Ending A TV Series Without Losing Your Way

by John Aquino on 04/10/14

As television series end, there is often a question about whether they will really end, as in concluding the story, at least for now, wrapping up loose ends, and having the characters move on to presumbly other stories in different settings. In March 2014, the CBS series How I Met Your Mother attempted to do just that.

In a very interesting premise, the series began with the father--Ted--talking to his teenage children in the year 2030 describing how he met their mother 20 or so years before. Over the next nine seasons, the series focused on the lives and romantic attachments of Ted and his friends Barney, Lilly and Marshall, and Robin. At first, in the year 2005, it appears that Ted is in love with Robin, but they break up and Robin becomes one of his friends.

The series, then, was primed to end with Ted meeting the "mother." The series finale aired in March 2014, and the fact that it drew over 13 million viewers was a testament to audience interest in the ending. The outcry over the Internet and in print was a testament to their disappointment.

There's an interesting history about the end of series. Usually, series don't end in the sense of wrapping up because the network may cancel them after production for the season has ended. A classic example is the 1960s sitcom Gilligan's Island, which was about seven castways stranded on a deserted island. It ran three seasons on CBS and was actually renewed for a fourth season. But CBS also cancelled the long-running show Gunsmoke, the wife of the head of CBS objected, and in restoring Gunsmoke to the schedule CBS bumped Gilligan's Island after production on the show had wrapped. And so, no ending was filmed, and the castaways remained on Gilligan's Island until pent-up audience demand resulted in three tv movies over a decade later in which the castaways were rescued, marooned again, and ultimately built a hotel on the island. 

There has always been an argument that actually ending the story of a series when its network run is finished hurts it when the series is re-run in syndication. An example is the 1960s series The Fugitive starring David Janssen as Dr. Richard Kimble, who comes home, sees a one-armed man running from his house, finds his wife dead, and is accused, tried, and convincted of her murder. He escapes from custody and tries to find the one-armed man to prove his innocence. He himself is pursued by Lt. Gerard played by Barry Morse.

Throughout its three-year run, there was speculation that Gerard's obssession with Kimble was too much and that he may have been the murderer. Some conjectured that it was one of the members of Kimble's family or one of his business associates, rather than the one-armed man. As the ending of the series was announced so that Janssen could pursue film work, there was, literally, nation-wide interest in who the murderer was.

SPOILER ALERT, Kimble, unsurprisingly, found out that the murderer was the one-armed man. Gerard ultimately actually helps Kimble prove his innocence. (Those who thought that he was too obssessed with finding Kimble have evidently never read or seen Les Miserables, whose Inspector Javert was a model for Gerard.) And the important thing is that the series was difficult to sell for syndication because everybody knew the ending.

But when the creators of a tv series actually decide to end it, sometimes they either get too clever and/or lose their sense of direction. The hospital drama St. Elsewhere ended in 1988 with the surprise twist. The camera enters a snow globe that encloses a miniature hospital held by the autistic child of one of the characters and it turns out that the entire series was in the imagination of the child, whose father and grandfather, whom we knew as doctors at the hospital, are working-class people struggling to know what goes on in the child's mind. In other words, all of the characters the audience cared for over the years were fantasies in the child's mind. An audience primed to find out which future path their favorite characters followed found out that they didn't follow any because they were figments of the child's imagination. The series also did not sell in syndication. Why re-watch a story about a hospital that you now know was imaginary? The creators were too clever for their own good.

Something similar was done with the ending of Newhart in which Dick Loudon, the owner of a New England inn as played by Bob Newhart, is knocked out and  Newhart is then found in bed with his tv wife Suzanne Pleshette from Bob Newhart's previous tv show, with the whole Newhart series turning out to have been a dream. But Newhart wasn't as popular as The Bob Newhart Show had been, and so the return to the more popular show was regarded as welcome and clever. 

Then you have a situation such as the one concerning the syndicated tv series Xena the Warrior Princess. The show especially attracted the interest of gays and lesbians because of the implication that Xena and her friend Gabrielle were lovers. The shoot was an exhausting one for Lucy Lawless playing Xena and worked around her pregnancy and her fractured pelvis sustained when she fell off a horse. She and her producer husband Bob Tapert decided just to be done with it. They expressed no interest in followup tv movies. And in the last episode, which was broadcast in 2001, Xena, who had been killed, decides to stay dead, although she comes back as a ghost to watch over her friend Gabrielle. Its viewers were shocked, the series was, again, a hard sell in syndication, and, like The Fugitive and St. Elsewhere, is seldom seen.

Perhaps the most notorious series ending is Seinfeld. Jerry Seinfeld and his friends were self-absorbed New Yorkers. The series ran nine seasons until 1998. In ending it, the creators--including Seinfeld himself--decided to bring back a lot of the guest stars who had appeared in the show over the years. But here was the premise for the finale: Jerry and his friends are on their way to Hollywood in a private plane that has to set down in a small town for repairs. They see a fat man being mugged and--being self-absorbed--laugh at him. A policeman arrests them, saying that the town enacted a "good samaritan" law requiring witnesses to a crime to render assistance in the wake of the death of Princess Diana, who, it was reported, lay dying from an automobile accident as paparazzi took photos rather than render help. To justify the law, the district attorney finds witnesses--the returning guest stars--who describe how selfish Jerry and his friends are. They are convicted for violating the law and sent to prison.

What rubbed everybody the wrong way was that they always knew that Jerry and his friends were self-absorbed. But to have the characters' selfishness be so great that they are sent to prison for it seemed very unfunny. It was comparable to the idea of Lucy in the 1950s tv series I Love Lucy being sent to a psychiatric ward at the end of that series because she did such crazy things. (That series ended with no ending, except that it was clear Lucy and Ricky were less affectionate and in real life Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz later divorced.)

A recent Washington Post article claimed that the fact that Seinfeld does appear in syndication indicates that all the furor was for nothing, that all is forgiven. I think the viewers of Seinfeld in syndication are new viewers. I never watch it when it comes on, and a lot of people I know who followed it it when it when it was new feel the same.

And then we come to How I Met Your Mother. Again, here was a series primed to end with the meeting of Ted and his wife. The character of the mother was introduced at the end of the penultimate season and throughout the last season she appeared during the many episodes about Barney and Robin's wedding but she and Ted kept missing each other.They do meet in the end (in 2014). But we also see that the mother dies 10 years later, Barney and Robin get divorced, and Ted presumably in his 50s,. finishes telling the story to his children in 2030. They respond to him that the story is not about how he met their mother but about how he loves Aunt Robin. The series ends with Ted going to Robin where they will presumably renew their relationship.

The series prided itself on going back and forth in time and presenting twists and other surprises. After it aired, the ending was described by one of the show's creators as just such a twist. He seemed oblivious to the potential audience reaction. We've waited to meet the mother for years, we fall in love with her in the last season, and then you kill her! And it turns out, as his children said, the show wasn't about what we were told it was about, it was about something else.

Sometimes you can be too clever and just lose your way.

The best series endings, the ones that may not be as bold and brass--like Cheers which had some characters like Frasier moving on (to his own series) and avoided the expected big moment in that Sam and Diane don't get married after all--seem more satisfying.

Copyright 2014 by John T. Aquino.