It’s exactly 10 years since The Sopranos ended. Its beguiling climax – left so open for interpretation that it still inspires debate to this day – was perfect for a series that enjoyed defying convention at every turn.
But have any other prestige dramas managed to top The Sopranos’ ending in the decade since? Let’s rank some stand-outs, from worst to best. Spoilers, obviously.
10. Dexter
Almost certainly the worst finale of any major drama of the last decade, perhaps ever. Having peaked with the Trinity Killer arc in series four, Dexter cack-handedly lumbered on for another four years. When it eventually ended, with Dexter as a lumberjack with a fake beard and a smile like a toddler pooing in its nappy, the shrugging it prompted could be heard from space.
9. Battlestar Galactica
For all the plaudits flung at the Battlestar Galactica revival, its legacy will forever be tarnished by its ending, where God was ultimately responsible for everything and all a 150,000-year time-jump showed us was that we might one day regret being mean to our toasters. Still better than Caprica, mind.
8. 24
If we count the Kiefer Sutherland years as its own entity, then the end of 24 is a weird one. Hauled over to London for one last mission, Jack Bauer foils a terrorist attack, listens to the serving president pray for dementia to free him of all his horrible memories, then gets captured by a different set of baddies and flown away to a fate unknown. He’s suffered worse, of course, but hopefully this time he’s old enough to know that it’s probably best to just give in and let himself be tortured to death.
7. Boardwalk Empire
Boardwalk Empire is not the only show ever to kill its primary antihero in the finale, but the bluntness with which it did so speaks volumes. Nucky Thompson is shot three times by the child of a former protege, right there on the titular boardwalk. He has a vision of himself as a younger man and that’s it. It’s as conclusive an ending as you can get, but the perfunctory way it played out felt slightly rote.
6. Girls
The main criticism levelled at Girls throughout its run was that it was a whiny snowflake of a show, full of endless inward-looking first world problems. The finale countered this by having Hannah level all those same criticisms at a younger woman even more narcissistic than herself. But just to stop the show from tipping into wonky overcompensation, it also set Hannah down a new path of experiencing endless inward-looking first world problems about motherhood. She’ll always be awful, and that’s a comfort.
5. The Wire
The final series of The Wire is notoriously the worst. Bogged down by a fake serial killer plot, and a misjudged focus on the media that came off as preachy and belaboured, it lacked the elegance that made the show so beloved in the first place. And even though a bad series of The Wire is still better than a good series of most other shows, this dip in quality meant that the finale came tinged with a sense of relief. As the Baltimore Sun itself said at the time, perhaps David Simon shot his finale load back in the third series.
4. Lost
“But the final episode of Lost is historically bad, you idiot”, you’re saying. To which I say: nope, the final episode of Lost was brilliant. True, it came loaded with unrealistic expectations; with people tuning in on the misguided notion that every single mystery in this deliberately enigmatic 121-episode series about islands and time travel and parallel universes would be tied up in a beautiful ribbon. When it climaxed with a narratively opaque yet explicitly spiritual reunion scene, it felt to some like a sucker punch. But for those willing to let the mystery be, it was a beautiful, elegiac conclusion. I will go to my grave trying to convince you of this, I swear to God.
3. Breaking Bad
On the other hand, Breaking Bad ended with a masterpiece of ribbon-tying. Yes, Walter White died, but his final scheme went off so seamlessly – from the bullying of Gretchen and Elliot to his farewell to Skylar to Jesse’s rescue and escape – that one popular theory at the time suggested it was all happening in the afterlife. Everything was dotted and crossed with such precision that you’d never guess that it literally caused Vince Gilligan to bang his head against a wall.
2. Mad Men
A prediction: the gleeful cynicism of this finale will never be topped. Don Draper has spent a decade sinking to lower and lower depths. He’s two marriages down, his children hate him, his drinking is out of control, his career is a shadow of what it once was. Eventually hitting rock bottom, he travels to California and learns to meditate. As he closes his eyes and begins to om, a smile stretches across his face. Has he finally discovered inner peace? No, he’s figured out how to steal all this blissed-out iconography and sell it back to idiots as a Coca-Cola advert. Nothing ever changes, and we’re all trapped inside ourselves, that’s what Mad Men taught us. A near perfect ending.
1. The Sopranos
And yet The Sopranos is still the very best of them all. Its final scene, so innocuous at first glance, is a painstaking masterpiece of writing and directing inspired by everything from The Godfather to the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The family meets in a diner, and sets about eating onion rings like communion. Tony puts Don’t Stop Believin’ on the jukebox. A mysterious man in a Member’s Only jacket lurks in the background. An uneasy tension grows. Outside, Meadow has trouble parking her car. She enters, Tony looks up and that’s it. Ten seconds of black and the show is over. Either Tony died, shot by a rival, or he’s resigned to living out the rest of his life on high alert. Whatever the case, he loses. But he did definitely die, though.