In general, the entertainment industry these days doesn’t like endings. When it comes to the stories that they tell/sell us, they’d rather chase after one word: "franchise" (this is second only to the word "cult", which in this case translates as an avid, engaged and loyal fanbase). That's where the real money is, in this world where film and television studios and publishing houses are only moderately-funded arms of titanic multi-national corporations -- whose main focus has always been building brand loyalty. The down side, therefore, is that the people we trust to lead us through epic, years-long stories, often don't know where, when, or even how their stories are ultimately going to end. And it's been proven over and over that there is no greater vitriol than a fan base who feels like they've been betrayed or cheated when a franchise doesn't end the way the feel it should. Ironically, the longer a story goes on, the more elaborate and fleshed-out the mythology becomes, and the harder is it to come up with an ending that has enough of a twist to it to delight, albeit one that fits so perfectly that it's the exact resolution that the fans didn't even know they wanted. It's like trying to hit a moving target that keeps getting smaller and smaller.
This is especially true of TV, since there's rarely an auteur with a singular vision. Even people like Ronald Moore, Aaron Sorkin, Bryan Fuller, etc., can’t be the sole visionaries of a five-season series the way a movie director or a novelist can. A person just can’t sustain that kind of creative involvement for so long. It’s the most precarious position of all, I think: you have to provide millions of people with an hour’s worth of entertainment every week, which the vast majority of them won’t directly pay for. They have high expectations, and will turn on you in a heartbeat if they see something they don’t like. So who, in my opinion are some of the winners in this extended high-stakes gamble? What series do I think really got it right? Or, barring that, which ones at least made the ending interesting, or polarizing? Here's just a small sample – and does it go without saying that spoilers abound beyond this point?
"Friends": I’m starting with the obvious, really. This was the biggest show in its day (1994-2004), was the anchor of NBC’s classic Thursday prime time lineup, and could have kept going for as long as they liked. True, the final season ran into the problem that many shows do when they start getting long in the tooth, having to revisit (and sometimes contradict) previous plots and themes once their characters’ lives and backstories are fully fleshed out. But in the case of Friends, they also set several story arcs in motion that would give all the characters plenty to do: Chandler and Monica's adoption process (with Joey being the main "antagonist" in the plot), the potential of Rachel moving to Paris and taking her and Ross's daughter with her, and Phoebe's wedding (and, as much as I enjoy watching Paul Rudd, shouldn't she have ended up with Hank Azaria in the end?!) It all built toward the final scene, with the characters standing in the bare apartment, talking. That's all the show was really about at its best, and watching them all walk out the door together for the last time (and the slow zoom on the iconic frame around the door's peephole) had just the right tone.
"Twin Peaks": By the time the end came, this David Lynch/Mark Frost show, which had been the hottest thing on television just a year before, was staring down its second cancellation after being revived due to fan clamor, which in part took place on the fledgling Internet. After the resolution of the central mystery early in the second season (“Who Killed Laura Palmer?”), the series devolved into a weird amalgam of queasy humor, macabre/incomprehensible side plots, and stunt-casting (why oh why did they let Diane Keaton direct an episode?!) Fortunately, Lynch and Frost had enough passion to eventually take the reins back and give us a great finish. They had never wanted to solve Laura's murder at all -- but the network nixed the MacGuffin idea and pressed for an answer, fearing that the audience couldn't be teased forever. So after the mystery was resolved and a half-dozen foundering episodes that pretty much sealed the show’s fate, they set up an even larger mystery, leading up to a cliff-hanger ending that put no less than five major characters in life- and soul-endangering situations. The result of what Cooper found in the Black Lodge (and what he brought back with him) has fueled fan speculation for over twenty years.
"Gilmore Girls": Amy Sherman-Palladino and her team have a way of constructing a small-town community from the ground up. And by the time you've spent even a few hours in Stars Hollow, you feel like you live there. You know the people, and you could probably find your way around if you suddenly found yourself dropped off at the city limits. It's actually a testament to her style that, when she left the show after six seasons, she had assembled a team that was so on board with what she was trying to do that the show was able to close with one more season while only minimally degrading the quality. Of course, the ending centered around the dissolution of the mother-daughter relationship that was at the heart of the series. For Lorelai, the mother, they basically hit the reset button on her on-off-married-divorced relationship with the curmudgeonly Luke. And Rory, the daughter, ended up leaving home to work on the presidential campaign trail of a first-time candidate... some unknown Illinois congressman with the unlikely name Barack Obama. I can't help but wonder where Rory is now in that alternate universe.
"Newhart" - I remember the night this sitcom finale aired, and the way the series' final scene created such a collision of nostalgia, hilarity, and plain old shocked surprise. Of course, it's now the textbook example of how to twist and subvert expectations when closing out a TV show... Bob Newhart wakes up next to his wife from his previous television series, revealing that what we have been watching for five years was really an extended dream sequence within that original show. It could have felt like a rip-off (like the way that Dallas erased a season of ill-advised changes with an “It was all a dream!” moment), but Bob and Suzanne Pleshette played it perfectly, instantaneously creating a classic moment.
