They Won't Be There For You Much Longer

The famous proverb says that all good things must come to an end. It does not say, however, that all things must come to a good end.

Yes, sadly, the end is here for "Friends," "Frasier" and "Sex and the City," arguably three of the most popular, if not smartest, sitcoms in history. (Well, "Friends" may not be one of the smartest, but it lasted this long, why start knocking it now?)

Current American pop culture has been defined by weekly doses of Monica, Chandler, Phoebe and the other yuppies of Central Perk serving us cups of mochajavafrappucrappos while whining about their normal, uneventful lives.

As the end of our 10-year eavesdrop draws near, why must we suffer through a predictable wrap-up of life-changing milestones? Why do Chandler and Monica have to move, as commercials for tomorrow night's episode suggest?

This won't be the first time a popular sitcom ended a long run in an uncreative way. If you'll remember, Sam Malone sold his bar on the last episode of "Cheers." How different. How new.

In the future, we know that Joey will have his own spin-off sitcom, titled - remarkably - "Joey." Chandler and Monica will get their adoptive child. And it only seems too perfect that Ross, Rachel and their conspicuously absent daughter Emma will end up together in the end.

Why can't the last 23 minutes of our time with them be a normal day in the life of our best friends - er, the characters?

When "Seinfeld" ended it's history-making run in 1998, speculation ran high over what would come of Jerry, George, Kramer and Elaine. Would former sweethearts Jerry and Elaine rekindle their infamous romance? Would George finally find the courage to ask out the woman of his dreams? (The myth of Kramer, we could count on, would really never been fully explained.)

But it ended in a satisfactory - if lukewarm - way when the foursome found itself in a jail cell for violating a small town's decency act. All of their rudeness and insensitivity came back to bite them. In the end, the show that was famously about nothing was really about something after all.

To this day, you can't find two people who agree whether the clever, yet altogether ridiculous, finale really served the show's eight-year run any justice.

Another example of a successful sitcom that chose an unorthodox method of exit was "Roseanne," one of the best sitcoms, in my opinion, ever produced.

After a few seasons of ridiculous story lines and unbelievable character developments - patriarch Dan has an affair and a heart attack, the Connor family wins $100 million in the Illinois state lottery -the sitcom seemed to be running out of creative avenues in which the plight of the working-class family could be told.

But in an inspired and unexpectedly heartwarming last few minutes, Roseanne begins a voice-over that plays over a recreated sequence of the family dining at the kitchen table (the same scene that appeared as the opening title sequence for many seasons).

We come to find out that all of the outlandish events that took place over the last few seasons were really just a creation of Roseanne's own imagination. Back in the second season, when Roseanne's family built a writing room in their basement so that she could realize her dream of becoming a writer, we just assumed that by the next week's episode she'd lost interest and went back to her laundry.

It becomes apparent in the finale that every episode since that one has been another fictionalized chapter written in her autobiography. It seems she did use that writing room after all. She wrote that her family won the lottery because she wished they had had a more stable financial life; she wrote that Dan recovered from his heart attack when in fact he had died years before; she wrote herself the life she wanted because she knew it would never come true.

If we can look forward to any of this season's sitcoms wrapping up with any creative dignity, I don't look forward to "Friends" being one of them. As the first two episodes of "Sex and the City's" finale mini-season have shown, it should be a bittersweet and true-to-life finale. Someone will marry, someone will become pregnant, and everyone will be sipping cosmos.

"Frasier," on the other hand, can do no wrong. The only sitcom to win five consecutive Best Comedy Series Emmy Awards ('94-'98) is going out at a creative peak no matter what the ratings might otherwise suggest.

In the end, it'll be just fine that "Friends" ends predictably and sappily; and it'll be just fine if Carrie decides that the Big Apple is the only companion she needs.

And if all that "Frasier" concludes with is that his smug arrogance is too unattractive for the women of Seattle, that will still be consistent with what we've grown to love about his character.

At least that would be Must See TV.