When the Sopranos ended its television run, it did so in such a fashion that it had its fandom up-in-arms, cursing and wondering what the hell happened to their favorite show. It ended with a hard cut to black. No one knew what would have happened next even though the episode built up to a climatic ending. Boom, without warning, the series ended.
With this type of controversial ending now possible, LOST fans worried that its show runners would also try to pull a large "fake out" to avoid answering the calls of diehard fans for answers to the key mysteries.
The writers did try to get out of years of story layers when they thrust upon us the flashforward universe, where the characters were living different lives but apparently in the same island time frame. It began to call into question whether the flashbacks were actually truthful portrayals of the characters prior to the crash landing on the island. For if the flashforwards were not "real" in the sense that that universe was merely a holding world until the souls of the friends could reunite in the after life, then the same could have been true of the flashbacks (which contained some serious medical and legal errors). If the flashbacks were a dream state, what was the island? A collective dream state or purgatory as speculated by some season one viewers.
LOST viewers never got the clarity from the producers about the last season. We were merely told that the show was always "character focused" so they did not have to answer the complaints.
After many years of debate, Soprano fans got their answer. From recent NY Post article:
The Sopranos” creator David Chase accidentally spoiled the finale during a leaked interview for his book celebrating the Emmy-winning HBO mob drama.
At the end of 2007’s final episode, titled “Made in America,” Tony
Soprano (played by the late James Gandolfini) is eating out with his
family amid a turf war between the New Jersey and New York Mafia
families while an enemy hit man waits in their midst.
The screen then fades to black as Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’ ”
blares on the soundtrack, leaving it ambiguous whether the show’s star
gets whacked — until now.
Spoiler alert: In the roundtable discussion, co-author Alan Sepinwall
asked Chase, “When you said there was an end point, you don’t mean Tony
at Holsten’s [the diner], you just meant, ‘I think I have two more
years’ worth of stories left in me.’ ”
Then Chase, 74, dropped the bombshell: “Yes, I think I had that death
scene around two years before the end … But we didn’t do that.”
Noticing his epic leak, co-author Matt Zoller Seitz chimed in: “You
realize, of course, that you just referred to that as a death scene.”
“F - - k you guys,” replied Chase upon realizing his blunder.
Showing posts with label finale. Show all posts
Showing posts with label finale. Show all posts
Saturday, June 13, 2020
Wednesday, January 27, 2016
TWO LOSTS
There is a position in the LOST universe that says that the fans who hated The Ending never understood it. Or that they were never real fans of the show. Or they expected too many answers to the questions posed in the story lines.
In order to justify this viewpoint, it is said that the final season of LOST was its own universe, its own independent story - - - its own self-contained bubble. It's features and attributes do not reflect what was happening in the island world. In other words, the fact that the characters in the sideways world were dead did not mean that the characters were dead all along. But that in itself is only a supposition.
Except, there were connections between the two worlds. In the sideways world, it was a character's "awakening" that flooded back island memories to re-bond with lost friends and lovers.
But if you do want to separate LOST into two distinct, independent stories, here is what you get:
THE ISLAND world would apparently have ended with Juliet detonating the bomb, killing everyone on the island. Or, as the science would tell, you can't detonate an atomic bomb with a rock (there needs to be a complex chain reaction explosion to detonate a nuclear device), so the bomb did not work. That would mean the island characters were still "alive" and battling among themselves in the Jacob-MIB feud.
THE SIDEWAYS world would be totally different. For example, none of the characters were ever in a plane crash or lived on the island. They were normal people with normal problems. Ben was a school teacher taking care of his disabled father. Locke was a disabled substitute teacher who was happily married to Helen. Jack was divorced but from Juliet. He had a son. Hurley was a successful businessman after winning the lottery; a confident community leader. Sun and Jin had made it to the US. She was expecting their child.
Now, complete separation of the characters time lines has to be part of any independent universe view. In the linear story telling of the show, the sideways events happened AFTER the island events. And that creates a clear paradox. The children were born in the prior island time, but were not born in the sideways world until the end. And the End was a place of death so how can children be born in the sideways world? Again, the theory that the sideways is self-contained means it is not fair to ask that broad question.
Then you have to look at LOST as two franchises. The island and first 5 seasons were the original. The sideways episodes were the "re-boot" of the franchise (as JJ Abrams did with Star Trek). But that seems too confusing and inconsistent with what the show writers were telling fans at the end of Season 5.
One could divide the worlds into one where the gritty danger of real life engulfs a person with one where a person's dreams and imagination of a perfect life controls. If you take the sideways world as the collective dreams of the island characters, folding it like whipped cream into a cake batter, then you would discount Season 6 as mainly unimportant filler.
