Vote for the Most Satisfying Series Finale!

Voting for the inaugural Yahooies!, Yahoo TV’s awards honoring the best of the 2014-15 TV season (including summer shows), continues today with the next category: Most Satisfying Series Finale.

And the nominees are…

Justified: What Ken Tucker, Yahoo TV’s Critic-at-Large, said…

Justified’s artistic achievement was to bring to television the Elmore Leonard style — which was to efface style, to keep you off-balance, unsure of where your sympathy is supposed to fall, and to prevent you from figuring out not only where the story is going, but who the real hero, in any given scene, may be. The violence in Leonard’s books is quick, quiet, and brutal; it’s the kind that strikes you as being true and realistic even though the actions are utterly beyond your experience. Yost and company got that about Leonard’s tone and execution, and translated it to the screen — of the many movies made from Leonard’s books, only Out of Sight and Jackie Brown equaled what Justified did with Leonard’s essence.

And let us add this: The show’s writers outdid themselves in the final conversation between Raylan and Boyd. “We dug coal together” — a line repeated from the pilot, and one that underscores why Ken describes the series as “the television version of a social-realist novel about class warfare set in rural America” — will be nominated in our Most Memorable Line category.

Mad Men: What Ken said…

Mad Men concluded its run with a warm hug of an ending, an episode written and directed by show creator Matthew Weiner that was in keeping with this final half-season’s emphasis on slow pacing and fast inner growth for many of its key characters. The extra-long edition was simultaneously very much in keeping with its 1960s time-period, but also jarringly 21st-century in its sensibility. What Mad Men did decisively was tell its audience that the entire initial premise for this series — the glamorous but soul-depleting depiction of big-time advertising — was something to be rejected.

Parenthood: What Ken said…

There have been other self-consciously artful shows about parenthood (from the underrated, unexamined The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet in the 1950s and ’60s to the Ed Zwick-Marshall Herskovitz morality plays thirtysomething and Once and Again) but no show has captured the messy, complicated, unfair, joyful, and agonizing state of the condition the way Parenthood did. Show creator Jason Katims did this with a risky method: He had form match content, which is to say that, from week to week, Parenthood was messy, complicated, and agonizing (to its viewers as well as to its characters). To quote myself from an old review, it was a drama of emotion, unlike so much of the rest of hour-long TV, which is dominated by the drama of action.

Katims thus assured Parenthood of a smaller audience than a broadcast network might have liked, because a mass audience is uncomfortable with discomfort. But discomfort and doubt — primarily over the role a parent ought to play in a child’s life — was at the core of what Parenthood wanted to explore, and to which it remained admirably true right down to this very last episode.

Parks and Recreation: What Ken said…

Now that it’s complete, one of Parks and Recreation’s achievements is to have created a small town as vivid in its distinctive population as The Simpsons’s Springfield. But the show’s greatest achievement is its big, bleeding heart: No sitcom ever made the case for political activism, rugged individualism (please and thank you, meat-and-potatoes libertarian Ron Swanson), and New-New Deal idealism. And you have to reach all the back to The Andy Griffith Show to find a sitcom that managed to be as gentle, as kind, and as funny at the same time.

All of it set to the music of the Traveling Wilburys (“End of the Line”), a great semi-obscure Willie Nelson song (“Buddy”), and a moving final-moment tribute to the recently-deceased producer-writer Harris Wittels. Back to the future for you, Parks and Recreation, and thanks for the still-to-be-formed beautiful memories.

Sons of Anarchy: What Yahoo TV recapper Kimberly Potts said…

Sons of Anarchy began seven seasons ago with Charlie Hunnam’s Jax Teller happily riding his motorcycle along the highway, alone, while two black crows picked at some garbage in the road.

Sons of Anarchy ended with Jax Teller once again driving a motorcycle (now his dad’s restored bike) down the highway, this time followed by a flock of police, and, if not happily then calmly and at peace, straight into a semi. Arms outstretched, eyes closed, and a smile on his face, Jax ended his life the same way his father had 21 years earlier, on his own terms, and with full recognition of the man he’d become and the man he no longer wanted to be.

Unlike John Teller before him, Jax made an effort to try to ensure SAMCRO could live on, and that his own offspring would not be a part of it — that the Teller outlaw legacy would end with him.

It was a fitting ending, and most importantly, as various cast members had promised leading into the finale, it was a somber but satisfying end, with plenty of death and destruction, some hopeful moments, and a few openings for fans to imagine what might happen next.

Related: Vote for the Best Sex Scene!