Hurrah, 'Galactica'!

The announcement that the upcoming season of "Battlestar Galactica" will be its last is worthy of high praise. Heck, it's worth cheering about!

Not because I'm anxious to see television's best science-fiction series — which is also one of the best series, period, on the air today — come to an end. But because the show's executive producers would rather do one more great season and bring the show to an appropriate conclusion than drag it out until we're cheering because we're glad to see it go.

In a medium where commerce generally trumps art, this is an amazing development.

"This show was always meant to have a beginning, a middle and, finally, an end," executive producers Ronald Moore and David Eick said in a statement released by the Sci Fi Channel. "Over the course of the last year, the story and the characters have been moving strongly toward that end, and we've decided to listen to those internal voices and conclude the show on our own terms."

Wow. Amazing. Exciting. Fantastic.

And a decided departure from what we've become far too accustomed to seeing over the years. It's hard not to cite the ultimate example of a show where commerce completely overwhelmed art — "The X-Files," which began with such promise and gradually deteriorated into an irretrievable disaster and deadly bore before it finally disappeared after nine seasons.

In the process of dragging it out, Fox managed to kill all interest in the series and any possibility of creating a theatrical-movie franchise.

Moore and Eick learned the lesson "The X-Files" producers never did. When you're dealing with a show that has one overarching story line that carries the series, at some point you either have to bring your saga to a logical conclusion or you're just going to be annoying the audience.

In a conference call with TV critics, Moore said that as the third season of "Galactica" was taking shape, "We started to feel like if we don't start to pay this off and don't really reveal those secrets and move in that direction, we'd get to a place where it would feel like we're jerking the audience (around)."

We've seen the same thing happen more recently with "Lost," which pretty much completely lost its way for a season and a half. With a definitive end in sight — three more 16-episode seasons — "Lost" has shown creative revival after losing millions of its fans.

"Battlestar Galactica" is in absolutely no need of a creative revival. The show is at the top of its game. And it has 22 episodes in its fourth and final season (which will begin in early 2008) to wrap up the story.