Mr Big was supposed to be beside the point, not the sudden hero. Carrie was definitely meant to return from Paris to her true loves, New York City and her three best girlfriends.
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Too bad the series did this at the expense of its core empowering principle: that romance is nice, but female friendship lasts forever.
Some love the warm-bath feeling of the predictable ending, like that of Sex and the City in 2004, which united star-crossed lovers Carrie and Mr Big. Many want a finale that tidily wraps up each character arc and plot thread. But the important question may have been: why does it matter to us so much to learn how he died? Why did we need to see him die? He would die eventually, because humans do – and the show’s major theme was always inevitable mortality, the ways we often misuse our fleeting time.Ī thought-provoking finale doesn’t often inspire much love from longtime viewers of a show, though, even if it can result in a stronger piece of art. That series’ ambiguous, cut-to-black 2007 finale enraged viewers who demanded a clear resolution for its characters – but it allowed for a debate that cut to the heart of the series itself. Mad Men’s ending invites comparison to that of its spiritual father, The Sopranos, for which Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner was a writer.
It resulted in exactly the kind of discussion that makes a finale resonate – we watch quality dramas, after all, so that we can have the lightly intellectual cocktail party chatter they inspire. No one doubts that Mad Men’s final moments had a point. It was a confused time.”ĭespite 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.įor starters, having something interesting to say helps. 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.
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As Rolling Stone critic Rob Sheffield, an avowed Mad Menfanatic, wrote on the occasion of the finale: “Series finales always suck, and everyone knows it, but TV shows still feel obliged to keep attempting them. And they rarely get what they’re hoping for. Viewers expect more from their finales these days. For comparison purposes, consider that the M*A*S*H finale, the most-watched broadcast of scripted television in the US ever, attracted 106 million viewers.įinales are inherently difficult to master: up to hundreds of hours of television, aired over several years, come down to one episode, one final scene. Parenthood’s January finale drew only about 5.5 million viewers, a relatively small number for US TV, but the show trended on social media for days before and after it aired.
That’s great, but it also raises the emotional stakes even programmes with cult followings get a big sendoff that fans will over-analyse on the internet for days and weeks afterwards. Now, in what so many TV critics have hyped as the ‘golden age of quality television’, most shows that make it past a first season do get a chance to end gracefully. The Mary Tyler Moore Show on US TV changed that by planning its own end date in 1977, resulting in a finale many would argue sets the standard for all future television endings. By the time long-running programmes signed off, few people cared enough to watch at all, much less scrutinise the final episodes frame-by-frame – very often those final episodes weren’t intended to be final episodes at all and provided little in the way of closure. In fact, until the 1970s and ‘80s, most shows were ‘cancelled’ – because they were past their prime – rather than having the privilege of a meticulously planned and hyped ending. Such histrionics would surprise television viewers of several decades ago, who often didn’t notice when a show went off the air. The inevitable social media storm ensued: was the 17 May conclusion satisfying or frustrating? Cynical or hopeful? The worst or best thing ever to happen on television and possibly in all of cultural history? After eight years of great television fuelled by heavy symbolism, complex characters, meditations on masculinity, feminism, capitalism and media, Mad Men came down to one parting image: an old Coke commercial with an insufferably catchy jingle.