"St. Elsewhere" - Where the Newhart ending was a unanimous success, here's an example of how a twist ending can polarize an audience, even to the point of alienating them from the show as a whole. In the final scene, it is revealed that the titular hospital exists only inside a snow globe, and the people and events we watched for years were all in the mind of a young autistic man (never mind that the show had aired several crossover episodes with other shows which supposedly took place in the real world). Still, that's probably what the show will be remembered for generations from now.
"Lost" - It's now generally understood that the creators of Lost didn't have their endgame planned out from the beginning, although they played it as if they did. It would all be explained, they said, and no, the characters were not in Purgatory. Looking back on it now, five years later, it's starting to matter less and less that all the questions that were brought up during the show weren't really answered satisfactorily. What I remember more are the characters, the relationships, and the sense of wonder the series evoked, which was severely lacking in nearly all shows before and since. It was all tied together, yes, but its ending “revelation” didn’t live up to the endlessly complex mythology and weirdness that came before it. Seeing as the show had spent seven solid years weaving an immensely convoluted tapestry of mythology, I suppose no ending would have.
"Futurama" - While forever being The Simpsons' less popular cousin, this show was actually more consistent in its focus and the clever way it twisted science fiction tropes to its own hilarious ends. When the series was cancelled after four seasons, Matt Groening and his team decided to make an open ending, with the Planet Express team willing throwing themselves into a black hole (and possibly into an alternate universe), sure only in the knowledge that whatever their fate, they would face it together. It was an uplifting way to send off the characters, although it would turn out to be somewhat premature – they would continue to live on in four straight-to-video movies, then two more seasons on another network. As of this writing, there’s still 13 episodes left to air even though the second cancellation has been announced, so this show will be the only one on this list to have *two* series finales. We’ll have to wait and see what Groening & Co. have dreamed up for the ultimate finale.
"Pushing Daisies" - For the two seasons of Bryan Fuller's comedic series about a pie-maker who solves murders by being able to briefly resurrect the dead(!), Pushing Daisies wrapped every one of its 22 episodes with enjoyable quirk, by way of astounding comic-book style art direction, endearing characters, and the occasional musical number. Here's a rare case of a series creator knowing the end is coming, and doing his best to make it pay off. Although it seemed a bit rushed, the show used its last two episodes to wrap up all of its ongoing story arcs, and brought the characters to a conclusion that, after being charmed by them for two years, paid off handsomely. It might not have been particularly surprising, but with characters we had grown so close to, not having a resolution would have been crueler than rushing the ending.
"FlashForward" - The mid- and late-00's were full of people trying to find the "next Lost", and we were flooded with shows that promised big, mythic, sci-fi based ideas on the meaning of life, love, and existence, with enough convoluted mythology for the newly-minted Internitpickers (my own word-creation, patent pending) to obsess over and catalog in wikis. This was my favorite of that crop, the premise being that, one day, every person in the world is given a simultaneous 137-second vision of what they will be seeing and hearing exactly six months in the future. One man saw himself visiting his Marine daughter, who he thought had been killed in action. One woman saw herself cheating on her husband with a man she hadn't even met yet. One man saw nothing at all. The show dealt with the FBI trying to sort through all this... why did this happen? Did someone cause it, and was it an accident, or on purpose? All the characters had to deal with the aftermath of their visions: How should the man go about finding his daughter? Would the wife still cheat, knowing full well that she was dedicated to her marriage but about to meet her future lover? Was the man who saw nothing going to be dead in six months? By the end of the first season, most of the answers were given, and the show looked like it was going to wind down. Not surprising, since it hadn’t been picked up for a second season... but then the ending turned into a cliffhanger in which the world went through *another* "flash-forward", which showed even farther (years, if I'm remembering right) into the future. What impressed me about it was that the show creators could have changed the ending, knowing that a second season would never come, but they kept it. The reason was most likely because they had put so much time into crafting that final montage, full of flashes of different locales, situations, new characters, etc. that they had nothing to lose by keeping it. Where Lost didn't know where it was going, FlashForward kind of had to know, at least a little bit, because the characters’ visions used footage that would have to woven into the actual story when the time came. All that unfulfilled promise still intrigues me.
"Fringe" - Fringe was always a borderline show for me, and by that I mean that after all the alternate realities and complex mythology, I almost stopped caring about the characters. It wasn't that they stopped being well-written or interesting, but it was just that at the end of season three, Joshua Jackson's character permanently switched timelines, and from them on worked with a set of identical characters who did not know him (in the alternate universe he switched to, he had died as a child). I couldn't help but be continually reminded of the fact that the characters were *not* the people who I liked from the beginning of the show, and wondered what had happened to them in "our" world. There was some mumbo-jumbo about him causing his girlfriend to "become" the old character we were familiar with – he transferred all her alternate-universe memories into her or some kind of nonsense -- but after that point I found myself always on the verge of losing interest. I kept up with it until the series finale, and at the end the course of time was reversed so that the show's final cataclysm never happened, giving the characters license to have their happy endings. It was well done, but I never quite got over the taint of that third season switcheroo.
