The Series Finales of Seem

“Let be be the finale of seem/The only emperor is the Emperor of Ice Cream.” It’s okay if you don’t get it. Its an elder English major thing.

Ever notice that series finales of all these once-celebrated TV shows rarely satisfy?

Granted, my first example was by no means celebrated, but it was almost funny—almost—when Star Trek: Enterprise, after its one decent season, got canceled and went out with a Clip Show from the Future episode in which people of the future, namely Riker and Troi from Star Trek: The Next Generation, see what happened to the brave pre-Kirk-and-Spock explorers. 

In the course of this dull affair I barely remember 15 years later, one of the more beloved characters was killed, and for no apparent reason than to import gravitas into this clip-show finale. The death was cheap, everything about this episode looked cheap, and you could tell the cast couldn’t wait until this humiliation was over. At least Scott Bakula still found work after this sad ending to the series of spinoffs from Star Trek: Next Generation (itself a spinoff) beginning with Deep Space Nine in 1993. Glasses are raised for the less fortunate.

Then there was that show Lost, the one that made executive producer stars out of J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof. For a while in the late ‘00s it had a dedicated cult following. That following did not survive the sloppily written finale. I wonder how many young people under age 18 remember it. I never saw it, so I’m grateful to have been spared the disappointment.

The most famous and recent disaster of a series finale was the one for the once mighty Game of Thrones. Given the opportunity for cosplay (costume + play), the fan base will survive, if only as a niche among sci-fi/fantasy media fandom, which is better than most get. Especially when the Great Big Supernatural Bad and his army is dispatched with one poke of a dagger by some little elfin thing and the much-beloved Mother of Dragons turns evil at the last minute because, as one bystander helpfully offers after all these seasons, it’s what her bloodline tends to do.

When the tweenage girl in Stephen King’s Doctor Sleep cried out, “I feel like I’m Daenerys Targaryen!” during a particularly non-heroic heroic escape from the Bad People she never seemed to be in any real danger from, I knew I was reading my last Stephen King novel. Knowing this Great Platinum Blonde Hope ended up murdering an entire village with one of her pet dragons at least makes it a little funny to think back on. Only a little, though.

Like most television shows I prefer to spend my time reading about them online than watching them. I’ll view the occasional clip, but that’s all. It’s not so much the overt pseudo-moralizing and mean-minded ideological agendas that stink up these things these days, though those are certainly a factor. It’s a matter of committing the time to a structure that involves so much talky/ broody/ gratuitous sexy-time sandwiched between moments of gross and visceral shock. 

The Walking Dead was a great example of this. I’m impressed it’s still around, years after the women on Twitter abandoned the “follow me back pls Norman Reedus” line in their handles. I can imagine the reaction when the series finale to that is announced. I can imagine no one being happy as it finally winds up.

Every now and then I learn of some great, “binge-worthy” series that I’ve never heard of before that is concluding after seven or eight seasons. I’ve heard a credible case for this last decade being something of a Golden Age of Television for all the stuff you can watch. And so much is so cleverly written, too! 

Thrill to the high school teacher’s descent into evil as he manufactures and sells methamphetamine to pay his medical bills! (After all these years Breaking Bad is still considered the gold standard for binge-watching a series. General consensus holds that it was consistently good from its bitter beginning to its bitter end.) Nod sadly and knowingly at the cartoon character with the horse’s head on a human body as we examine the effects of alcohol abuse on the people around him. That last one, Bojack Horseman, recently concluded on a blue note, but at least its fanbase seemed satisfied with the conclusion—although some thought it would have been better with the character dying as he did in the penultimate episode. (It turned out to be a dream, or something like that).

Supernatural, the only TV series I’ve been following consistently since Stargate Atlantis wrapped up years back, is concluding after 15 years on the air. I’m heartened to see the writers are doing their best to send Sam and Dean out with good stories; I had feared everything was going to fizzle as with Stargate S.G. 1, which was the longest running genre show at 10 seasons when it went out. The boys are up against God Himself this season. Talk about a Final Boss.

I can only hope the writers, cast, and crew manage to pull it off. When Supernatural is done, that’s it. That will be my series finale of contemporary series. That corner having been turned, like a lot of older people, I’ll go to YouTube and catch episodes of the old classic stuff from the 1960s, most of which were lucky to have lasted three or four seasons back in the day. 

I’m already doing that with the black-and-white first season of The Wild Wild West. It’s nice to have something to sit down and watch with my wife. In the meantime, I raise a most fittingly cooled cup of coffee to the turning of this corner. When there were only so many channels and only so much content, we all had that much more in common. But it’s been 40 years since an entire nation wanted to find out who shot J.R., and over half a century since electric guitar sales spiked because some band from England played them on Ed Sullivan’s Sunday night variety show.

It is what it was, and the beat goes on.