the classic Mary Tyler Moore Show, which showed us how it should be done (and established the workplace-as-family approach); Newhart‘s famous call back to an earlier show; Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel saving the world There are more shows covered in each section than I’ve listed above, but the ones I’ve mentioned were some of my favorite chapters to read. I was reminded throughout of how much enjoyment I got from watching some of these series over the years, and how emotionally involving some of them could be. Each chapter goes into detail, enough so that you can understand the storytelling if you never saw the episode(s), or so you can remember the experience of watching these events play out the first time you watched. Each show is put into cultural context, with information on what else was airing at the time, how the series came to be, what drove the decision to end the series, and how it was received. Plot elements are reported and key moments of the show’s history listed. A lengthy appendix has short summaries of many other series finales. TV Finales FAQ, although saddled with a clunky title (because it’s part of the FAQ book series), is a wonderful time capsule with plenty of important TV history. The authors do a great job in these 400+ pages summarizing some of the best TV shows of all time, making the case for their cultural significance. (The publisher provided a digital review copy. Review originally posted at ComicsWorthReading.com.)