Warning: this article contains spoilers
At 2am on Monday morning thousands of people across the country will stumble out of bed to watch the final episode of TV’s biggest show, Game of Thrones.
Among the questions they hope will be answered: did wine-swigging villainess Cersei really die in the rubble of the Red Keep? Will Jon Snow have to kill Daenerys Targaryen, the woman he loves, following her fiery destruction of King’s Landing? And, most important of all, who will finally sit on the (presumably somewhat charred) Iron Throne?
This level of engagement is both a boon and a curse for any TV series creator. For, as show runners from The Sopranos’ David Chase to Lost’s much-maligned double act, Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof, would no doubt agree, ending a long-running, hugely popular series is never easy.
For every show that gets it right – such as Mad Men, whose cynical ending rang gloriously true to Matthew Weiner’s dissection of the hollow heart of the American dream – there’s a misstep like that two-hour conclusion to Lost, which infuriated fans after most of their theories crumbled to dust in favour of the obvious answer: they were all dead all along.
There are programmes where the ending looks great in retrospect – the premature cancellation of This Life meant that everything ends with Milly’s infamous punch. The divisive Seinfeld denouement, which saw the gang go on trial for their mean-spirited ways, only rings more true these days when we are all arguably as horrible, albeit under cover of online anonymity.
Larry David, the co-creator of the comedy, cut to the heart of why ending a popular series is such a tricky beast. “I think the thing about finales is everybody writes their own in their head,” he told the blogger Bill Simmons in 2014. “They go, ‘Oh, well this should happen to George, and Jerry and Elaine should get together …’ They’ve already written it and often they’re disappointed because it’s not what they wrote.”
It’s a line of argument that rings particularly true where GoT is concerned, not least because this series is the last all-conquering show of the internet age. As our viewing becomes more scattered, the audience choosing when to watch, rather than the TV channel dictating, so increasingly few programmes can be said to offer a truly communal experience.
In such a fragmented climate, GoT is that rare thing: a programme that dominates weekly conversations because everyone, even non-viewers, gets the references being made. We all know “winter is coming”, that Jon Snow knows nothing and that just as you should never get involved in a land war in Asia so, too, you should never accept a wedding invitation in Westeros. Yet the flipside of such cultural dominance is that it is all but impossible for the co-creators, David Benioff and DB Weiss, to craft an ending that will appeal to all. For the past eight years fans have debated and discussed various plot points from the obvious to the obscure. They’ve sided with characters and described themselves as Targaryen loyalists or Starks until they die. They’ve imagined their ideal ending and can’t picture it not being the one that happens.
And, because GoT is such a huge show, all those theories and feelings become magnified until you end up with a Change.org petition, which demands that the final season be remade, as though HBO had either the time or inclination to recall one of television’s largest casts and reshoot some of the most expensive episodes ever made at the say-so of an enraged fan. At time of going to print, it had been signed by almost half a million people.
By contrast, a smaller, more personal series, such as Fleabag, can go out on its own terms. Phoebe Waller-Bridge crafted a bittersweet and believable exit for her conflicted lead character, last seen alone again yet with a new sense of purpose. But it’s arguable that she was able to do so in part because even getting that second series seemed like a gift – Waller-Bridge having admitted that she hadn’t always intended to bring the character back and did so only because she thought there was something to say.
It will be interesting to see if her other show, the spy thriller adaptation Killing Eve, which is passing from writer to writer and was recently renewed for a third series, will garner the same praise when it comes to an end. Early reviews for the second series are strong but it’s an odd rule of television that the longer something continues, the less likely it is that the finale will win universal acclaim.
In America, the adage is four seasons good, anything past that bad. There are notable exceptions – 1980s-set spy drama The Americans recently pulled off a conclusion after six series that was clever and in keeping with the show’s characters and tone – but it largely holds true.
Thus The Wire should arguably have concluded after the heart-breaking fourth series; zombie drama The Walking Dead should have pulled the plug long before the upcoming 10th season; and even the much-lauded Breaking Bad’s first four seasons are far better than its fifth and final offering, in which creator Vince Gilligan set his anti-hero Walter White up for the expected fall from grace, only to give him a surprisingly heroic end. Similarly, while the record ratings of Jed Mercurio’s Bodyguard will surely lead to a second series, it’s hard not to feel that the ending of the first, in which Richard Madden’s stoic former soldier finally sought help for his PTSD, was the perfect place to stop.
The desire for GoT to craft an ending that resonates is further complicated by the fact that the story it is adapting, George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, is unfinished. Benioff and Weiss have reportedly been given an outline of how it all ends but Martin has admitted the paths taken to get there are divergent, and many believe that the two conclusions may not ultimately turn out the same.
Nor does it help that not everyone is in agreement about the show’s strengths. There are those who love it for its big, bold battle scenes with their clever references to famous films and their sense that this is television remade on a truly epic scale. And there are those who thrill to the shady politicking in King’s Landing and the needle-sharp dialogue in which neither side is saying what they truly mean and the audience is in on the dark joke.
Marrying both sides used to be relatively easy – each series would begin slowly, build darkly and conclude thunderously – but, as the ending has loomed closer, so the inherent tensions between these two types of storytelling have come to the fore. It’s no surprise, then, that one of the biggest complaints about this season has been that as it gallops towards the finish line, so a certain amount of nuance has been lost.
It is arguable, too, that this is a show that has fallen victim to its own publicity. That because all the hype was about the spectacle, the creators have crafted a final season relying more on big “gotcha” moments than on the feuding families that made its name. In doing so they appear to have forgotten that viewers cared about these characters, even the ones they despised: to see them abruptly removed from the board with little or no build-up can feel oddly personal.
Despite these issues, it’s still possible Benioff and Weiss may manage to pull those last disparate strands together for an ending that shocks, surprises and satisfies, if not every fan, then at least the majority. The duo, taking no chances, have said that they plan to be drunk and far from the internet when that final episode airs. I’ll see the rest of you online.
