Finale Girls

This episode contains spoilers for The Newsroom, The West Wing, Mr. and Mrs. Smith and Love Island (from weeks ago).  The Newsroom premiered in 2012 on HBO and ran for three seasons. It was created by Aaron Sorkin, who the girls were really nice to in the last episode, but now it’s time to get real. In this episode of Finale Girls, Mallika and Rachel dive into the season one finale of The Newsroom...

This episode contains spoilers for The West Wing. The West Wing premiered in 1999 on NBC and ran until 2005. It was created by Aaron Sorkin, who the girls love to dunk on (but they're nice to him in this ep!). The show followed a Democratic president, Martin Sheen’s Jed Bartlett, and his staff in the West Wing. It was perceived as a smart and witty antidote to the buffoonery of a looming Bush...

This episode contains spoiler alerts for Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (SVU).  SVU premiered in 1999 as the first spinoff of the original Law and Order franchise, which aired from 1990 to 2010 and then returned in 2021. SVU originally starred Christopher Meloni as Detective Elliot Stabler and Mariska Hargitay as Detective Benson, who solved especially heinous crimes with the NYPD. In the s...

This episode contains spoiler alerts for DTF St. Louis, The Better Sister and the 2003 film Mystic River .  DTF St. Louis , which premiered in March on HBO, is a dark comedy starring Jason Bateman and David Harbour as friends, co-workers and neighbors Clark Forrest and Floyd Smernitch who are both looking for more in their marriages. What exactly they’re looking for, they don’t seem to fully know....

This episode contains spoiler alerts for Gilmore Girls.  Gilmore Girls premiered on the WB in October 2000 and ran for seven seasons, concluding in 2007 on the CW network. The beloved series followed single-mother-and-daughter duo Lorelai (played by Lauren Graham) and Rory (played by Alexis Bledel) who live in the eccentric New England small town Stars Hollow. Genre-wise, the show teetered from fa...

The Pitt aired in January 2025 on HBO, bringing us to a Pittsburgh emergency room where health care professionals are savings lives, doing risky procedures that truly no one should be doing in an emergency room and grappling with their own demons. In this episode, Rachel and Mallika discuss the recent season two finale with a very special guest: Moises Mendez II! Moises has been a staff writer for...

***This episode contains spoilers for Euphoria (seasons one and two) and Love Story: John F Kennedy Jr & Carolyn Bessette . -- Euphoria aired on HBO in June 2019 . Starring Zendaya as Rue Bennett, a 17-year-old struggling with addiction in the aftermath of her father’s death, the show was one of the first to spotlight Gen Z’s aesthetic and dig into what it means to grow up as digital natives....

***This episode contains spoilers for Search Party and L ove Story: John F Kennedy Jr & Carolyn Bessette, plus a minor spoiler for The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. -- Search Party is dark comedy series that aired on TBS in 2016 and ran for five seasons, getting picked up by HBO Max. It follows an aimless Brooklyn-resident Dory Sief, played by Arrested Development’s Alia Shakwat, who becomes fixated...

***This episode contains spoilers for Succession and Traitors (season four). -- In 2018, HBO premiered Succession, introducing us to the Roy family who control Waystar Royco, one of the largest and most powerful media companies in the world. The tension starting with that first episode is that Logan — the founder of Royco and the patriarch of the family — is turning 80 and expected to announce his...

***This episode contains spoilers for Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Traitors U.S. (season 4, episode 7).  -- In 1997, the world was introduced to Buffy the Vampire Slayer , a supernatural horror comedy about a teenage girl with a cosmic duty to kill demons. The show received critical and popular acclaim and its original airings often reached four to six million viewers, which was knocking it out of...

***This episode contains spoilers for The OC and Traitors U.S. (season 4, episode 6). There's also a tiny spoiler for One Tree Hill season 3, episode 22. -- In 2003, Fox aired The OC , altering the teen drama genre forever and spawning Laguna Beach , The Hills and the entire Real Housewives franchise. The OC launched Adam Brody and Mischa Barton into stardom and introduced much of the world to...

***This episode contains spoilers for Stranger Things, Heated Rivalry, Fleabag and The Traitors U.S. (season 4, episode 5) In 2016, Netflix quietly premiered Stranger Things, a show set in Hawkins, Indiana in the 1980s. There were boys on bikes, a girl who liked waffles and blowing things up with her mind, monsters, evil government entities, a dimension nicknamed the Upside Down that is basically...

Welcome to Finale Girls, a new podcast all about TV we love (and hate) from writers Rachel Rippetoe and Mallika Mitra. In every episode, we'll discuss what we're currently watching and the latest TV news. Then we'll zero in on a season finale. A finale is where the possibilities narrow, when the road ends. Did our writers and directors know where they were going all along? Did they tak...