Did AMC, ATWT, GL or OLTL have the better SERIES FINALE?

[LoyaltoAMC]

I actually thought ATWT's was much more emotionally satisfying than the other three, and this is coming from someone who liked ATWT the least of the four shows throughout the years. I thought the whole episode came together and offered a sense of closure, and geez, the last scene with Bob/Kim, the spinning globe...I was bawling. You really got the feeling that an American institution--a real piece of Americana--was coming to an end. The only negative IMO was the shoddy treatment of Eileen Fulton. It kind of reminded me of SFT's ending, which of course set the standard for soap endings. I didn't feel that same warmth with AMC or OLTL...they were just too cliffhangerish.

[dragonflies]

I'd have LOVED to have seen James' reaction to Barbara marrying Henry(his son) LOL!! that'd have been pure gold

[Chris B]

This is true and EXACTLY why I hated that last year of ATWT. I thought the previous year was much improved actually around the Audrey time and then when Kriezman took over it was all downhill. Reid was overrated and killing Brad (whatever the reason) was a mistake. Especially if it meant throwing Katie into yet another pairing, especially one with no chemistry. I won't get into other story details, but overall I thought it was awful. They weren't focused on the history of the show, just wrapping up the current mediocre show, hence all the Cioccone action.

Changing gears, why has nobody mentioned Passions or Port Charles? Short-lived I know, but still examples of soap finales since 2000. Unlike the CBS or ABC soaps they didn't have as long to prepare, but I think they did well, especially Passions. With Port Charles, it ended on a cliffhanger, but I felt that was true to the style of that show. It also helped that the show went out on a really strong arc and a strong cliffhanger. it showed that the show was still good and went out on top, cliffhanger or not. Then Passions I felt tied things up in a short amount of time. All the major stories were wrapped up and everybody got coupled up. The only disappointment is that they couldn't get Kelli McCarthy back as Beth so they could reunite Luis and Sheridan, as originally planned.

[All My Shadows]

I agree with the sentiment that ATWT's finale was less about wrapping up a legendary soap and more about ending the then-current storylines. ATWT, in all its slow-moving, grandma's-stories glory was the quintessential soap, iconic, extremely popular, and was really the first soap to be a major part of mainstream popular culture, and I feel like the finale should have been just as grand and as majestic as the show's long run. The only part that I thought really came close to that was at the very end when Bob picked up his name plate and the music hit a very dissonant chord. Everything else was a very hollow type of maudlin. They wanted it to be a big deal, but when all you're giving me is Jack and Carly in bed, Katie/Chris, and Casey/Ali -- characters who'd been on nonstop for the previous months -- it's hard for me to see it as a big deal. There was nothing there to illustrate the magnitude of the show's legacy.

[Cheap21]

bc the thread specifically asks about the 4 more recent ones

[All My Shadows]

Did the PC people even know they were shooting the finale when they did? I think I remember that they got their cancellation notice while on hiatus after taping the last book.

[Cheap21]

and that would be right. The show never got a proper finale as they were cancelled during hiatus

[Max]

That was an excellent post which summed up exactly why I loved ATWT's finale so much.

[dragonflies]

Them's fightin' words

[Eric83]

Passions had plenty of time to wrap up the show. They were canned by DirecTV in December of 2007 and didn't go off until August 2008.

[OLTL_fan]

OLTL- A-

AMC- B+

GL- B-

ATWT- C+

[EricMontreal22]

Completely agreed. I admit I am a bit baffled by the people who felt AMC had too much of a cliffhanger but OLTL's was perfect. They obviously served different purposes (and yes AMC also never revealed the other person David brought back with his silly project), but for me OLTL's brought up far more questions (starting with WHY Alison has Victor tied up anyway--not to mention how--wanting to mess more with Vicki isn't enough reason for me). Still, overall I did find both quite satisfying, but AMC gets the nudge from me. I do think AMC's should have been two hours (and I would have been happy with OLTL being too but it just felt like AMC's was planned to be two hours as originally said--the party could have been a bit longer, etc)

I agree that ATWT and GLs didn't feel near to the same level, IMHO...

Ha but I could go back to The City which I found to be a satisfying ending which did throw in one shock (but not too unresolved feeling) ending with Sidney's murder and the hint Molly escaped.

[EricMontreal22]

Iliked it more than you--and to be fair if we're discussing the final *episode* the Ford Bros weren't featured, and Dorian not returning seemed genuinely out of RC/FV's hands, I suspect they woul dhave loved one last scene with her. But yeah--the Alison thing is something I can't quite decide if it's an example of RC being too clever for his own good or something I liked... It was a bit of both--for much of the peisode Iw as worried it woul dbe a St Elsewhere style ending ands we would find out OLTL for all 43 years had been happening in her head, lol. But it still kinda... made no sense. I would love to know where they were going with it though and how Alison would tie into it (though I'd worry that it would involve more retconing).

I know it may seem like being unoriginal and playing it safe, but I don't know why every soap finale wouldn't try to have one or two big parties with all the chaacters interacting like AMC did.

