10 TV Shows That Actually Stuck The Landing
8. Mad Men
There were so many fan theories about how Mad Men would finally wrap up, two of the more common ideas being that Don Draper (Jon Hamm) might be revealed as mythic hijacker D.B. Cooper, or that he'd end up taking a depressed leap out of a Madison Avenue window, per the show's snazzy opening title sequence.
But Matthew Weiner had something much cleverer and more inspired than either of those options, deciding instead to end Don Draper's seven-season journey with the suggestion that he might've finally achieved personal enlightenment. Or did he?
Draper ends the show at a spiritual retreat, smiling while in a meditative pose, before Weiner smash cuts to Coca-Cola's iconic 1971 "Hilltop" TV advert.
The implication, that Draper's retreat served as the inspiration for him coming up with one of the most famous commercials in TV history, is gloriously cheeky.
Even if we accept that Don found himself in a better place by show's end, he still found a way to translate that spiritual breakthrough into a slick commercial product.
Yet it is an undeniably ambiguous ending all the same - it's entirely possible Don created the advert as a more earnest, un-cynical tribute to the retreat, or perhaps didn't even create it at all.
As a capper to one of TV's richest character studies and most robust period pieces, this was basically perfection.