From Maxim.com last year -- was their Sopranos prediction spot-on or what?
Twin Peaks
We never quite got Twin Peaks, what with its waltzing midgets and dense dream sequences involving pregnant, shrieking coyote-women. Its unresolved cliff-hanger ending, in which Special Agent Cooper sorta half-becomes the baddie Bob, didn't help matters much. It's never a good thing when viewers can't understand what's going on without the assistance of somebody armed with Cliffs Notes, diagrams, and, for reenactment purposes, sock puppets.
Alias
So wait—Sydney was working for the secret, secret, secret quasi-governmental cabal or the secret, secret ULTRA-secret one? Prophet 5, SD-6, The Covenant, Rambaldi… What's this about who's what? If this impenetrably plotted show had dressed Jennifer Garner as conservatively as the Law & Order gals, it'd have been off the air in about 18 seconds.
Quantum Leap
You gotta love shows on the cusp of cancellation that don't see the writing on the wall. The last Quantum Leap, a fairly typical episode with somewhat of a cliff-hanger ending, was appended with a simple "Dr. Sam Beckett never returned home," which would've been all well and good, except for the fact that the entire show was premised on the dude returning home. It was the prime-time drama equivalent of a football game ending in the middle of the third quarter without an explanation.
Moonlighting
After Bruce Willis started mowing down baddies in Die Hard and Cybill Shepherd squeezed out her twins (which accounted for her absence in the postcoital fourth season), neither star had the slightest interest in being on the show anymore. So you send them out quickly and quietly, right? Uh, no. The last Moonlighting ep showed Maddie and David rushing around like vertiginous chickens as the show's set was disassembled around them; they even got lectured by ABC executives. There's a fine line between "breaking the fourth wall" between viewer and show and "crapping" all "over" "a creative endeavor" that had once "meant something" to a gazillion "viewers."
The Sopranos
We're putting this one on the list a few weeks in advance (and no, we haven't received advance screeners). If David Chase and co. stubbornly refused to tell us the fate of the Russian left in the woods way back in season three, we have little hope that they'll answer any of our other questions. Our best guess: The Sopranos ends with Tony eating something (turkey? gelato?) with the same look of bemused annoyance that he's worn for the last three seasons shrouding his face. And every reviewer in the universe will laud Chase's "bravery" for having plotted such a daring, dramatically unconventional climax.
St. Elsewhere
After multiple seasons of Howie Mandel high jinks, we learned that the whole thing took place (or didn't take place) in the mind of an autistic kid. No, seriously.
Seinfeld
Leaving the gang in prison after finding them guilty of violating a Good Samaritan law—what's up with that? (Utter that last clause in a nasal, New Yawk whine, if you will.) The conclusion may have been true to the show's no-hugs, no-learning blueprint, but it wasn't remotely…what's the word we're looking for here…funny, perhaps? Costanza deserved better.
Oz
The show spent its final season methodically and nonsensically killing off most of its memorable characters (e.g.: Warden Leo Glynn got stabbed as part of some conspiracy involving the governor and Said got shanked for being too righteous or something). But the blow-off of the series-long Beecher vs. Schillinger subplot remains several levels beyond unforgivable. After all the rape, kid-killing, face-pooping, and sublime nastiness, Beecher accidentally kills Schillinger during a prison performance of Macbeth? That's all we get for our emotional investment in the feud? Fuck you. Really. Fuck you.
The X Files
By the time The X Files was mercifully euthanized—roughly 40 episodes too late—the show's black-oil, sewn-eyed-aliens conspiracy had long since ventured into the realm of the absurd. In the finale, the show attempted, through some kind of court-martial proceeding involving Mulder and lots of flashbacks, to dig itself out from under a trash heap of red herrings. Alas, the explanation made things even worse—it exposed plenty of holes in the storytelling. And that was before a helicopter materialized out of nowhere and killed the Cigarette Smoking Man for the 11th time.
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