Ask Alan: Do Series Finales Ever Overshadow How We Think About Shows?

Time for another installment of Ask Alan, where I take your questions about the past, present, and future of TV.

Still trying to do super-sized episodes, and we’ve got six questions this week, starting out with the matter of when a truly great series finale, or a really awful one, winds up altering how people wind up thinking about the entire show that led up to that episode. How, for instance, would we feel about Six Feet Under if not for this?

Then we come to the flip side of a question I answered in March about the best movies to share continuity with a TV show that preceded it. Now we go the other way, trying to find a champ from the TV spin-off likes of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and a few shows without “Chronicles” in the title.

TV’s recent nostalgia binge prompted questions about the appeal of a Taxi reunion movie and who should star in the inevitable TV spin-off of the upcoming Friday Night Lights movie reboot, sandwiched around a discussion of TV shows that had to replace lead actors. And we close things out with talk about Chuck, whose reruns were just added to Amazon Prime’s catalog.

You can email me questions at askalan@uproxx.com, or tweet at me with the hashtag #AskAlanDay.

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