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    Why Are People Obsessed With TV Finales ‘Sticking the Landing’?

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    As “Curb Your Enthusiasm” gets ready to exit, it’s time to let go of the idea that a story’s ending determines its final score.Larry David is just fine with how “Seinfeld” ended. OK, I can’t read his mind — but “Larry David,” the version of himself he plays on “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” is cool with that much-maligned finale. He insisted on it, vehemently, during a season of “Curb” that was almost entirely about a fictional do-over of the landmark sitcom he created with Jerry Seinfeld.“We didn’t screw up a finale!” he insisted. “That was a good finale!”The actual Larry David may be sanguine about repeating the experience of “Seinfeld.” The 12th and final season of “Curb” has even been steering toward a similar scenario, with TV Larry facing a trial, much as his earlier series ended.But the rest of the viewership is more likely to look at the final episode the way we have become conditioned to view a series finale: as a high-stakes, legacy-defining challenge. Will we laugh with it or at it? Will it cement the series’s place in history or tarnish it? Will it — say it with me now — stick the landing?Ugh. There are plenty of clichés in TV criticism, and I am not immune to using them. But “stick the landing” is one that awakens my cantankerous inner Larry David — not just because it is an overused phrase, but because of what it says about art and endings and what matters in both.The term, of course, comes from gymnastics, part of a creeping sportsification of pop-culture criticism that has also given us assorted TV power rankings and myriad March Madness-style brackets. (Didn’t arts nerds spend enough time getting stuffed into lockers by jocks without having to live inside their language, too?)Applied to TV, sticking the landing suggests that a finale is the equivalent of a vaulter’s dismount. The concentrated force of narrative momentum is channeled into a moment of impact, and the series either hits the mat firmly or shatters a leg. It’s the difference between the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Best Thanksgiving Episodes to Stream: ‘Friends,’ ‘Succession’ and More

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      Thanksgiving episodes are an underrated TV staple. Here are some of the best to enjoy while you cook, eat or fade away on the couch.Note: This is an updated version of a list that originally ran in 2017.Preparing for the big binge? Whether you call the upcoming holiday Friendsgiving, Slapsgiving, the Feast of Feasts — or just, you know, Thanksgiving — this year, you can be thankful that there is plenty of TV to keep you company. Join these fictional families and friend groups while they break bread or break each other’s spirits, depending on which feels more comforting as you cook, eat and fade away on the couch. Yes, you may have seconds.‘Friends’Matthew Perry, who died last month, at 54, was the king of many a “Friends” Thanksgiving episode. Or as his character Chandler put it, the king of bad Thanksgivings. Or, as Monica’s mother put it, the Boy Who Hates Thanksgiving. (His disdain for the holiday stemmed from learning about his parents’ divorce one Thanksgiving as a child and vomiting in response.) Gradually, though, Chandler conquered his aversion, bailing out the gang with cheese sandwiches at the first Friendsgiving and later helping to prepare a batch of cranberry sauce (made, in his parlance, of tasty Chanberries). Fans with only enough room for one episode should seek out “The One With the Thanksgiving Flashbacks,” from Season 5. (Streaming on Max.)‘Rick and Morty’For the mad scientist Rick Sanchez (Justin Roiland), Thanksgiving is an ideal time to break into the National Archives and try to steal the Constitution. So what if some other national treasures are destroyed in the process? “Rick and Morty’s Thanksploitation Spectacular,” from Season 5, finds Rick on the outs with federal authorities and fomenting an elaborate scheme to score a presidential pardon. Pretty soon people start turning into turkeys while turkeys turn into humans. Your job, if you choose to accept this episode, is to make sense of all the gobbledygook. (Streaming on Max.)Lena Waithe won an Emmy for writing a “Master of None” Thanksgiving episode that tracked her character’s efforts to come out to her mother.Netflix‘Master of None’This series’s Thanksgiving episode is one of its very best. Shifting the focus from our indecisive hero, Dev (Aziz Ansari), to his lifelong friend Denise (Lena Waithe), it presents a sequence of vignettes following her through two decades of Thanksgiving dinners as she struggles to come out to her mother as a lesbian. Every element of this touching half-hour feels carefully crafted, from Angela Bassett’s emotional guest performance as Denise’s mother to the nostalgic 1990s R&B soundtrack. Waithe won an Emmy for the script — which was inspired by her own family history — becoming the first Black woman to win the award for writing in a comedy. (Streaming on Netflix.)