** SPOILER ALERTS: In the following, I'm going to be discussing pretty specifically the ending of The Sopranos, as well as up-to-date talk on Dexter & Breaking Bad. Proceed with caution. **
I have long said that TV is the new novel. Whereas there is arguably merit in downing on folk who sit in front of the television for hours on end every night mindlessly looking for whatever's on, that same criticism can be levied against people who read trashy magazines/books just to read something. As far as I'm concerned, media is media, and it can all be good or bad, smart or dumb, worthwhile or vapid. I understand where the couch potato stereotype comes from, but we've had books for millenia; TV & movies are youngsters comparatively, and it's taking some time to work out the kinks.
Not that good TV or movies are brand new, but I'm of the opinion that it's getting better all the time. I'll cite Jon Gnarr as my favorite (perhaps tongue-in-cheek) example. He's the mayor of Reykjavik, and he announced upon his election that he wouldn't enter political coalition with anyone who hasn't watched the full run of HBO's The Wire. It sounds (and is) a little foolish as a political platform, but I agree with him. Cite your Stuff White People Like entries all you want; if you're at all invested in the characters and the show and spend any time thinking critically about it, you'll probably end up a better or wiser person for having watched it. Perhaps I'm lagging a little in how to play politics, but for me it opened up avenues of thought and self-reflection in the exactly same way that many of the classic novels do.
I'm not sure if it's my years of "training" in English literature that's done this to me. But, when I watch a series, I like to think about overarching plot, themes, etc. Telling a good story should be job one, but once a show succeeds in that, I like to think themes.
I'll start with the one I just talked about: in The Wire, through its constant perspective on both the "good guys" (cops) & "bad guys" (criminals), in five seasons it evolves into a show where sometimes the good guys are bad and the bad guys are good and they switch sides quickly or slowly and at the end of the day, everyone is judged on their individual merits rather than their labels. Season 4 brings youth into the picture, and it provides thought into how some of these good guys and bad guys come to be. Everyone has potential for good and evil, regardless of where they are in society. There's also politics; both the personal relationships & the show's actual political story are great thought exercises about the role of backroom dealings, and the final season's inclusion of the media helps to highlight this to the point of satire. The final episode, claimed by many to be the greatest series finale ever, ties everything together and closes off pretty much every loose end. Almost all of the characters live, and at the end of the day, the viewer sees where the characters are headed in their life in a way that's satisfactory at a bare minimum. The ending ties together the realistic narrative that the show kept throughout, bolstering the great story they've created.
Another one is The Sopranos. I actually watched the last scene of the last episode before even starting the series, just so I could understand that Hilary Clinton campaign spoof ad in '07. Though The Sopranos' ending didn't reveal nearly as much as The Wire, I've made peace with it for a couple of reasons.
First, it jived well with Tony as a character. One of the things that often (if not always) drove the plot in the show was Tony's tendency for indecision; he had the curse of empathy and always understood the moral and political ramifications of his decisions for better and for worse. In this way, it was only suiting that the final scene ended with a great indecision, wherein it's left to the viewer's imagination whether he dies or not.
Second, after doing a lot of reading online, I've come to believe that he does indeed get shot in the diner. Just Google it if you don't know where my head's at, there's a slew of explanations all over the internet that resonate with me, and it makes me happier with the series that I choose to believe them. Paul Auster's short story Ghosts actually does an awesome job on the same theme: discussing how, sometimes, a story is best told describing the lead-up to an event without spoiling the reader's perception of how things should happen.
Either way, the show is definitely a journey.
This brings me to shows that are currently running, and have announced that they are coming to their end, and how I'd like for them to go.
First off, my (apparently) favorite show to write about, Dexter. Last week's episode was amongst my favorite ever for a television series; though nobody died and there were no great cliffhangers, the show was a spectacle of parallelism. The episode's theme was definitely the crazy things that people will do for love, and it managed to include so many major and minor characters: Dexter, Deb, Isaak, Hannah, Quinn... and those were just the highlights in the montage. It was great, and Michael C. Hall's standard episode-ending voiceover was especially powerful because of the great job they did.
I've been thinking about this theme and where they're going to go with it, and I've come up with a skeleton sketch of how I'd love to see the show go from here.
First, housework: Dexter kills Isaak soon. Not long after, Hannah, too: he figures out he can't love someone who fits his profile. However, with the writers' skill in parallelism, I think the end of the season could be a straight parallel to the end of season 6: Dexter walks in on Deb killing a now-wiser LaGuerta. Then, the entirety of season 8 highlights Dexter's internal battle over whether he wants to kill his now-profile-fitting sister, after his Hannah-induced realization that he can't love a killer. In the end, Dexter either does or does not kill Deb (I haven't decided which I'd like better), but ultimately realizes that he fits his own profile because of his homicidal thoughts for Deb, and in an effort to protect her (if she's alive) and Harrison, he kills himself. Maybe, along the way, he finds out that Quinn's a dirty cop, and kills him, too: no doubt, more blood at Miami Metro would help spur his realization. This'd be a great tie-together for the whole story, and touch on the same kind of thing that The Wire does... though it eschews the realism that The Wire was so good at, it really thematically reflects on that same human-condition capacity for good & evil inherent in everyone.
Next up, Breaking Bad. I've been saying since some time in season 3 that I want the final episode to center on Walt dying of the cancer that started the whole thing. The whole time, we've just watched his character get less relatable, crazier, and overall vilified. In Season 1, he was an ironic hero who you couldn't help but cheer for because of his unorthodox way to make lemonade out of the lemons life had given him. However, with each passing season (especially the very end of season 4), his character has the approximate hardness of a bag of galvanized nails, and I think Vince Gilligan's goal the whole time would be to see how far he can stretch a viewer to cheer for a villain. I still think my idea for an ending would be particularly poignant; it'd really go on the tragic hero motif. Maybe Walt has a deathbed epiphany about life (a la Ivan Ilyich), or maybe he reinforces that he was a villain all along (a la Hagar Shipley); either way, he is undone and eventually succumbs to the the thing that he let ruin his life. Granted, given the ominous scene in S05E01 and given Hank's realization of Walt's crimes, I think this ending especially unlikely now. I don't know where they'll go or how they'll get there from where they left off, but I'm excited for the revelation of both the plot and the theme in the 8 remaining episodes.
One more quick hit: Mad Men. I think that this one is the least impactful of everything I've discussed. The show's raison d'etre seems to just be great drama and character interaction, and I expect they'll continue to do that. If anything, given the way they skip large time intervals in between seasons, I kind of expect the show to end like The Wire: loose ends will be tied off without a ton of boat-rocking or character death (if any), and you're free to imagine how and where the everyone ends up. Given that I've been stretching for comparisons in most of my other discussions, I see a real No Country For Old Men vibe. The show has been well tied to realism, and the overall theme may really just be the story itself. It gives the viewer insight into an environment they'd otherwise never have considered, and leaves the message that the world is the world, people are people, and things aren't really going to change.
In any case, this post just goes to show that all types of media are, to me, an addictive thing that can endlessly be compared and tied together.
tl;dr: TVTropes is an evil place and I avoid it like the plague.
