On the heels of “The Good Place” airing its series finale last night, I’ve been thinking about how TV shows come to an end. I’ve written about some disappointing ones, and the state of TV in general, but I want to focus on what, exactly, makes for a “good” or “bad” series finale.
As creator Mike Schur told the Hollywood Reporter:
“No — there’s really only one goal ever for a show finale, in my mind, and that’s to make people who have been watching the show and invested time and energy and emotion in the show feel like it’s a good ending. That’s really the only goal. Anything other than that is uncontrollable and unknowable. This show has made a lot of arguments about various aspects of the human experience and about what matters and what doesn’t, and about how we ought to live and behave. All of that stuff, if any of that stuff resonates, that’s gravy. But my primary hope is that people who have been watching the show and like it feel like it’s a good ending. That’s all.”
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/good-place-series-finale-explained-mike-schur-interview-1275060
Unlike many people (at least, what I gleaned from my twitter searches last night), I wasn’t a fan of “The Good Place” finale. Don’t get me wrong; there were moments that were really enjoyable (especially that Mary Steenburgen cameo!), but instead of satisfying a comedic itch, it just made me anxious about the the unending peril of mortality. Judging Schur by his own metric, I didn’t feel like it was a *good* ending, but it may be because I’m viewing it through a selfish lens of “how can paradise be imperfect?” Character beats certainly landed (Jason essentially became a monk after all!), and it had a lot of good callbacks (“take it sleazy”), but my initial feeling was disappointment.
So what, then, are finales that actually hold up? What do we truly want from a finale? I posed the question to my fiancee, and she (rightly) said as a matter of first course we want “closure.” Finales in theory should not leave dangling plot threads or open questions to which viewers were promised answers. That said, I don’t think people want a finale that serves as a Cliff’s Notes for the whole show, and the entire episode shouldn’t be simply rehashes of prior in-jokes. It has to provide closure and honor the past, but also put our characters in a different place than they were in from the jump.
I think there’s a way to walk the line. I, for instance, loathe the “Dawson’s Creek” finale – but interspersed throughout, they used songs that had been key musical moments in the show. That part (for me) worked. “Mr. Robot” ended with a dramatic reveal that our main character was not, in fact, Elliot, but another alternate personality – explaining why we were let into those four particular seasons’ of his psyche. Or, with a show like “The O.C.,” they flashed back to key moments, but ultimately made the show come full-circle, with Ryan becoming a new Sandy Cohen:
In that way, while the show provided closure, it also made everything feel cyclical, and like that world could continue ad infinitum. That is true of one of my other favorite finales, “E.R.” That show honored the past by bringing back Benton, Corday, Weaver, and even Mark Greene’s daughter Rachel, but also ended with a shot we’d seen dozens of times before: doctors waiting outside County for an ambulance to arrive. Doctors’ shifts end, but the E.R. at County General will go on.
But what about comedies? I think other Schur shows have handled finales much better. The “Parks and Recreation” finale flash-forwarded to different points in the characters’ lives, and yet was framed by a story of the Parks Department performing one last public service job. “The Office” ended as a lot of finales do – with a wedding. There were callbacks, sure, but it also honored the show’s thesis: that the people with whom you work become a second family.
I’ll make this argument until I’m blue in the face (even though it’s probably much more accidental than with the intention to which I ascribe it), but I think (most) (good) shows have theses. “Parks and Rec?” People who work together improve each others’ lives. “This is Us”? We’re all part of a grand picture. So I think a good finale has to, at a minimum, honor what the show was trying to say.
Where some finales have failed is diverting from an original promise. “How I Met Your Mother” announced in its title (!) and first episode that Ted was searching for the titular mother. Fans (myself included) felt betrayed when that journey ended and he realized the search was ultimately for Robin. “LOST,” at its core, was a show about people who had been in a bad way, who came together under dire circumstances to survive and build a community. As I wrote in an early post for this blog, the finale betrayed the original premise because the actions on the island no longer mattered. It’s the same issue I have with “The Rise of Skywalker” – if Palpatine is magically alive, what Vader did in “Return of the Jedi” is robbed of its (redemptive) power.
Rewarding fans with a solid through-line to the end is the best way for a finale to go. Widely hailed as one of the best finales of all-time is “Six Feet Under,” because a show about death and a funeral home chose to show all of its main characters’ deaths. It’s a really creative idea, but most finales don’t need to think so cleverly. A show like “New Girl” wrapped up its final season with Jess and Nick getting married and the friends moving out of the loft; “Friends,” too, had the main apartment be vacated by Monica and Chandler (and their newborn twins). Both shows’ pilots were about a literal new girl moving in (Jess and Rachel), and both shows ended with people moving out.
When people talk about shows “sticking the landing,” it does’t require the finale to be the *best* episode of the show, just one that honors what’s come before. “The Leftovers” – a show that always involved a bit of mystery – ended with Nora telling Kevin either the most convoluted lie or detailed truth, but either way that was a show that had the premise of “If 2% of the world disappeared, how would the other 98% react?” and a thesis of “They’ll do it by making new communities and relationships.” It’s also a meditation on grief, and loss, and longing.
In writing, I realized that a lot of the shows that I’ve been thinking about have dealt with an idea of Community – even “Community”!
But it makes sense, right? A sitcom or drama usually deals with a core cast of characters who are together for various reasons (they’re family, the work together, they live near each other, etc.) And so when the last episode airs, there usually is a logical reason for that togetherness to end: someone’s moving away, the branch is closing, people have new jobs, and so on. The beauty of endings like “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” or Hawkeye flying away on “M*A*S*H” is that circumstances have justified why viewers will no longer be seeing their favorites week in and week out.
Even in the finales that are circular or don’t offer definitive closure, there can be an ending that feels natural. I’m thinking especially of – and have mentioned before, even on this blog – the end of “Cheers” – Sam’s simply saying, “Sorry, we’re closed” is the pitch-perfect way to end a show about a bar.
The unspoken elephant in the room here is that basically every show is being rebooted now. The very idea of “finality” seems quaint, as impermanence and the zombie-fication of shows once thought long gone reigns supreme. So, what do we want from finales? Closure, sure. A sense that the characters we like are happy, and the ones we dislike aren’t? An honoring of the premise? Maybe it’s just that indescribable feeling, knowing that we’ve left characters at the right moment.
That’s why, in my opinion, “The West Wing” had the finale that felt the most *right.* The Bartlett presidency ended, the Santos one begun, the cycle began anew, our favorite players were in new roles, and the only thought on President Bartlett’s mind? “Tomorrow.”
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The PSA 