‘Chilling Adventures of Sabrina’For mere mortals, Thanksgiving is a harvest festival. For witches, however, the equivalent Feast of Feasts is a very different celebration, with a very different main course — human rather than avian. In “Feast of Feasts,” from Season 1, the young witch Sabrina Spellman (Kiernan Shipka) is shocked to learn about this barbaric holiday ritual. (“Are we seriously taking about cannibalism?” she asks in horror.) Her rejection of this ancient tradition puts a damper on any festive feelings. (Streaming on Netflix.)‘Bob’s Burgers’A Season 3 episode is titled “An Indecent Thanksgiving Proposal,” but don’t worry — Bob and Linda Belcher’s marriage is safe. The proposal in question comes from the rich landlord, Mr. Fischoeder, who offers the Belchers five months’ free rent for a chaste evening with Linda and the family’s three children, with Bob on hand to cook. Like other schemes on the show, this one is a disaster. But Studio Ghibli fans should look out for a lovely dream sequence that pays tribute to “My Neighbor Totoro.” (Streaming on Hulu.)‘The Sopranos’Most of the episodes on this list are somewhat uplifting and work well as stand-alones. This one, titled “He Is Risen,” won’t make sense if you’ve never seen “The Sopranos,” and it is no more uplifting than any other hour of the show. But if you’re already a Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) fan, you probably don’t mind a dark holiday tale. This Season 3 episode features a car wreck, a funeral and the beginning of an extramarital relationship, along with a Soprano family Thanksgiving dinner that is surprisingly pleasant, thanks to the conspicuous absence of Tony’s most reprehensible associate, Ralph Cifaretto (Joe Pantoliano). (Streaming on Max.)James Cromwell, left, and Brian Cox in a Thanksgiving episode of “Succession,” which offered extra helpings of recrimination.Peter Kramer/HBO‘Succession’The Roys serve up the usual feast of familial animosity at their Thanksgiving bash. The patriarch Logan Roy (Brian Cox) is especially disruptive, culminating with his lashing out at an innocent child. In “I Went to Market,” from Season 1, party chat includes touchy but relatable topics such as political ideologies and movie selections, but business concerns naturally trump everything. Cousin Greg (Nicholas Braun) has to skip most of the festivities — it seems there are some sensitive documents at the office in need of shredding. (Streaming on Max.)‘black-ish’It’s always fun to watch Laurence Fishburne and Jenifer Lewis on “black-ish,” picking at each other as the divorced grandparents Pops and Ruby. The Season 3 Thanksgiving episode, “Auntsgiving,” threw a third veteran actor into the fray, casting Lorraine Toussaint (“Orange Is the New Black”) as Pops’s older sister, Aunt A.V. — whom Ruby hates. (Streaming on Hulu.)‘Gilmore Girls’Lorelai Gilmore (Lauren Graham) and her teenage daughter, Rory (Alexis Bledel), can barely boil water, but they do love to eat. In “A Deep-Fried Korean Thanksgiving,” from Season 3, they make cameos at no fewer than four different dinners. Rory’s friend Lane (Keiko Agena) offers a meal featuring Tofurky and a budding relationship. The perfectionist chef Sookie (Melissa McCarthy) watches in horror as her husband deep-fries a turkey. Romantic tensions for both mother and daughter are on the menu at the local diner. Lorelai’s parents serve up the usual stew of guilt and resentment. Just like Thanksgiving dinner itself, the episode is a plate piled high with sweet, salty and deliciously tart moments. (Streaming on Netflix.)‘Happy Endings’Midway through the third and final season of this zany hangout comedy, in an episode called “More Like Stanksgiving,” we finally learn how the crew’s resident married couple got together. It turns out that Jane (Eliza Coupe) and Brad (Damon Wayans Jr.) met when he and her friend Max (Adam Pally) were castmates on an unaired season of MTV’s “The Real World” in 2002. A decade later, Max still has the scrapped footage. In just over 20 minutes, the reliably lightning-paced “Happy Endings” pulls off a perfect reality-TV parody and sheds new light on a few longstanding relationships. (Streaming on Hulu.)“Big Mouth” used a turkey dispute to explore issues of generational trauma.Netflix‘Big Mouth’Nothing says love more warmly than a perfectly roasted turkey (or even tofurkey). Such is the lesson learned by Andrew (John Mulaney) in this Season 5 episode. Andrew’s father (Richard Kind) has anger-management issues related to prepping poultry — he believes insulting the bird is the key to keeping its juices inside. Andrew decries this “turkey tyranny” and refuses to eat. In the end, though, he and his father have a heart-to-heart about their troubled family history. Despite the usual gross-out humor, there is a genuine attempt to address issues of generational trauma — and of course the power of sharing food. (Streaming on Netflix.)‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’Many Thanksgiving episodes sprinkle in references to the holiday’s complicated history. “Buffy” takes the reckoning to an extreme in “Pangs,” from Season 4, in which the bumbling Xander (Nicholas Brendon) inadvertently unleashes the spirit of an Indigenous warrior. As the ghost starts murdering people who disrupted his sacred burial ground, the Slayer (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and her friends debate whether it’s right to kill a “vengeance demon” whose grievances are legitimate. The result is a reasonably nuanced debate about whether Americans are responsible for the sins of their ancestors. (Streaming on Hulu.)‘Gossip Girl’Forget, for a moment, the way “Gossip Girl” fell apart at the end. Its first season was a sublime confection sweetened with glamorous costumes and forbidden love, and tempered by heated conflict. All of those elements come together in the Thanksgiving episode, “Blair Waldorf Must Pie!,” which jumps back in time to compare the previous year’s festivities with those of the present. In the past, the beautiful and troubled Serena van der Woodsen (Blake Lively) got wasted before a dinner with the family of her best friend, Blair Waldorf (Leighton Meester). A year later, Serena has cleaned up and Blair is struggling with bulimia. Although the girls are often framed as frenemies, this unusually sentimental episode is a tribute to the way they take care of each other. (Streaming on Max.)‘South Park’If a long weekend of family togetherness makes you desperate for a triple dose of irreverence, Season 17 of “South Park” has you covered. In a trilogy of episodes that begins with “Black Friday,” a local mall braces for the yearly blood bath that begins as soon as the plates are in the dishwasher. For Cartman, that means assembling an army of pint-size gamers to procure the new Xbox at a deep discount. When a pro-Playstation faction splinters off, South Park’s own “Game of Thrones” breaks out, complete with Kenny as Daenerys and a Red Robin Wedding. (Streaming on Max.)“How I Met Your Mother” turned Slapsgiving into one of TV’s abiding holiday traditions.Monty Brinton/CBS‘How I Met Your Mother’It is a holiday of firsts in “Slapsgiving,” the Thanksgiving episode from the third season of this beloved CBS sitcom. Lily (Alyson Hannigan) and Marshall (Jason Segel) are hosting their first Thanksgiving as a married couple. Ted (Josh Radnor) and Robin (Cobie Smulders) have just broken up and are figuring out how to be friends for the first time. This is the first of three Slapsgivings (the others are in Seasons 5 and 9), named for a bet in which Marshall wins the right to slap his obnoxious pal Barney (Neil Patrick Harris) that culminates in the glorious original song “You Just Got Slapped.” Be sure to read Entertainment Weekly’s oral history of the episode after watching. (Streaming on Hulu.)‘Family Ties’This quintessential 1980s family sitcom outdid itself with “No Nukes Is Good Nukes” from Season 1. As the Keaton kids endure their grandmother’s awful cooking, Elyse (Meredith Baxter) and Steven (Michael Gross) relive their hippie youth at a festive Thanksgiving Day nuclear disarmament protest. Of course, the boomer parents end up in jail and their Gen-X children couldn’t be more mortified. It’s a dated story line, but the episode’s message about standing up for your beliefs never gets old. (Streaming on Paramount+.)‘Adam Ruins Everything’Need some ammunition for semi-friendly arguments around the Thanksgiving table? This animated episode, called “The First Factsgiving,” helps dispel many of the beloved myths that have grown around the holiday, including the role of the Native warrior Tisquantum — commonly known as Squanto — in the original Thanksgiving feast in 1621. And about that date: The celebration of Thanksgiving as a fixed, nationwide holiday didn’t come about until the Civil War — a day of mourning for turkeys everywhere. (Streaming on Max.) More

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      Cobie Smulders Communes With Sharks

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      She plays a deliciously coldblooded Ann Coulter in “Impeachment.”A white shark nudged closer, gliding just above the actress Cobie Smulders, like a fan asking for a selfie. Ms. Smulders welcomed the intrusion. “This is cool,” she said, rapt, as the shark slid past in the waters of the New York Aquarium.Ms. Smulders, adored for her nine seasons on the sitcom “How I Met Your Mother,” has loved aquariums for as long as she can remember. As a mermaid-obsessed child in British Columbia, she visited the Vancouver aquarium often and spent weekends on her father’s sailboat, wondering about the life below the water’s surface. The University of Victoria accepted her to its marine biology program.But a few months before school began, she fell in with some theater actors and deferred for a year. And then another year. And then another.An avid scuba diver and an ambassador for Oceana, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting and restoring the world’s oceans, Ms. Smulders never gave up on the water. She participates in beach cleanups near the Los Angeles home she shares with her husband, the actor Taran Killam, and their two daughters. And she campaigns against the single-use plastics that clog waterways.