Before the Golden Age of Television, TV shows rarely ended on their own terms: They either aired until everyone involved was exhausted and went dark, or the network pulled the plug on a season too soon. (After all, each additional episode meant thousands and thousands of dollars, thanks to distribution.) Therefore, it was great news when The Cosby Show concluded in 1992, after Bill Cosby decided he was ready to say goodbye to the series. as E.W. The writer Lisa Schwarzbaum expressed it in 1992.Cosby saw “no reason to stay in the Huxtable house while viewer interest flags and ratings drop and people start saying, 'Oh, that tired old lady.'”
The Cosby Show It ended after eight seasons, twice the length of many series these days. However, the notion of a show reaching its own natural conclusion is an idea that has gained much more traction in the last 30 years, an idea that has coincided with television receiving increasing levels of respect as an art form. .
That is No a coincidence, and 2023 gave us plenty of reasons why that is. Of course, there have been many cancellations (some made even more brutal by a later removal from the broadcast). However, when it comes to shows that made a deliberate decision to conclude their stories this year, the endings they provided represent not only the value of a strong ending, but what television creators have learned about what a strong ending should look like. .
For the past few weeks, I've been asking people to name a bad series finale that aired this year and they haven't been able to do it. That's anecdotal, of course, and everyone's mileage may vary, but when it comes to saying goodbye, Succession, Journey to the stars: Picard, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Ted Lasso, Barry, I have never, Sex educationand Reserve dogs They represent an incomplete list of shows that discovered elegant, or at least true-to-style, ways to end things.
In some cases, these were programs that had an external expiration date, one of Patrick Stewart's conditions for returning to Star Trek, for example, had been that it should not last more than three seasons. Meanwhile, the young cast of Sex education He had pretty much reached his limit when it came to believably portraying teenagers (and many of them were on the verge of greater opportunities).
In other cases, well… the producers just decided it was time, like Jesse Armstrong and the writers of Succession He did it with the fourth and final season. And others, like Mrs. Maisel and Barry, they also ran into the limits of the types of stories they could tell; There were many ways Midge Maisel could fight the patriarchal structure of comedy or Barry Berkman could dodge a violent ending.
Star Trek: Picard (Paramount+)
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