This is a terrific analysis of what makes a good finale, by AV Club alum Emily Todd VanDerWerff and featuring interviews with creators from The Americans, The Leftovers, Parks & Rec, Halt and Catch Fire, etc, It sets up a spectrum of character closure ranging from Sopranos (completely ambiguous) to Six Feet Under…

Thanks, I wanted to post that Sepinwall recommendation but couldn’t find it. But if you like the show there's still a lot of great character moments in the fluff episodes, especially some glimpses of who Donna would evolve into. 

You could try jumping into season 2, but if you like it I’d really recommend going back to S1. The characters are really well-drawn and their relationships and alliances constantly shift, which is hard to appreciate without knowing the foundation.

PS — This is a great HACF twitter thread.

HACF wins some kind of most-improved award. Unfortunately I think the shaky first season is why it’ll never have the audience it deserves. It’s a shame, because the way the show gets better and better each season tracks perfectly with the overall theme that life is a series of reboots where you just try to keep…

The second-to-last season was such a fake-out. For the first few episodes I really thought it would turn out okay.

That and Halt and Catch Fire. Some of the final season episodes hit me deeper than any TV show ever has before.

If someone shows a bartender an ID that the bartender randomly decides is fake, and then the person insists they’re over 21 and the bartender still refuses, and it turns into a flat-out argument — can’t the bartender just serve them because it’s reached the point where the bar could easily claim entrapment if the…

I hope they get H. Jon Benjamin to voice the head drone.

Your library probably uses an app called Overdrive that you just download their audiobooks to. I used to be the same about only listening to books I’d already read, but I discovered that young adult novels are pretty easy to follow without the close attention required by something heavier.

What about audiobooks? If you have a library card, your library probably has a half-decent selection that you can borrow for free.

I just got into this show and am reading back over old write-ups -- this is a pretty amazing comment four years on, with trailers just coming out for Lee Pace’s new role as John Delorean.

I grew up in the 70s, when peak parental neglect coincided with TV stations buying cheap movie rights by the boatload — I watched that by myself when I was four and had some vivid nightmares about it for quite a while afterward.

I felt the exact same way. I hated that I’d let someone put those images in my head and got absolutely no enjoyment out of it.

So many people said the end of that movie was a let-down, but I guess they’re not insomniacs whose gaze went straight to the corner of their bedroom every time they woke up in the middle of the night for weeks after seeing it. I can still freak myself out if it crosses my mind at 2am.

“Tutoring.”

“When Your Cat is a Trained Assassin” -- all cats are trained assassins.

Yeah but they also let us know who to go back and sterilize once we have time machines.

I’m at the point where if something looks good, I’m disappointed to learn that it’s a movie instead of a series. The last 10-15 years have conditioned me to feel entitled to at least 20 hours of any given piece of quality entertainment. Brit-coms get a pass, though I’ll continue to cuss them out when the episode 6 cred…

I just watched this show for the first time and I don’t think I’ve ever sobbed so much during a series finale. The ending of Six Feet Under always brings me to tears, but that’s just the final montage of all the characters’ deaths. I started crying from the moment this finale began simply because I was so sad that I’d…