“It’s a human conversation that needs to be talked about more loudly,” she said.She still has mermaid fantasies. “I still think it could be a possibility,” she said. And she still loves aquariums, though only those that favor conservation.Ms. Smulders studied marine biology before she became an actress.  Daniel Dorsa for The New York TimesOn a recent trip to New York City to promote the FX limited series “Impeachment: American Crime Story,” she took a car to Coney Island to visit the aquarium’s shark exhibit.She breezed in from the boardwalk just before noon, showing her vaccine card to a giddy employee. “I thought I recognized you!” the woman said as she checked Ms. Smulders’s ID. Rather than dressing for the beach, Ms. Smulders had chosen a monochrome look: belted black Chanel blazer, black jeans and black boots with stamped metal buckles that shone in the October sunlight. Pearls plucked from some very talented oysters hugged her neck.In the first building, she cooed over yellow snappers and pointed out some angelfish, then admired the stripes on some zebrafish. “Mother Nature knows what’s up,” she said approvingly.A cow nose ray caught her eye, as did a yellow rose goby. “I want to be the person who gets to name these,” she said. “You can have a lot of fun with that job.”Ms. Smulders, 39, seems to have fun with most jobs. On “Impeachment,” which revisits the impeachment of Bill Clinton, she plays the right-wing pundit Ann Coulter, a member of the Elves, a group of conservative lawyers who advised Paula Jones’s team.With hair like a Westminster-winning Afghan hound, legs like the Eiffel Tower and a voice as clipped and polished as a high-end manicure, her version of Ms. Coulter finds pleasure everywhere she goes, usually because she brings multiple bottles of wine along. And yet she remains as coldblooded as the aquarium’s sharks.“You’re all too nice,” her Ms. Coulter says of her fellow Elves during a late-night strategy scene.Initially, Ms. Smulders had resisted the role. The “Impeachment” producers had approached her a few weeks before the 2020 presidential election, the first in which Ms. Smulders, a proud Canadian who recently became an American citizen, could vote. Ms. Smulders votes a liberal ticket, so sharing head space with Ms. Coulter, who has written books such as “Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism,” didn’t seem healthy or fun.But Mr. Killam was already attached to the series as Steve Jones, Paula Jones’s husband. And “Stumptown,” the moody procedural on ABC in which Ms. Smulders starred, was canceled because of the pandemic, freeing up her schedule.“Isn’t it just so peaceful here?” Ms. Smulders said of the shark exhibit.  Daniel Dorsa for The New York TimesSo after Donald Trump lost the election, Ms. Smulders taped an audition. Playing an ultraconservative — especially an ultraconservative with a miniskirt wardrobe and a champagne habit — no longer felt so dark to her.“She’s the only one who can actually have any fun,” Ms. Smulders said of her character. “This confidence that this woman has, to be able to walk into a room and think you’re the smartest person in the room, that you’re the most powerful person in the room, that is the polar opposite of me and my life.”In the shark building, which Ms. Smulders had entered after passing a harbor seal (“Hi, friend!”) and a waddling penguin (“You can do it, buddy!”), it was clear where the power lay. Crawling into a tunnel just past the coral reef section, she marveled at the zebra sharks and bamboo sharks swimming just inches away. “I want to set up a little cot in there,” she said when she emerged. “Waking up to that? Heaven! Heaven!”Not everyone enjoys intimate encounters with fish that might find you delicious, but Ms. Smulders does. On a recent family trip to Oahu, she went for a cage dive with huge Galápagos sharks. “That was a crazy thing,” she said. She enjoys humbler marine life, too. Polyps are an obsession, as is algae, which has a mutualistic relationship with reefs.Further into the shark exhibit, past a re-creation of a shipwreck, Ms. Smulders stopped at Hudson Canyon’s Edge, a dramatic wall of water. She admired the rays, floating past like cheerful ghosts, and a whiskered fish that swam beneath them. “I love a little mustache on a fish,” she said. A loggerhead cruised by, pausing to admire her Tod’s bag. Sharks surrounded her, some of them grinning toothily. Ms. Smulders smiled at each predator.“Isn’t it just so peaceful here?” she said. More