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.

LOST LESSONS

Television is to inform, entertain, enlighten, educate and change its audience.

Some shows are cliche, formula, slapstick, dumb, aggravating, annoying, supernatural, preachy and challenging to viewers.

A good story should lead the reader/viewer on a journey of adventure, self-discovery, conflict resolution and a final life  lesson.

In the years after the finale, writers have continued to grapple with the life lessons to LOST.

Many viewers claim that LOST is one of the greatest television shows in history, but at the same time many faithful viewers were angry at the ending. Many writers believe no matter how one viewed the finale, LOST changed the way most people will watch TV and how creators of new television shows plan their story lines. 

LOST's writers created many mysteries and ambiguities which fueled the show's popularity and critical response because it seemed to be playing by different rules. Season ending twists kept viewers coming back year after year. So profound were these mysteries that thousands of websites, blogs and forums were devoted to answering viewers’ questions, as well as developing their own Lost conspiracy theories about science and faith, life and death, and everything else in between.

Just as there are various debates on how people perceived the ending, there are just as many discussions about what lessons LOST tried to impart to viewers. For example:

For the most part,  the Oceanic 815 crash survivors were all ordinary people who lived ordinary lives, with common problems and vices. Yet these normal travelers all ended up doing extraordinary things that were uncharacteristic of their former lives when they were removed from their comfortable and known existence and into the mystery and danger of the island.  We saw kicked drug habits, self sacrifice for the sake of others, and love towards significant others that had not previously been expressed.

Likewise, another lesson could be one cannot live without taking some risks. 
Characters like Hurley lived in isolated shells, fearful of society's wrath that they were different or crazy. Once they survived the plane crash, the characters had to shed their normal routines and habits in order to help the group survive. By changing their own interpersonal programming, and going outside "their comfort zones" did the characters actually grow as individuals. Yes, there might be unforeseen consequences, total failures, deadly mistakes, but the characters learned that some risks were worth taking. 

The bonds of friendship are one of the risk-rewards of living a good life. "Live Together, Die Alone" was the bumper sticker for the show.  The importance of the statement was clear: if the survivors couldn’t learn to work together and get along, they wouldn’t make it and would die a lonely death.
Relationships are what bind us together as people. Life often sucks, but it sucks a whole lot worse when our relationships separate us rather than uniting us. We need people around us who can support, encourage and empower us. Without that, we could lead a very lonely and depressing existence. In “real life” it’s true that we either learn to live together, or die alone.

From a show creative process, there were two forced lessons upon us.

First, the purposeful philosophy that "Some Questions in Life Will Go Unanswered."

Each week we loyal viewers returned to watch the new episode of LOST hoping that new clues and information would answer some our questions. And week after week, it appeared that more questions were being posed by conflicting clues than hard and fast answers.

The writers and show runners believe that there will be mysteries in our own lives that we can’t comprehend, questions of love and faith and why we did the things we did. But it’s the mysteries of life that make it such a ride. So, in one aspect, the wild ride is more important than how the ride works.

The other lesson for television producers and writers is how series should end. There is a phrase in Hollywood that a show should not "pull a LOST," meaning a controversial, confusing and perplexing end that fails to meet most fan expectations. 

It is not new that televisions shows have struggled on how to write a proper finale. For very popular shows, the last episode is dreaded like a funeral wake. It brings mixed emotions. Some had endings that fans liked, accepted or thought could have been better (such as M*A*S*H) or some that  bewildered their faithful fans (SEINFELD, THE SOPRANOS) but none had the spectrum of feelings from positive to negative than LOST's end.  Creators and show runners would simply like to deny for as long as possible that their show is ending and they think that if they simply leave things on a cliffhanger that it will sit better with fans; opposed to trying to do the honorable thing and actually write an ending to the show. There is no greater poster-child for bad show endings than LOST. It is the perfect example of how when a show betrays a large portion of its fan base, it will never live it down. There have been many lessons from LOST. One of the primary lessons from LOST is: be careful who you trust. Damon Lindelof continues to push aside unhappy LOST fans to the point of giving up defending his choice for the series finale.  

Perhaps, the real lesson between show runners and the audience is the element of trust. Trust is something that is earned. Trust is something that needs to be maintained. Trust is something that can be lost in an instant. 

It is the enormous burden,  trust. Television viewers today are investing their time in shows that they trust. They want to know that their heroes will get to live long healthy lives. LOST betrayed that trust and picked off its characters until literally they were all sitting in a church waiting to walk into the light to move on to the afterlife. Even today, the absurdity of the LOST ending strikes many fans as being hard to grasp, like getting punched in the gut until the air explodes from your lungs. In any relationship, trust is the glue that binds two souls together. For a great deal of LOST viewers, they trusted that the writers were going to give them a mind blowing ending that the greatest show in TV history had promised; a clever and neatly wrapped up package which made absolute sense and tied the mysteries together into a neat bow. Be careful what you wish for; be careful of who you trust. Disappointment is also a life lesson. For good or ill, viewers had a 6 year connection boarding on love affair with LOST. If one looks at LOST as the end of 6 year relationship,  how you reacted to the end of the series is probably how you relate to real friendships and relations in the real world.

The lasting effect of LOST on die hard viewers is probably how the show changed the way they view television today. Can they invest time on a show with many mysteries and questions, and not get burned in the end? People overcome bad break-ups; people can over come disappointment and move on with their lives. Perhaps, that is the most important lesson of all.