Feeling a Little Lost

I was reminded this week of something I wrote about a year ago, referring to the TV shows we make a habit of watching. Of the six I listed, ER ran its course last spring; Heroes, although valiantly protesting it wasn't dead yet, was apparently carted off a couple months ago; and we said a reluctant goodbye to our friends on a certain island (or maybe not) just days ago. So it appears that, on top of all the other landmarks I'm going to have to reprogram in a few weeks, I will also need to re-navigate the television dial (note to our younger friends: once upon a time, televisions had an actual dial! Leaving us with this charming anachronism).

As a longtime student of TV history -- not in an unattractive way, of course; as I have often pointed out, it's The Other Guy who gets obsessive... I'm an aficionado -- this has also caused me to reflect a bit on the nature of the series finale. As far as I'm aware, this kind of thing didn't happen in the early days of television. I Love Lucy was a beloved show, certainly, but I can't find any evidence that it had a finale in the modern sense. Same with Burns & Allen, Maverick, Perry Mason -- all popular programs I more or less pulled out of a hat and checked.

It's not like I'm going to really research it or anything ... but I believe the modern Finale Event dates to 1967 when The Fugitive concluded with a 2-part, cliffhanger finale. Part 2 was at that point in time the most-watched episode (by percentage of households watching) in television history... and it's still third among all series episodes behind the Cheers finale and "Who Shot J.R.?". Among other things, this points out the difference between the old-fashioned world of "You can watch anything you like, as long as it's on one of these 3 channels" world of true broadcasting, and today's environment where each viewer gets his own individual cable network.

Update: I just found these guys and they more or less agree with me on The Fugitive.

Of course, it's only an "important" show that merits a 'final episode'; others are just canceled. When I was a kid, the first big finale event I remember was The Mary Tyler Moore Show; I remember how highly anticipated it was, and of course it became the gold standard for final episodes. After that I tended to watch a series finale regardless of whether I ever watched the show much during its lifespan.... not really possible now with so many shows.

I guess part of what I'm getting at is that over the years, the concept evolved to where the final show was supposed to be a climactic event that summarized but also transcended the entire series; if you want to know how high the stakes have risen, recall the reception for the finales of Seinfeld and The Sopranos.

Into this environment comes the Last Lost -- a show that has specialized in raising its audience's expectations, an entire series based on an ever-growing pile of questions. I think you can probably take the expectation for Seinfeld and multiply it by the hopes for The Sopranos.

As it turned out, the show didn't exactly resolve every open question (of course, if they had really attempted to do so, the show would still be going on. Whenever you're reading this, still going on. Trust me on that one). It also didn't cure cancer, bring about world peace, or come close to satisfying every one of the people who have been blogging, and reading blogs, about it for the past several years. Yeah, I'm in that last group.

I'm also puzzled by all the speculation about what it really "meant"; was it not clear that everything on the island actually happened, and it was the "Sideways reality" that didn't really happen? Think about all the things that happened in the Sideways where we all said, "OK, wait a minute, that's really pushing the limits of plausible"... and it turns out that's because it didn't happen in the "real world".

And sure, I would've liked more "closure" -- although on the other hand, everyone dead is about as closed as you can get. While it was not everything I dreamed of, it did have some truly magical moments and afforded us a chance to say farewell to some beloved, and not all that beloved, characters, and watch them say goodbye to each other as well. I can't say that I felt like they owed me any specific outcome, so I'm not really "disappointed".

It's also worth pointing out that the Newhart final episode, which is widely considered to be one of the classics in the genre, was (at least in my opinion) interminable and boring, and is only remembered today for the brilliant final joke -- which may very well be the funniest moment in TV history; if not for that final sequence, I doubt the program would be remembered at all.

So what do you think the odds are that I can fill the the vacancies in my watching-list with even one new show that'll even have a series finale... much less one worth discussing?