[LeClerc]

I tuned into OLTL's finale bitterly thinking it was going to be WAY better than AMC's. Because they had so much more time. Because, while I think the constant ass-kissing he gets from the Daytime Confidential crowd, Michael Fairman, SOD, SOW, SID and pretty much everyone else is ridiculous, I do think RC is a creative guy. And because I tended to believe that RC and FV were far more wary of the whole PP thing (compared to Agnes Nixon) than they let on and planned the finale accordingly.

But I ended up watching the whole episode thinking "Okay, so far AMC's is better, but as soon as the next scene/segment starts that's gonna change." But it never happened.

In the end the only thing I really liked about it was when they used OLTL's theme as a musical score a couple of times. Any time a show does that it gets to me.

Was anyone actually surprised by who Allison was talking to? What did surprise me was that ES/Viki wasn't given the final scene of the show, and I didn't like that. I get that the Two Todds story is widely considered to be the greatest thing since sliced bread, but I was still expecting to go back to Llanfair for one more scene after the Victor reveal.

There was quite a bit that seemed like it shouldn't be in the last episode (the Starr/Langston/Markko/FauxCole scenes, the Evans', the Tea/John/Thomas scenes). I felt the same way about Justin Bruening getting so much airtime in the first quarter of the AMC finale. The Jamie/JR scenes were important (I guess) but just screamed "this shouldn't be happening today".

All in all, for me AMC's finale is slightly ahead of OLTL's. However, given how much more time they had (and that OLTL was in much better shape than AMC when the cacellation notice came down, OLTL's finale should have been leaps and bounds ahead of AMC's. I feel like OLTL wasted a lot of the extra time it had. But then again that wasted time did very well in the ratings so....

[DeliaIrisFan]

At the time, I was very disappointed in GL's finale. The trite "happy endings" - most of which were facilitated not by actually showing how characters got to where they ended up but instead via the "flash forward" gimmick that I thought was lazy at the time and hate even more after ATWT borrowed and OLTL toyed with it as well - were piled on one after the other to the point that I was just completely numb to them. I haven't watched GL's finale since then, but I wonder if I would feel differently now, having seem the competition. At least they had returns that I had essentially been waiting all of my adult life to see.

ATWT was also disappointing - in retrospect I would say even more so, but I had never watched it regularly, so I was less invested. But I knew that treating Eileen Fulton the way that they did was just pi$$ing on everything that had made the show a success for so many decades.

AMC was also not a show I had watched regularly, but there again I was familiar with most of the characters and I tuned in to see the end and I thought all of the back-from-the-dead stories completely ruined it, and flew in the face of the show's history of being rooted in reality and dealing with true-to-life issues. I didn't mind the cliffhanger like most...the only real cliffhanger for me was whether David had been the one shot, otherwise anyone else could seemingly have been brought back from the dead by him.

And then, OLTL was just...I hesitate to call it thrown together because putting together a "finale" for a show that's been on for 43 years while not knowing if it would continue on in another media has got to be pretty impossible. Even when compared to the level of interference from higher ups that has evidently become commonplace in soaps in the past decade or two. Still, Troy McIver returns, but not anyone actually meaningful to the show's history? And the one "classic" scene worthy of a flashback in the final week was Lindsay injecting Nora with a memory-erasing drug? The fact that an original cast member spoke out about the racism, chauvinism, and downright horrid treatment she experienced on this show in its final month while nobody mentioned her groundbreaking role in the show's history either in front of or behind the camera spoke volumes.

More broadly, the point that I think Carl made about nobody growing or developing as a character - let alone coming full circle - was spot-on. It wouldn't surprise me if somebody said that the scene(s) in Ryan's Hope's final episode between Jack and Maeve and the voice of the late Mary could have been written back when the show first debuted, almost 15 years before; it was as if the whole show had been about Jack growing into a more open, loving person and Maeve learning to love someone from outside her fold and truly accept him for who he was. Even Another World, as clunkily written as it was, had one particular scene that I still remember almost verbatim, in which Vicky and Paulina recalled how they had come to town as "bad girls" out to get what they felt they were entitled to have and to hell with anyone they stepped on, and somewhere along the way they had grown up (over the course of more than a handful of recasts) and now maybe it was Lila and Cindy's turns. I think that hearkened back even as far as Rachel's redemption in the 1970s, and was true to the show's spirit of appealing to those of us who thought outsiders were deeper and had more to offer than society initially gave them credit for having. OLTL certainly had none of that - just, who will die; who will end up with whom; what is Jessica's parentage this time? The most moving part was that (probably unintentionally so) some of the most important players in the NY soap scene - from Ilene Kristen to John Wesley Shipp (though obviously that role was not much of a showcase for him) - got to be part of its last hurrah.

Well, to answer the original question, I would say either AMC or GL was the best (at least they had a representative cross-section of returns and characters learning from their experience, despite the circumstances), then OLTL, then ATWT was the worst.