"Firefly" - This Joss Whedon western-in-space show didn't have a series finale, per se, because was cancelled halfway through its first season. But it was what happened *after* the cancellation that made it so impressive. The nineteen-episode series -- including four or five that never got the chance to air -- were released on DVD and started taking on a life of their own. Online communities got involved, championing the show's wit, charm, propensity for swearing in Chinese, and just plain goodness, and managed to rally enough troops to convince the powers-that-be that a follow-up movie should be made. That film, "Serenity", didn't make too much of a splash outside of the already-dedicated fan base of Browncoats (as they came to call themselves), but for those who loved the characters and style of the show, it was just about everything they wanted it to be -- bigger, bolder, shinier. Whedon has said that he crammed what he had planned for the next two seasons of plot into the film, and the result was a brilliant resolution and sendoff for a show that should have lived on for years.
"Sports Night" - Aaron Sorkin's other millennial TV show (the first being "The West Wing") was a sitcom about the crew of a Sportscenter-type TV show. It flew along at a thousand miles an hour, throwing out clever dialogue and obscure references in patented walk-and-talk sequences, with the characters joyfully debating all sorts of topics, only a few of which directly dealt with sports -- I think my fellow-Aaron picked the subject just because it could be used as a metaphor for so many other human situations. A good example is the character who became obsessed with researching a particular championship sailing accident as a way of dealing with his parents' divorce. I remarked to my wife that watching the show actually made me feel smarter, mentally challenging myself to keep up with it, and it was exhilarating. The show ran for two full seasons, and it was a rare case of the end being both premature and prepared for. There was an extended plot arc where the titular show was about to be cancelled -- meta, right? -- while the management tried to find a way to salvage it. The end was a meticulously plotted word puzzle, which gave so much of just the right amount of things-changing vs. things-staying-the-same, that it felt like it had been Sorkin's endgame from the beginning.
“M*A*S*H*” - When it went off the air in 1983 after 11 seasons, this series finale was the most-watched television episode in history. I was only 11 at the time myself, but I understood that it meant a lot to a lot of people. And looking back, I can understand why. While the show was about a mobile medical unit in the Korean War, it started its run just after the US finished a humiliating defeat in another drawn-out Pacific war, this time in Vietnam. The show was always hard to pin down... was it a goofy comedy? A harrowing war drama? It managed to somehow hit both of these points, and every bit of spectrum in between, which I think was the secret of its success. As for me, I remember watching it in syndication and being slightly bewildered by the fact that I could never figure out whether whatever happened on screen was about to be followed by a laugh track or not. To be honest, I was watching the night of the finale, but fell asleep during the middle, so it seemed surprisingly short. I was aware that there were dramatic farewells and other moments happening that just didn't resonate with me because I didn't understand the show well enough. Still, it remains one of the most beloved send-offs of a show that ran for a ridiculously long time, by 1970s standards. So they must have hit that sweet spot between comedy and tragedy that so many other shows swing for, but never quite connect with.
"Roseanne" - I'm probably in the minority, but I thought the ending of this series was brilliant. To some, it was a poor payoff of a season-long joke that made it appear that the show had run off the rails. To sum up: the ninth season of the story of the Connor family started with them winning the lottery. For a show that had spent its entire run up until then featuring (and appealing to) a staunchly blue-collar, scrappin'-and-survivin' family, it was a pure left-field moment of "Whaaa???". And as the individual episodes got more surreal and outrageous, with celebrity guest stars, world travelling, and divorce drama, we all thought that we were actually watching the psyche of volatile creator/star Roseanne fragment in front of our eyes. The idea seemed plausible; by the ninth season, the series had pretty much run its course and was on the way out anyway, who's to say that she didn't just announce "I don't give a crap anymore" in her trademark nasal tone and just start throwing in everything but the kitchen sink? But it turns out there was a plan after all... in the series finale we learned that all along we had been watching Roseanne's character writing her life story. And while the beginning of the series was "true", more and more the show became life as the Roseanne character wanted it to be... children married who she thought they were supposed to be with, instead of who they really did, the family found their way into money, her husband had never died of a heart attack partway through the series, etc. What we thought was creative laziness had really been a run-up to the final shocking revelation that what we were seeing was a character creating an alternate version of her life, the one they wanted instead of the one they had. This did, and still does, strike me as very profound and moving.
Of course there are lots of examples I’ve left out, and if I have it’s probably because (shocker!) I haven’t actually seen every TV show ever made. Aaron Sorkin said that the hardest thing about television as a storytelling medium is that it's "all middle". Meaning that you need to have a great premise, and a great resolution to that premise, but then you also have to stretch out the middle part, never actually getting to the ending, but always progressing toward it, for an indefinite amount of time. Mysteries have to be teased and teased and teased, but as we saw with "Twin Peaks", solving the mystery is almost as lethal as making the audience wait too long, as we saw with shows like “The Killing”. It's a high-wire act that only a talented few can make worth our while, and I always applaud anyone who attempts in a new way.
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