Television Is Always A First Draft: Why A Good Finale Is A Miracle

Or, to put that another way: television is a serialized story that’s being finished right in front of us. Think about that for a second the next time you’re either delighted by or crushed by a series finale. Whether it worked for you or it didn’t, just piloting the thing to a recognizable kind of ending is something of a miracle.

Mad Men ended this past Sunday, and my Twitter feed is still full of people saying they can’t get the Coke jingle out of their heads. Meanwhile, I complained to my wife this morning that I felt the Internet had robbed me of objectivity toward that final shot, due to all the guessing that had gone on. “It was this big moment and all I could think was, ‘Yup, guess you were right, you geniuses.'” She listened patiently, and then told me why this was stupid.

First, it was my fault for reading things about Mad Men if I knew the finale was going to be important to me. Then there’s the fact that the very last shot shouldn’t dictate how I felt about the rest of the episode — and we’d established that I did have wildly mixed feelings already. It’s likely, she said, that I was taking my ambivalence about the episode and projecting it onto a faceless, external bunch. Finally, there’s the fact that I tend to follow, on social media, creative types (including critics) who make a regular habit of pulling things apart and thinking about how they work — “A THING YOU DO ALL THE TIME!” And as she put it: “This is their version of sports!”

So yes, I was being a boob. And just to get it out of the way, here’s my actual quibble with the finale: as with a lot of series finales, this one felt rushed. Through this whole back half-season, it was as though Matthew Weiner and his writers couldn’t bear to deal with the end, so they stalled and stalled and stalled — and then realized, “Oh, shit! Rent’s due!” My favorite storyline was the Joan one. My least was the bizarre rom-com moment between Peggy and Stan. Not that they shouldn’t have ended up together, just that this one realization scene felt like it’d been written by fans who really, really, really wanted this to happen.

I had similar issues with the Breaking Bad finale. Too much moseying in the run-up, and then a sudden vomiting of story and event in the finale that felt so out of character (and tone) with the rest of the series. For the record, my perfect series finales would be: Friday Night Lights, The Comeback, Enlightened, The Shield, The Office (UK). I also really liked the Battlestar and Lost finales, so there’s your gauge of how seriously to take me.

A great finale can elevate an entire series. The Dollhouse ending, for sure, makes that whole show seem like it was great, when most of season one was a weird scramble. Meanwhile, a disappointing finale can leave a bad taste in your mouth. It’s a lot of pressure for the writer(s), and this brings me back to the point made in the headline: a television series, by its nature, is a first draft. That is a crazy thing to consider.

A book, before it is published, is written, often several times over. Then it, generally, is shown to someone. When feedback comes in, the book may yet again be rewritten — sometimes more than once. Same thing with a movie. Before it’s ever shot, there’s a script. Most times, a bunch of people, for better or for worse, have gone over that script and made changes, or perhaps approved it. When you watch a movie, you are watching the filmed version of that script — and that film itself is edited, watched, recut, etc.

A TV show? The individual scripts might be rewritten and argued about before we ever see what gets made of them, but the series as a whole — the work of fiction — is completed for the first time right in front of us, in week-by-week chunks. That can work to TV’s advantage — do fans hate Nikki and Paulo? You can kill them later in the season — but it also makes a satisfying ending something of a miracle. Again, you’re watching someone land this thing, and it’s a plane they’ve never piloted before (and did they remember to add wheels to it back at the beginning?) and a strip they’ve never landed on before, and also they’ve got all the passengers pressing up against their backs, muttering, “This better be good.”

It’s a little bit crazy, this culture we’ve created for ourselves here in 2015, where we’re either in the midst of, or the end of, Television’s New Golden Age. We’ve decided that we prefer serialized adult dramas to episodic or procedural stuff — even Law & Order: SVU has a running, and complicated, storyline among the SVU crew — but we maybe don’t always recognize that “serialized” equals “not finished ahead of time.” Many of our great novels of the 19th century were first published in serial form, but in a lot of those cases, they were revised before being released in book form — or they maintained a certain “sprawl” that worked for readers of the time but would simply not be tolerated by 21st-century television watchers. Nowadays a bottle episode in the middle of a season is enough to drive a lot of viewers to feelings of murder.

So with shows like Mad Men or Breaking Bad, we’re looking for a serialized story that also has a clear shape to its overall narrative. Yet television shows, when writing begins, hardly ever know if they’ll be back for a second season, never mind a fifth. And at that, will the fifth be the most appropriate place to end it? Or should it really have ended in the third, and now we have to retrofit an ending while accounting for what’s come, storywise, in the intervening two seasons?

It’s a strange thing, too, to be adapting what’s essentially a pay-cable model — 8- or 1o-episode seasons of limited-run series — to the worlds of both basic cable and network, worlds that are determined, first and foremost, by ratings-based advertiser dollars. The networks are still grappling with this — Revenge, on ABC, just ended a run of 22-episode seasons for a show that really should’ve been maybe two 13-episode seasons.

It’s not that Mad Men or AMC were wrong for lasting seven years, by the way. They were all short seasons, and the show never felt to me like it’d overstayed its welcome or was spinning its wheels. But again: what we want as viewers is not always what’s best for storytelling. I love Nashville above all other shows. Is it the best, most artfully told story? No. Does it feature characters I love who are constantly acting against what’s best for them? Indeed. And when it’s over, each hour, I am sad. This is what we want in a TV show, to spend huge amounts of time with our favorite characters. If you don’t make that connection with your viewers, then you have not made a successful TV show. But giving the audience what they want, all the time, as much as they want? Maybe not such a great thing.

That’s the trick with storytelling: it works best when it’s finite. We love a book, and we grow sadder to be leaving that book as the pages in our right hand dwindle toward the pile in our left. (Hell, it’s why we love a character in a book: by necessity, we’re getting the most compressed, greatest-hits version of them.) But if that book were, as one movie dares to imagine, some sort of Neverending Story? We’d come to hate it. I don’t know: maybe this is our American sentimentality coming to bite us, yet again, while the Brits seem to have it all figured out.

In the end — or after the end, I guess — I still love Mad Men. I will probably rewatch at least some of it at some point, maybe when my kids decide to take the plunge. And maybe that ending will feel better to me, divorced from my own expectations and from the oddness of checking in on a story week-by-week. And if it doesn’t? If it actually feels like a worse series of choices to me? I’ll have to reckon with that, too, for that is the hidden fee when you’re renting your stories on the installment plan. And god bless the people who do that work, for their hours spent trying to hammer liquid into shapes that we will like. I don’t know which of us is the crazier party.