What's in an Ending? How Our Obsession With Closure Is Ruining Television

Stop letting series finales define your favorite TV shows.

Not Available Lead
Complex Original

Image via Complex Original

Not Available Lead

Earlier this week, The Sopranos was back in the headlines when showrunner David Chase kinda, sorta revealed Tony's fate in the final episode. "David Chase finally answers the question he wants fans to stop asking," claimed the Vox.com article. Now we could finally have closure! Or could we?  

As any fan of the show remembers, the Soprano family's deep-fried Eucharist cut to black, leaving Steve Perry hanging mid-syllable and viewers calling their cable providers in panic. It was both jarring and ingenious—quite possibly the only proper way to end a series where explicit closure would have seemed like a cop-out. It was also the first (but not last, or should I say Lost?) time that commenters on the Internet would proclaim that the last episode of a series "ruined" a show. (Seinfeld  had an equally controversial ending, but no one thought Jerry and co.'s prison sentence invalidated seven seasons of America's most beloved comedy.) With 20 atramental seconds of silence, Chase ushered in a new era of expectation that drastically changed the way we experience TV. 

1.

Fast forward six years, past Lost's spiritual send-off and Breaking Bad's "Baby Blue" blowout, to the weeks before the Damon Lindelof's new series, The Leftovers. In case you misplaced your mom's HBO Go password, the show is a drama about a small town dealing with the unexplained phenomenon of two-percent of the world's population having poofed out of existence. In the weeks leading up to the show, the New York Times published a piece titled "Damon Lindelof Promises You His New Show Won’t End Like ‘Lost’," in which Lindelof assured audiences that his new show wouldn't be a repeat of his past failure. It was a bizarre, possibly unprecedented situation where a writer was justifying the audiences emotional involvement before a single episode of a show had even aired. 

But in our current television climate, it makes sense. Audiences no longer seem to realize that television is, as it was 30 years ago, still serialized entertainment. The quality may be higher, but TV is written one show at a time, one season at a time, and there's often no guarantee a series will even exist the following year. If a showrunner has a grand finale in mind, it's purely theoretical; first the network needs to sell ads and get eyeballs on the screen. "I never knew if the show was coming back for most of the series," Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner recently told The Wall Street Journal. "So we treated every episode 13 like it was the end." Writers and producers know that even the best shows usually don't last more than a few years, while others become pale versions of their former glory.

2.

Fans these days don't want to hear that something they love now won't be around next year. It isn't much fun to think about the logistics of the entertainment industry as you watch your favorite show. From the first episode to the last, we want writers to have a unified vision, where quality doesn't flag and a show's final moments make it "worthwhile." If you ask Lost's biggest fanboys if the show is still worth watching now, most will probably tell you not to bother. Think about it: This was a show that fans spent at least 121 hours obsessing over, and they wouldn't recommend it to a friend. The words "time investment" are often thrown around these days, as if fans believe they are doing actual work when they flip on the tube. I'll be the first to admit that that's how I feel when I tune into The Leftovers every week. 

A world where viewers think fun can be retroactively erased doesn't sound like the Golden Age of television to me—it sounds like an epic bummer. Take Breaking Bad, the recent high water mark for a series ending, and imagine what could have been: What if Vince Gilligan had blown the last four episodes and left us with a nasty comedown rather than an epic high? Would that have somehow erased the pitch-perfect writing and visual poetry of prior episodes—all the ecstatic G-chats and watercolor discussions? I was there, man, I know how much fun I had.  So were you. 

3.

Then compare Breaking Bad to Deadwood, a show that ran three seasons and was, in my opinion, up there with the best TV ever made. Unlike its peers, though, it ended without much of an ending at all—no cut to black, no  shootout, no where-are-they-now montage. Still, there will forever be three perfect seasons spattered with some of the best dialog ever written (you should watch them!), but the reason David Milch isn't still getting grilled about the show is that fans will always see as unfinished. When The Sopranos cut to black, maybe the hit wasn't on Tony, but on the audience's impossible expectations. Last-minute validation is nothing compared to years of happy memories to look back on. 

Nathan Reese is a News Editor at Complex who thinks Lost is "worth the investment." He tweets here

Latest in Pop Culture