Clockwise from bottom left: The Legend Of Korra (Image: Nickelodeon TV), Atlanta (Photo: Guy D'Alema/FX), Halt And Catch Fire (Photo: Bob Mahoney/AMC), Succession (Photo: David Russell/HBO)
In a certain, ever-expanding corner of the galaxy, May 4 marks Star Wars Day. But here at The A.V. Club, we’re spending this weekend diving into the fourth entries that reset franchises, broke a pop culture curse, or wrapped things up in a gratifying manner. Read on, and May The Fourth Installment Be With You.
We continue our May The Fourth coverage by asking a very important question: What TV show had your favorite fourth and final season? The shorter four-and-done trend has become prominent in the streaming era, as reflected in modern-leaning staff picks below. Still, don’t let that stop you from toasting older gems—The O.C., X-Men: Evolution, and Alf, to name a few—that wrapped up in as many rounds.
As always, we invite you to contribute your own responses in the comments—and send in some prompts of your own! If you have a pop culture question you’d like us and fellow readers to answer, please email it to [email protected].
This isn’t the best season of Succession—that distinction has to go to the drama’s third outing—but it is an excellent one, with everything I love about the series: There are inevitabilities that were craftily and surprisingly dropped, a lot of jokes (many of them involving Greg, who shows glimpses of the absolute horror show of a boss he will one day become), bad guys winning (Matsson, Mencken, Disgusting Brother Tom), brilliantly realized dramatic moments (that balcony fight, those election-night shenanigans), a memorable trip abroad, and some unlikely doses of empathy for our spoiled sibs. Oh, and this sentiment has been expressed a trillion times by now, but Jeremy Strong does give one of the all-time-great HBO performances here. [Tim Lowery]
Halt And Catch Fire
Halt And Catch Fire was epic in scope, and in its fourth and final season, its ability to play in the micro and the macro was supercharged. From its inventive, swirling opening sequence, which sees Joe and Gordon navigating the early-internet boom, to Donna’s final words to Cameron (“I have an idea”), the show found symmetry in the beginnings and endings of all things, ruminating on the ideas and questions that take technology and relationships to the next step. Over its four seasons, Halt shifted, changed, and contradicted itself, updating its DOS-based Mad Men derivative into an open-hearted and empathetic treatise on collaboration. Season four does all of the essential things a series finale must do, saying goodbye to its characters on the upswing and landing on tranquil moments of reflection and opportunity. But with each of its farewells—and some of them are quite final—HACF looks beyond the now and gazes ahead optimistically. “Computers aren’t the thing,” the show’s unofficial ethos proclaims. “They’re thing that gets you to the thing.” By season four’s sendoff, this show believes it. [Matt Schimkowitz]
Atlanta
Few shows kept everyone guessing over the past decade quite like Atlanta did, and it went out in a blaze of surreal glory in its fourth and final season. Though it’s hard to point to a “typical” season of the series, the fourth outing wrapped by mostly going back to focus on Earn, Alfred, Darius, and Van after their anthology-style adventures in Europe the previous outing. That said, there’s still at least one fantastic one-off episode about the history of A Goofy Movie. And elsewhere, the series continued its excavation of the industry as Earn and Van’s daughter Lottie was recruited by a not-so-subtle Tyler Perry stand-in called Mr. Chocolate. The end of Atlanta didn’t offer much in the way of traditional closure, but affirmed that this world would always continue, whether Donald Glover or Hiro Murai’s eyes were on it or not. [Drew Gillis]
Barry
Bill Hader embraced darker tones and themes with each passing season of the award-winning HBO comedy he co-created with Alec Berg. So it’s no wonder that Barry’s fourth and final round went all in on the misery as opposed to the humor. What other way could assassin Barry Berkman’s story have ended if not with a—spoiler alert—sudden, unexpected bullet to the head? But before Gene killed his treacherous former student in the series finale, Barry delivered eight potent episodes that pushed the boundaries of its format. That included an eight-year time jump to give Barry and Sally the facade of a happy ending, only for their family to come crumbling down. Not even everyone’s favorite, Noho Hank, made it out of the show alive. Barry’s fourth season—which featured Sarah Goldberg‘s series-best performance and excellent direction by Hader—gave the show a fitting, unforgettable end. [Saloni Gajjar]
