Eight Perfect Series Finales

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Last year, I asked The Atlantic ’s writers and editors to name a perfect episode of TV , but a perfect finale is especially hard to pull off—and nothing invokes the wrath of fans quite like a bad ending.

Here are eight shows that make the most out of their last minutes.

The following contains spoilers for the shows mentioned.

Fleabag (streaming on Prime Video) Almost nobody is left happy by the final moments of Fleabag —not the heartbroken but resolute “Hot Priest”; not the protagonist Fleabag, watching a fox trail behind the man who has just left her for God; and certainly not the viewer, who has no choice but to let Fleabag look into the camera, shake her head, and leave us behind.

But the best ending is a cathartic one.

Fleabag, played by the show’s creator, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, is a dry-humored, unabashed, fourth-wall-breaking character who encounters God and new meaning in the second season, which is also the last.

She attends a Quaker meeting and is moved by the Holy Spirit to say one of my favorite lines of the series: “I sometimes worry I wouldn’t be such a feminist if I had bigger tits.” She and her sister, Claire, repair their relationship and each kneel, exasperated, before different men to ask for deliverance—Claire from her obnoxious husband, and Fleabag from her suffering.

And in the last moments of the finale, after a backyard wedding and the implosion of Claire’s marriage, Fleabag tells the Hot Priest that she loves him, and he tells her, “It’ll pass.” To anybody still reeling from the conclusion of this perfectly short-lived show, that’s also a message to us: This is the end, and one day it will feel like enough. — Stephanie Bai, senior associate editor *** Twin Peaks (streaming on Pluto TV and Paramount+) Twin Peaks had multiple conclusions over its strange life as a TV show, first ending on a shocking second season cliff-hanger in 1991, then failing to resolve that with a follow-up film a year later, leaving fans feeling frustrated by what could have been.

But in 2017, the co-creators David Lynch and Mark Frost delivered a magnificent and challenging third season with an even more mind-bending last episode.

In the true finale of Twin Peaks , titled “Part 18” or “What Is Your Name?,” the heroic Special Agent Dale Cooper (played by Kyle MacLachlan) finally frees himself from the demonic possession that he’s been under for the entire season and travels back in time to the start of the show to try to undo Laura Palmer’s murder.