Rose Casolari rewatches “New Girl” every year. The popular sitcom, which details the hilariously relatable adventures of three men and one woman who live together in Los Angeles, is one of her favorites. Despite that, Casolari never rewatches the last season, which depicts what she calls an unnecessary three-year time jump after a satisfying end to the earlier season.
“You don’t remember the ending,” said Casolari, a college student at Columbia College Chicago. “[Jess and Nick] are getting back together and it’s supposed to be this big moment and then it isn’t. It just isn’t memorable.”
Casolari admits, however, that she sees endings differently than the average viewer as a television writing and business major. She knows there are often circumstances out of the writer’s control.
“You have to work your ass off to get into this industry, you are not doing that to put up subpar stories,” Casolari said. “It’s the network, it’s the money, it’s, ‘What do the fans want?’ It’s just like, ‘Goddamnit, the businesses won again.’”
Goodbyes are never easy, whether on a cheery sitcom or a nail-biting thriller. From Ted Mosby’s lackluster reunion with an old flame on “How I Met Your Mother” to the anticlimactic death of Dean Winchester on “Supernatural,” the conclusions of beloved TV shows have often been controversial.
But as hard as they are to watch, endings are even harder to create. Screenwriters try to painstakingly assemble the loose strings of characters, relationships, conflicts and plotlines and tie them together into a widely-acceptable knot. All while navigating the pressures of changing creative direction, passionate fans and more.
i actually hope whoever wrote the ending of how i met your mother is having a horrible week.
— nevaeh (@icemvlts) October 13, 2023
“We’re gods. We’re making up universes,” said Adam Lapidus, a TV writer and a professor of film and television at Boston University. “Even though people know it’s not real, they’re invested and they want to feel satisfied.”
“Game of Thrones” is remembered for its widely-panned series finale. The fantasy show’s dedicated fan base was appalled by Bran’s ascension to the throne, among other events, and angry at those meddling writers who penned them into reality.
The last episode aired in May 2019, but that did not stop one fan from tweeting this year, “Just rewatched game of thrones and the ending has annoyed me more than it did the first time… #GameOfThrones #regret.”
“The single way that you know how important endings are is the howl of rage and disappointment that echoes through the social media universe and through our hearts when an ending is not satisfying,” said Pamela O’Connell, an Emmy-nominated TV producer and writer who has worked on Disney Channel shows like “The Suite Life of Zack & Cody” and “Jessie.”
Cooper Bergan, a second-year college student at American University in Washington, D.C., said he was annoyed by the ambiguous cliffhanger that brought crime series “The Sopranos” to a close. He binged-watched the whole show this past summer.
“I immediately looked up so many explanations for it and [it] turns out the writer wanted to leave it up to the audience,” Bergan said. “I was totally disappointed…You want it to end a certain way, you envision it, but then it doesn’t end that way.”
Of course, there is usually more than one writer calling the shots.
“You really have to think about what the showrunners want, you have to think about what the [writers] room all together came with,” said Maria Warith-Wade, a TV writer and producer who has worked with Disney. “But then you also have, more importantly, what the studio wants.”
Streaming has indirectly altered creative priorities. The value of shows used to be derived from how many episodes it needed before it qualified for reruns, which led to dynamic creative structures. Nowadays, it is common to see limited-run shows with a more fixed writing staff.
Fans do not always know how external events influence the creative direction of a show.
The final episodes of long-running fantasy show “Supernatural” were filmed under strict COVID-19 social distancing restrictions. The creators have since discussed the impacts, with one telling Entertainment Weekly, “There were things planned that just [weren’t] feasible anymore.”
O’Connell was the executive producer for the final season of “Married… with Children,” a Fox sitcom. She said the creative team was “completely hamstrung” because the network did not know if they wanted to end the show. So, the writers were never allowed to write a finale.
As a result, “it ended with a whimper, not a bang,” O’Connell said, “and I think that was really frustrating and disappointing for fans and certainly for all of us who worked on the show.”
According to experts, however, the writing teams behind today’s craze shows like “Grey’s Anatomy” or “Stranger Things” are probably less subject to the whims of network decisions, given their high ratings. But even when writers have complete control, fans may still be disappointed.
“What I say is, ‘Isn’t it amazing they wrote such a great show that you’re so invested?’” Lapidus said. “If it was a bad show, you wouldn’t care.”