If, as some fans thought at the time, the sideways world was truly a glimpse of the characters if Flight 815 did not crash, then that would be fine . . . . until the point when the writers merged the fantasy with the island "awakenings" and the poor choices to conclude the series, such as Sayid embracing his alleged soul mate, Shannon, instead of Nadia. In fact, the whole structure of Season 6 was premised upon Eloise trying to keep Desmond and Penny a part in the sideways world - - - because she knew it would open a Pandora's box of memories to the characters which would cause her son, Daniel, to remember how cruel she was to him.
The two LOSTs explanation is one way of looking at the series. Two distinct character studies of the cast members. But that is a dry, academic explanation. And really unnecessary. If you wanted to show the good and moral side of a character, such as Ben, you could have made those changes in the island world story. You could have had the characters leave the island and try to adapt to LA instead of creating a conflicting, parallel universe.
LOST was one show and one series. It has to be accepted as being one, complete, and coherent story. The last part is what continues to cause fans the most problems. The blanket explanation that the show was only about the characters and their actions and reactions to events is shotgun logic. It does not explain the important mysteries the writers gave us to solve. It does not give closure. It just keeps fans debating the merits of the ending.
In order to justify this viewpoint, it is said that the final season of LOST was its own universe, its own independent story - - - its own self-contained bubble. It's features and attributes do not reflect what was happening in the island world. In other words, the fact that the characters in the sideways world were dead did not mean that the characters were dead all along. But that in itself is only a supposition.
Except, there were connections between the two worlds. In the sideways world, it was a character's "awakening" that flooded back island memories to re-bond with lost friends and lovers.
But if you do want to separate LOST into two distinct, independent stories, here is what you get:
THE ISLAND world would apparently have ended with Juliet detonating the bomb, killing everyone on the island. Or, as the science would tell, you can't detonate an atomic bomb with a rock (there needs to be a complex chain reaction explosion to detonate a nuclear device), so the bomb did not work. That would mean the island characters were still "alive" and battling among themselves in the Jacob-MIB feud.
THE SIDEWAYS world would be totally different. For example, none of the characters were ever in a plane crash or lived on the island. They were normal people with normal problems. Ben was a school teacher taking care of his disabled father. Locke was a disabled substitute teacher who was happily married to Helen. Jack was divorced but from Juliet. He had a son. Hurley was a successful businessman after winning the lottery; a confident community leader. Sun and Jin had made it to the US. She was expecting their child.
Now, complete separation of the characters time lines has to be part of any independent universe view. In the linear story telling of the show, the sideways events happened AFTER the island events. And that creates a clear paradox. The children were born in the prior island time, but were not born in the sideways world until the end. And the End was a place of death so how can children be born in the sideways world? Again, the theory that the sideways is self-contained means it is not fair to ask that broad question.
Then you have to look at LOST as two franchises. The island and first 5 seasons were the original. The sideways episodes were the "re-boot" of the franchise (as JJ Abrams did with Star Trek). But that seems too confusing and inconsistent with what the show writers were telling fans at the end of Season 5.
One could divide the worlds into one where the gritty danger of real life engulfs a person with one where a person's dreams and imagination of a perfect life controls. If you take the sideways world as the collective dreams of the island characters, folding it like whipped cream into a cake batter, then you would discount Season 6 as mainly unimportant filler.
If, as some fans thought at the time, the sideways world was truly a glimpse of the characters if Flight 815 did not crash, then that would be fine . . . . until the point when the writers merged the fantasy with the island "awakenings" and the poor choices to conclude the series, such as Sayid embracing his alleged soul mate, Shannon, instead of Nadia. In fact, the whole structure of Season 6 was premised upon Eloise trying to keep Desmond and Penny a part in the sideways world - - - because she knew it would open a Pandora's box of memories to the characters which would cause her son, Daniel, to remember how cruel she was to him.
The two LOSTs explanation is one way of looking at the series. Two distinct character studies of the cast members. But that is a dry, academic explanation. And really unnecessary. If you wanted to show the good and moral side of a character, such as Ben, you could have made those changes in the island world story. You could have had the characters leave the island and try to adapt to LA instead of creating a conflicting, parallel universe.
LOST was one show and one series. It has to be accepted as being one, complete, and coherent story. The last part is what continues to cause fans the most problems. The blanket explanation that the show was only about the characters and their actions and reactions to events is shotgun logic. It does not explain the important mysteries the writers gave us to solve. It does not give closure. It just keeps fans debating the merits of the ending.
Saturday, May 30, 2015
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.
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.
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