I don’t know if I’m supposed to tell you this, but I have seen the series finale of The Shield. For fear of spoilerizing anything, I’m not going to so much as fleetingly characterize it for now—sorry—but anyone who watched this week’s episode can see that Shawn Ryan is paring down the storylines and setting up the final episodes for an inevitable endgame.
It has got me thinking, though (and I swear this is not a clue one way or another about to The Shield’s finale), about what a high-risk job it is to get to write the conclusion to a series that is still successful and acclaimed. One false move and you’re going to be set upon by aggrieved fans who charge you with not understanding your own show, as Larry David and David Chase can attest.
So I ask you: what are you hoping for in The Shield’s finale? More broadly: what series did an especially good, or horrible, job with their final episodes?