Finales: Mad Men and others

A while back I wrote about the upcoming close to Mad Men

Here, part one

here, Part Two

and Here, part three

Overall, I expect it to be closer to a Sopranos ending than a Six Feet Under  one. 

Every show needs to end in the appropriate way for that show.  So, let's go over a few finales and see how they are appropriate

The Sopranos - first in the "television as art" age of the late nineties through now, a show that integrated symbolism and ambiguity throughout its run ends on exactly those notes.  It's the Mona Lisa and the finale is Mona Lisa's smile.

Six Feet Under - the much lauded, emotional finale that brought absolute and complete closure to every character via fast forwards as much as eight decades into the future.  This works for SFU because the show was about mortality and the way we pass, so it only made sense to play this string completely our for our beloved Fischers (& Co.).

But the thing that really made the finale was not the Breath Me montage but the events leading up to it, ie Nate's death.  A show born out of the death of a family member ends with the same.  Nate's AVM hung over the series like a shroud for almost it's entire run.  Each episode include the death of someone, and the reactions of that person's loved ones.  So it only made sense to see the Fischers & Co. reacting to Nate's death. 

Which brings up the idea of starting the finale early...

West Wing - had an incredibly underrated finale.  Between the two campaigns, the current White House and the new occupants, not to mention relationships like CJ and Danny and Josh and Donna, the show had a lot to wrap up.  Which is why they started doing it as early as "Transition", three episodes prior.  It makes sense with a large ensemble.  Thought it closes with a Bartlet and CJ centric episode.  It makes sense as they occupied the WH for all eight years/seven seasons to follow them around as they turn out the lights.  Especially Jed, our generation's collective grandfather, as the show that was never supposed to actually feature the president became his show, he gets the last word.

Justified - you can also go the bookend route.  Call back a lot of images to the show's beginniing.  Justified is a western, an Elmore Leonard, a novel, so it is going to be a little more closed off and clear than say, Sopranos.  And it works.  Like a novel, the questions raised in the first chapter are answered and called back to in the last chapter.  It does so by continuing to do what it had done best for six seasons, beat our expectations every time.

The reactions this article below refers to are why I can't stand to read about television anymore.  Expectations are out of whack and the only way a show can continue to be praised each year is to fly under the radar (like Justified).  Game of Thrones is both everyone's favorite show and everyone's favorite show to complain about. 

I read a great article discussing finales, within the context of Mad Men ending the crux of it is below:

That question is top of mind as we close in on the conclusion of Mad Men, the current program most directly linked to The Sopranos. This isn’t just about creator Matthew Weiner’s three seasons as a writer and producer for Chase, nor the charismatic antiheroes at the two shows’ centers; Mad Men has always been a show that just felt like The Sopranos, tonally and stylistically, a series where ambiguity and unease and narrative cul-de-sacs were not only present, but part of the modus operandi.

And that’s why it’s so infuriating to read clueless inventories of “loose ends we hope Mad Men wraps up” and “what needs to be resolved in the final season” (yes indeed, what needs to be resolved), as though this is a show that’s ever been about tidy conclusions and clean resolutions; that’s why complaints about recent episodes not going exactly where we think they “should” (from websites or fans or, worse, websites aggregating fans) are so headache-inducing — because Mad Men has never been about fan service. This fan, for one, doesn’t presume to know better than Weiner and company how this show should end, except that it shouldn’t end the way stupid people want it to: with someone falling out of a building, or Don parachuting out of an airplane with millions of dollars, or Bob Benson murdering him, or whatever.

The one thing that seems safe to assume is that Mad Men isn’t going to end in a nice clean package with a big, pretty bow on top, and that’s an assumption based on not only the show we’ve been watching for seven seasons now, but also Weiner’s own statements on the subject. “Resolution in itself is a mystery in this world,”

 

I think Mad Men, at large, is very much about wanting to maintain the status quo and resisting progress. It's a theme we see with Kennedy and Nixon, the firm being bought, the civil rights movement, Japanese businessmen, computers...in each case the change is resisted, eventually accepted as fait accompli and then people discover it's not as bad as they thought, and they work on establishing a new status quote, which they wont want to get rid of. Everyone is going kicking and screaming not just into the next era but the next year, month and day.

Oddly, the only change that's greeted with eagerness is the copy machine by the secretaries, even though that very copy machine spells their demise...and we get less and less secretaries each season.

So, anyways,  I look at the show's finale episodes in that context.  But maybe I'm wrong too.