This was a fun read. It’s interesting that you can actually quantify finales getting worse over time and that’s a dissappointment. I do like the closing sentiment- does it matter? And that’s intersting to think on. Shows like Game of Thrones and Sopranos- of course it matters. But Seinfeld is left with a dissapointing ending and that doesn’t keep us from rewatching it. The ending doesn’t matter. With How I Met Your Mother it wouldn’t have mattered at all if it wasn’t the actual name of the show and the constant narration throughout. That show was funny and easy to watch and there was absolutely no reason for them to even use that “who’s the mother?” story line at all. What’s my point? Idk man I’m just typing. I kinda forgot what I was talking about now.

I think there’s an important point that came near the end of the article, fittingly.

The way we watch “TV” now is so much different that finales have a greater weight than they would have twenty years ago.

Now, even when a series is released serially rather than dropped as a full set on a streaming service, we think of shows more like very long movies than a bunch of stories set around a premise.

Movies are always bounded by their tendons endings. They always have been. When you walked out of the theater, the ending is what you carried in your mind. It almost defined what your experience of the movie was.

We now watch series in binges (or, we do sometimes), and more importantly, people rewatch via binges. We see things in series that we simply couldn’t see when they were being aired because human memory is fallible. We would only really remember the biggest parts of a given episode by the next week, and only the most important parts of a season by the next season.

That gave a different perception of shows.

There were a ton of shows that never got true finales over the decades since television erupted. Nobody cared if the last episode wasn’t a satisfying end because what they cared about was the show not being on, if they cared at all. More often, back in the eighties and before, ratings would drop as interest waned, and the show got canceled and the majority really didn’t care at all.

It was only shows with major cultural impact that needed a finale. MASH, as an example. Set all kinds of records for its finale. Something like leave it to beaver? Nobody really cared what the last episode was like because there wasn’t an overall story. You didn’t need to tie things up, and you didn’t really care what happened to the characters after the show ended.

And I think that’s the key. Series with character driven fan bases have to deliver with a “what happens to them next” ending, or people are disappointed. Plot driven fan bases need an ending to the story, or they’re disappointed.

But when it’s a show with both intense character driven progression that people link to the characters in their minds, and there’s a plot that is the underpinning of that, the stakes feel higher for viewers. Sometimes, an ending is going to be bad at the time it comes, but turn out to make sense later on, after rewatching with the knowledge of the ending.

Like the sopranos ending. It was horrible for the fans at the time because it didn’t feel like an ending. But when you go into it knowing what the ending is, it changes what the show means. That’s a lot like a movie.

You me and the apocalypse. Jawdropping finale, great cliffhanger. And cancelation afterwards.