Television this year had plenty of its usual ups, downs and sideways moves, but was it us or did finales die a death? A classic last episode, like the ones that signed off The Sopranos, Six Feet Under or Breaking Bad, can keep us talking for months. But, in 2017, most endings were a bit meh. How come?
In this era of peak TV, finales have lost some of their currency. Now, nothing is safe from a revival, because, with so many rivals to compete against, TV networks love revamps that have a headstart thanks to brand familiarity. And if the revival itself is a success, its own end won’t be the end: anyone silly enough to think Twin Peaks: The Return would helpfully clear up all the lingering mysteries of the original classic will have been dismayed to see a season closer that was more like a launchpad for a whole other programme.
Peak-TV fatigue was also a factor with David Lynch’s triumphant TV comeback, which had already delivered 17 game-changing, bewilderingly awesome episodes before it came to a close. Nobody had any emotions left to care about it going. On a couple of occasions in 2017, we did mind, and the appropriate people took action.
Peter Kay’s perfect miniature sitcom Car Share suddenly wasn’t perfect in its last two minutes, delivering a fake-out double ending that was both annoying and unsatisfying. Kay reconsidered and has promised another episode of some kind. Netflix, too, realised it had killed Sense8 with more abruptness than its loyal fans deserved, so it is saying sorry with two closing specials in 2018. Likewise, Looking got a film to bid farewell after its unceremonious dumping in 2015. In a world where nothing televisual ever really dies, anticlimaxes can at least be reversed.
Anticlimaxes were, however, everywhere this year. Lena Dunham’s Girls, for example, sloped off having done its job. All the thinkpieces had been written. Kooky half-hour dramedies poking deep into millennial psyches had become the norm. In fact, shows such as Insecure and Broad City were threatening to make Girls lose the zeitgeisty freshness it needed to maintain to survive. Never mind that it was still miraculously well-written and acted: its cultural moment had expired and the finale was not in itself an event.
Sometimes, finales are a chance for underrated shows to bid for posthumous acclaim. Halt and Catch Fire signed off with the perfect amount of closure for its characters, the rounded portrayal of whom had gradually won the show a small army of fans. And The Leftovers, a saga about the aftermath of 2% of the world’s population suddenly vanishing that only ever attracted about 2% of the audience it deserved, won wild acclaim from followers for how it ended. That might prompt some of the other 98% to go back, catch up and eventually arrive at the season three denouement. It will be there, waiting for them with a chilly I-told-you-so look, as it unfurls in all its ethereal majesty to confirm that The Leftovers was great all along.
This year’s most successful swansongs were for new shows that had snuck up on us, hooking viewers into an unfamiliar narrative. Big Little Lies had a core secret that was teased out via flashforwards and was, when all was revealed, worth hanging around for. Its miniseries format, with a punchy seven episodes, just about allowed stragglers to catch up and see the conclusion in real time. Of course, that on-demand viewing means we are doing this less and less is one more factor in finales’ reduced importance. And with no promise of a second season – there will be one, but we didn’t know that then – the climax was given extra urgency.
A very different show that nevertheless mirrored BLL’s gathering momentum was Broken, which, on one level, was yet another predictably excellent Jimmy McGovern drama about impoverished people living on a precipice of social injustice. As it went on, though, the surprising lead performance by Sean Bean, and the show’s slow accumulation of shards of hope amid the despair, got us rooting for a final episode that might offer redemption. When it did, Broken broke through into contention for the British drama of the year.
Then there was Line of Duty, which now builds every season to not just the most exciting last episode of the year, but to a resolution that trumps every previous season finale of Line of Duty. No big spoilers if you’re dashing through the revived box set on iPlayer, but the 2017 LoD completed that impossible task once again, managing to outdo the previous year’s pivotal interview scene for sheer excitement. Given that someone whipped out a machine gun in 2016, this was impressive. When Line of Duty one day says goodbye for ever with a last episode more thrilling than all the others, that will finally be a finale worth shouting about.
