Are The Best Finales The Ones No One Watches?

gamerant.com:

Writing for Entertainment Weekly just prior to the release of Deathly Hallows, Stephen King summarized the essential difficulty of writing finales: “No ending can be right, because it shouldn’t be over at all. The magic is not supposed to go away.” In the case of Harry Potter, it was literal magic — but all stories bring a little bit of magic into the lives of audiences, and it is always hard for viewers to say goodbye to that magic when it ends.

Some finales have managed to deliver for their viewers, but the overwhelming majority of popular shows end with a whimper. Therein lies a curious phenomenon, as some of the most satisfying finales in recent television have also been some of the least-watched. Is flying below the pop culture radar the secret to a successful conclusion?

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It is important, especially in the post-Lost era, to recognize the narrative function that a television finale serves (as opposed to the ending of a book or a movie). A multi-season, serialized plot should not be defined by its finale — otherwise, the audience would not know what they were watching until they got to the end. This was the very problem of Lost: much of its allure lay in its mystery box, which spent too much time introducing questions and too little time resolving open threads. As a result, the finale had to do the work of solving all of its mysteries and wrapping up the arcs of individual characters and plots; it was too little time to do so much narrative labor. A finale should offer resolution, not constitution. It should align with the story that has been told all along, while acting as a natural stopping point for the viewers’ access to the lives of the characters.

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