BAD ENDINGS

BBC.com's Culture section had an interesting article on why so many popular television shows have crappy finales.

It is more probable than not a successful show will have a terrible end. 

 Rolling Stone critic Rob Sheffield, was quoted as saying “Series finales always suck, and everyone knows it, but TV shows still feel obliged to keep attempting them. The idea that a show needs a finale is just one of those daffy ideas America took to heart in the 2000s, like MySpace, the Zune… or the concept of Paula Abdul judging a singing contest. It was a confused time.”

There are a few conflicting concepts at play when a television series ends. First, the creator may have run out of ideas (or the show's quality has run its course). Second, the networks cancel the show prior to aligning all the story lines into one final climatic conclusion. Third, some creators are "too clever" for their own good. They try to make out--of-the-box statement pieces to cement their own TV legacy instead of being true to the show and its characters.

The bigger the show the bigger the expectation for a great ending.

The Mad Men finale was the latest foray into the show ending autopsy. While many die hard fans loved the finale, many critics found it troublesome, confusing and outright sappy bad. Shows with cult-like followings like Mad Men, which only drew 3 million viewers, want to get a big sendoff for their invested time in the series. As a result, creators and writers know that fans will over-analyse the finale on the internet for days and weeks afterwards. 

As the article points out Series finales are inherently difficult to master since long running shows have created hundreds of hours of television, aired over several years, with complex plots, conflicts and character bubbles so to merge all the elements down to one episode, one final scene is problematic.  Viewers expect more from their finales but they rarely get what they’re hoping for: closure.

Despite such confusion, there are some elements that can help finales rise to their inherent challenges, or at least survive them, with a series’ legacy intact.

The M*A*S*H finale, the most-watched broadcast of scripted television in the US ever, attracted 106 million viewers, was a terrible mess. The premise was fine; the hospital unit was being torn out as the war was winding down. But the show's sledgehammer message that "war is bad" through Hawkeye's sudden mental breakdown then his attempt to say goodbye to his colleagues was like a student rushing to the school to find that he had missed his high school graduation. 

As bad as M*A*S*H's send-off was, the Seinfeld finale make nos sense at all.  Seinfeld, the self-proclaimed "show about nothing," was a stunt that did nothing but put a resume item on all the various supporting cast members. The unbelievable premise was the main characters on trial for, essentially, being terrible people – that is, for violating a ‘Good Samaritan Law’ in a small town far from the show’s New York setting. Waves of a less than a minute repeats of minor characters saying how bad the characters were to them was essentially a clip show without any funny bits.  So many viewers despised the Seinfeld finale – perhaps because it made them uncomfortable in having to question why they liked characters who may indeed have been terrible people. Others thought it was a dumb ending that did nothing but diminish the comedy standard it tried to create in the 1990s sit-com arena

The current trend was to leave the audience in the dark, literally.  The Sopranos cut-to-black ending found fans within the writing industry as being a bold and shocking end to an acclaimed series, but fans were outraged by the stunt. Did Tony and his family get whacked? Why did the creators leave the story line open to individual interpretation? Many compared this ending to reading a long book only to find that the last chapter was removed.

LOST had similar critics who thought that the series creators did not fulfill their promises to give the viewers the answers to the main mysteries that cultivated a rabid internet community of theorists. It also sparked backlash that the producers had lied to the fan base in the early seasons that the show was not about purgatory, but the ending seemed to put that in real doubt.


The Mad Men finale also had similiar gripes. But the shows creator did come clean and say that yes, Don Draper's character created the iconic Coke commercial seen as the closing sequence. However, this is intellectually dishonest because a real person actually created that advertisement and his name was not Don Draper. The show runner's post broadcast statements actually make the finale seem even worse since it made Don go back to NY to his old job when his character clearly "killed himself off" by reverting to his old name and leaving behind his old past. But that attempt to create "a happy ending" palatable to the fan base should not be the core for a writer.

 The Mary Tyler Moore Show planned its own end date in 1977, resulting in a finale many would argue sets the standard for all future television endings. It combined these approaches: it gave smart viewers something to think about like Seinfeld or The Sopranos – in a softer, sweeter manner that also provided satisfying closure.  In that show’s finale, the entire staff at the TV news station where Mary has worked for the whole series, WJM, is fired. As they all clean out their desks and move on, we see how office mates often function as families, and were becoming especially important to single, working women like Mary in the ‘70s. Such insights, undercut with the melancholy of a real goodbye, earned the finale every right to some tearjerking.

It’s even possible that inconsistent shows with long runs, like Star Trek: The Next Generation and Battlestar Galactica, were enshrined as "classics" in hindsight simply because of their strong finales. ST:TNG ended with the Captain making an appearance at the senior staff's weekly poker game which signaled the final bond between the characters. It showed that during the series each character had risked something during their space exploration, but in the end they could come together in friendship.

But the greatest TV finale with the most memorable twist was The Bob Newhart Show. Newhart, a dead pan comedian who had a long TV career, was the focal character running  a small New England B&B resort.  He had a quirky cast of characters as he tried to run a vacation inn. But that series finale put in a strong memory most people have of Newhart is of Newhart waking up in bed beside Suzanne Pleshette, who had starred as his wife in his previous series, and realizing he had merely dreamed the entirety of the later show. It was so genius and unexpected that it will survive the test of time.

So it is possible for popular television series to have brilliant finales. It takes writers who are true to their vision, realize what their audience wants, and have the guts to make a truly memorable, non-cliche finish to a long run.