The Good Place
That The Good Place made it to four seasons—and managed to, more or less, keep the quality of its excellent first outing—is a miracle unto itself. The show’s high-concept premise should never have worked beyond that first big reveal (you know the one), but over time, it reinvented itself again and again—almost as much as its intrepid band of afterlifers. The beginning of the fourth season saw a slight dip in quality, but, as the show’s very first episode promised, everything was fine. Michael Schur turned the tide for the series’ final batch of episodes in a way that has to have earned him a few good afterlife points. That’s when we got D’Arcy Carden playing the cast, “Eleanor is the answer,” and of course, that tearjerker of a finale. It’s really forking great. [Emma Keates]
Catastrophe
Rob Delaney and Sharon Horgan’s addictively sour relationship/parenting comedy Catastrophe settled into its uneasy balance of grief, cruelty, and optimism over its brief, 24-episode run. Yet it also never stopped being laugh-out-loud funny as the pair’s cynical grumps deal with dying parents, relapsed alcoholism, and sexual harassment. No, really, it’s hilarious. And the show stays that way in its fourth season, even as its subject matter gets more and more serious. The realism of its daily slogs, of its fed-up long-term partners, of its small indignities—these all add up as the performer-writers flesh out their characters, making each episode both immediately comfortable and jarringly intimate. Catastrophe‘s final season uses this closeness and this trust to push its characters to the brink, ending its emotional uncertainty with one of the best final sequences in a modern TV comedy. [Jacob Oller]
12 Monkeys
Throughout its run, 12 Monkeys consistently added up to more than the sum of its parts. On paper, a scrappy Syfy TV reboot of an Oscar-nominated ’90s film starring Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt seems destined to become a one-season wonder, but 12 Monkeys leveraged those low expectations and quietly built an immensely compelling character drama. The series never received much mainstream attention, but its dedicated fan following allowed it to continue for four increasingly ambitious seasons, culminating in one of the best series finales of the past 10 years. Four seasons was just enough time for the show to fully explore its time-loop mechanics without losing its urgency or devolving into increasingly hard-to-believe scenarios and plot justifications. 12 Monkeys came in, told the story it wanted to tell in a relatively brief timeframe, and somehow went out on a very high note. [Jen Lennon]
Farscape
Farscape‘s final season is a mess that’s captured perfectly by its final shot: a gigantic “To be continued,” tossed on the series before it got canceled post-filming, and then kept as a semi-spiteful testament to hope. (It paid off: The series would get a miniseries conclusion a few years down the line.) But the mess was always kind of the point of Farscape, a sci-fi series that was never afraid to mix a little toilet humor or slapstick into its emotionally bracing take on big, heavy science-fiction concepts. The fourth season has missteps, to be sure. But it’s also Farscape at its most aggressively ambitious: pulling the trigger on plot moments the show had been building to for years, both in the wider universe of escaped prisoners and fascist pursuers and in its characters’ hearts. Stars Ben Browder and Claudia Black, especially, log the finest performances of their careers as star-crossed lovers John Crichton and Aeryn Black add “time, multiple dimensions, and the ire of galactic empires” to the list of things they’ll cross to forge a happy ending for themselves. Farscape‘s final season wouldn’t be Farscape if it weren’t sloppy as hell: Its satisfactions and excellence are just as true to form. [William Hughes]
The Legend Of Korra
At times, The Legend Of Korra suffered from comparisons to its predecessor, The Last Airbender, partly because it didn’t have the same overarching storyline that TLA had. But that allowed Korra to grow and evolve in thoughtful directions. Built on what came before, the fourth season includes complex character work and exciting world-building. The themes are also a lot darker, with the show tackling Korra’s mental health and the threat of technology in warfare. And, of course, there’s that fantastic finale with Korra and Asami walking off in the sunset together, which is still something of a landmark for queer representation in kids’ media. The four seasons also managed to come full circle on Korra’s journey (ultimately earning its title, “Book Four: Balance”) and introduce some big ramifications for the Avatar universe. [Mary Kate Carr]
