Two contrasting articles from different television magazines have caught my eye today. In today’s Radio Times, the TV listings magazine lists its top 20 closing moments, while SFX has picked their ten favourite pilot episodes.
Radio Times’ list is, to my mind, slightly faulted by including a couple of season finale cliffhangers, rather than being purely the final episodes ever. But in alphabetical order, their nominations (which you can vote on) are:
- Ashes to Ashes
- Blackadder Goes Forth
- Blake’s 7
- Battlestar Galactica
- Cheers
- Dallas (the Who Shot JR? cliffhanger)
- Frasier
- Friends
- Homeland (end of season 1 cliffhanger, which airs on Sunday on Channel 4)
- Inspector Morse
- Life on Mars
- M*A*S*H
- The Office
- Only Fools and Horses
- St Elsewhere
- Sherlock
- Six Feet Under
- The Sopranos
- The West Wing (end of season 2)
Over on the website of science fiction magazine SFX, Jayne Nelson has picked out her ten favourite pilot episodes. Obviously, given the magazine’s specialist focus, the pool of programmes is quite restrictive, but it’s still interesting. In reverse order, she lists:
- The X Files
- Angel
- Heroes
- Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
- Dead Like Me
- Odyssey 5
- Firefly
- Twin Peaks
- Lost
- Star Trek
Even given SFX’s limited scope, I’d still say they missed a trick in listing An Unearthly Child, the startling 1963 episode that kick started Doctor Who:
Stepping away from scifi, the discovery of Reg Cox at the start of the first episode of EastEnders made a clear statement about how the BBC’s new drama would look:
Overall, getting the start of what could be a long-running series right is tricky. There’s so much exposition and setup to get out of the way, that telling a compelling story at the same time can seem like an impossible task.
But so, too, is getting the ending right. A series which has built up a following and a reputation for excellence has to find the right note that will leave viewers feeling that they have been served well. That’s why I think Ashes to Ashes’ conclusion (filmed just round the corner from The Stage offices, trivia fans) works so much better than Lost’s, even though they are fundamentally very similar.
