If you’ve seen Dark, “satisfying” is probably the the best you could hope for. I literally saw the last episode of season one and was like “I don’t even know if I can hang on for this ride!”
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Hill House irritated me more than any recent TV show has, because it was so good before completely, totally, and utterly falling apart at the end.
The Jackson book is one of my all-time favorite books (next to We Have Always Lived in the Castle, it’s my favorite work of hers), so I was a tough customer, but still. That ending was purely awful.
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I read, some time ago, the Heechee saga from Frederik Pohl because I played the Legend Entertainment’s game and I enjoyed it.
I also enjoyed Ender’s Game saga from the homophobic Orson Scott Card. But I would not pay for it.
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The Good Place, which I’ll recommend.
I pretend the last five minutes or so don’t exist. FFS, you don’t get to game the malevolent force of nature haunted house for a happy ending!
Personally, I can’t fathom the Battlestar Galactica apologism. It was like Lost… a compelling first couple of seasons that then unravelled at painful length and in the end meant nothing.
The series “Counterpart” comes to a satisfying end after 2 seasons. I recommend finding out as little as possible about it before trying it. It’s got JK Simmons and Olivia Williams and spy stuff – what more does one need?
I recently read Naomi Novik’s Scholomance trilogy and liked it a lot. (I have a sneaking suspicion, though, that it may mutate from a completed trilogy into an unbounded series.)
Dark had a good first two seasons and season 3 was a mess. I had the impression that they had a total of four or five seasons planned but when they found out the third would be the last, they tried to cram all of it in.
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It’s a great show, but was that really a satisfying ending? I felt like they were prepared to go another couple of seasons but didn’t get the funding so they wrapped it up as best they could.
Most of my TV-watching over the past decade has been goofy stuff. I’d say that Defiance, Haven, Person of Interest, Korra, and (don’t laugh) Scooby Doo: Mystery Incorporated all stuck their landings.
Steven Universe had a good ending. Several good endings! This sounds like faint praise, but they had a big save-the-world climax – and then followed it with a season (plus TV-movie) of “ok, what is the rebuilding phase? How do people live in the new world?” That was admirable.
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Yeah.
When it comes to TV-series which set out to tell the story in a predetermined number of episodes/seasons, with interesting character development and deep themes, bringing the narrative to an emotionally and intellectually satisfying close, watch the Avatar-series.
Both The Last Airbender and Korra are among the very best I’ve seen in television.
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What about non-series books? I don’t read any series because I prefer the nature of standalones. And I’m not a fast reader. And there’s the hassles of series.
I buy a lot of sci fi at second hand book sales and spend time trying to make sure I don’t buy an episode of a series. Sometimes I accidentally get one. The older the book, the higher the chance its series-ness will not be clearly marked.
-Wade
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I read a lot of standalone books, and I’m delighted to take recommendations for them. But I really like series, and it seems like all the ones I want to read aren’t finished, so that’s what I need help finding. But if you’ve got a book of any sort to recommend to me, fire away. I’m stocking up. I like to have a fat stack of real books and a big list of e-books to start the year with. It makes me feel rich and fat and happy.
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A majority of the TV I watch now is Korean, and one reason for that is that most Korean shows are single seasons. They’re typically written by single screenwriters (rather than distributing episodes around), and they tell one complete story in one go. No worrying about whether they’ll get renewed for long enough to finish the story!
Not many good quality sci-fi K-dramas though… though one excellent fantasy series is Alchemy of Souls. It’s two weeks from completion, so I can let you know then if it ends as well as it has been so far.
If you like dark and serious shows with little glimmers of hope, then My Mister and My Liberation Notes are excellent. My Mister is probably the best TV show I’ve ever watched, from any country.
Extraordinary Attorney Woo is one of the better portrayals of female autism on TV, and a very uplifting and delightful story.
If you like action, thriller, romance, or romcom, then I have many more recommendations. 
For books, while Brandon Sanderson’s plans are way too big, the Mistborn trilogy is close to perfect, as a completed series. It doesn’t need any further reading to complete the experience, just three books and you’re done. Even if you don’t get into anything else he’s done, I’d still recommend that series.
Lastly, the Rivers of London series by Ben Aaronovitch and the Invisible Library series by Genevieve Cogman are both great. Ben is still writing Rivers of London books, but the first seven complete the main arc of the story. He’s written two more novels after that but at the moment they seem like mostly stand alone stories. (Maybe they’ll turn into a second arc in the future?) The first seven books though are quite compelling. The Invisible Library series is 8 books and now complete. The author has said she may write more in the future, but does not intend to in the near future.
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Ultimately because it’s a hard and fast rule of movies and TV that a leading man never look up at a woman. Sigh.
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While they probably could have found someone to play Naomi who was 2 metres tall, surely the problem is that then they’d have to cast all the Belters with giants. Having one giant on the show would be very conspicuous if all the other Belters were of average height. It would’ve been great if they could have cast all the Martians and Belters with very tall people, but this was one thing I could overlook for the sake of an otherwise very excellent show.
(And it was definitely worth it to have David Strathairn and Cara Gee on the cast!)
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Fair enough. And Cara Gee was wonderful.
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Urgh, you’re probably right. I’m six feet tall, and have been that tall since I was 14, and wow, does that intimidate a lot of men.
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Haha yes I’m sure it does. On the other hand, I’m 5’9”, my wife is 5’11”, and her sisters are 6’1” and 6’2”. That does get a little intimidating. 
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For what it’s worth, my sister hasn’t read anything except the Mistborn series, and hasn’t had any trouble with the crossovers. Moonlight’s real identity and what “Shay-I” refers to are more easter eggs than plot crucial.
And whether or not you’ve read the other books, the whole AonDor part is pure deus ex machina. Especially since it ignores the mechanics of essence marks from those other books! Apparently technology has advanced since then…
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Speaking of which, I’ll second this. There’s the original trilogy, and then a second “trilogy” (of four books) set a hundred years in the future of the same world. The two are pretty much independent and both finished.
(There’s theoretically going to be two more trilogies after this, but not for ages, and they’re also meant to be able to stand alone.)
I just finished the second trilogy yesterday, and it was very satisfying. Much better pacing than Stormlight, which I nearly abandoned multiple times during the first book. (In the end I just kind of skimmed a lot of Kaladin’s early chapters and don’t think I missed much of value.) He’s also written some stand-alone stories, which I think are actually a lot more solid writing-wise than the trilogies, since things have to actually get explained and resolved; The Emperor’s Soul is my favorite.
I’ll also second the recommendation for the Locked Tomb, which is going to be complete…next year? The year after? Do we have a release date for Alecto yet? Another of those fun four-book trilogies.
Six of Crows and the sequel Crooked Kingdom are high fantasy heists, and are a complete series. (Pair? Duology?) I had a lot of fun with those. (Though every time it mentioned that the characters are in their teens it threw me for a loop. They feel like they’re in their 20s most of the time. When exactly did you get all those military promotions?!)
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Timeless (Netflix). It’s one of the only series which doesn’t try too hard to extend the series, and has no major flaws.
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(Re: Mistborn series)
The first trilogy works by itself, but I thought The Lost Metal fell off a cliff of “you have to care about the Cosmere now.”
Well, I said that already. Plenty of other books in the sea. I’m currently reading The Ivory Tomb (Melissa Caruso) which is breezy demon-hunting adventure and (I think) the conclusion of a trilogy.
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