Entertainment Forum General Chat Thread • Page 885

This. I'm fairly certain I stopped after S7E01 if not 2-3 more episodes in. I just couldn't do it anymore. I'd like to see the viewing stats on how big the dropoff was after that. I know quite a few that stopped around the same time we did.

 

Television endings are a weakness of the form. The ending in film and other media is of extreme importance as the whole story works towards it, in television it is an afterthought. When TV achieves its primary objective of good ratings it gets rewarded by not ending, a TV ending is a punishment for failure.

The tone of TV finales reflects this, a persisting feeling of “sad that its over”. That is never the case for the best novels and films where a perfect ending can leave you with any range of emotions from devastated, exhilarating, mind blowing, contemplative, justified.

 

I mean, yeah. Episodic, serialized storytelling is naturally gonna handle an ending differently from a single standalone work like a movie or a novel. That’s a feature, not a bug, because it’s a different format doing a different thing.

 

It's not a feature to have bad endings, all mediums have weaknesses and this is one of them. It exists as a problem for all episodic stories but is exacerbated by the ecosystem television is created in.

 

As far as television endings, it mostly depends on what type of show you are talking about.

Keeping a show high-quality is such a difficult thing. You have to have a cohesive three-act story for the episode, the season, and the show. You also have no idea how long the show is going to be on so planning anything out other than a miniseries is mostly a waste of time. At the most extreme, you have the shows that are finished after a season has wrapped, so there is literally no ending. HBO has multiple times (Boardwalk Empire, Treme, The Wire) ordered shortened seasons, and in all three the natural flows the shows had developed feels off. You also have the difficulties of keeping your cast and crew together for that long. David Chase had no idea Nancy Marchand would die after the second season, and he didn't plan on writing off Robert Loggia so quickly for being a menace on the set. Phil Leotardo was not the villain from the beginning and only became the final boss of the show because he happened to be there at the right time.

If you are talking about sitcoms, the appeal in the first place is that you can watch a random episode from season three or thirteen and nothing has really changed. Seinfeld's finale is famously poor, but how else do you end that show? It could not end emotionally because that would be against the shows' ideology. It probably should have ended with just another episode, highlighting the ways the characters never grow or change, but people would have been angry about that too. How do you end these institutional shows like The Simpsons or South Park? Unless you are going to kill everyone off like Six Feet Under, their lives go on and on, which is fine in a movie because we are supposed to only be seeing a specific story, but the point of the show was that it didn't end until it did. It ends up highlighting the inherent business focus of television production, something that films (at least good ones) are able to avoid.

 

Observe & Report is a masterpiece

 

How do you reclaim it? People were comparing it to Taxi Driver back when it came out.

 

you just tweet that its happening

 

I always appreciate when David Lynch shows up.

 

tarantino in little nicky

 

What's the movie where the guy tells his wife he wants to do something she might disapprove of but she says yes and he says "You're the best"

 

does pollack count? he had one acting role before directing but not a huge one and numerous directing credits before he acted again

 

Gotta hand it to Shyamalan for always giving himself a minor role in his films despite not being a good actor lol

 

Pollack for sure. Incredible in Eyes Wide Shut.

 

Hmmm, that's...interesting

 

Tarantino is never good in his movies but they are always memorable.

 

I can’t remember if he was a director before he was an actor, but Cassavetes would be up there

 

seriously though Werner Herzog

 

I'm not totally convinced Herzog ever acts so much as people just show up to wherever he is with a camera and actors

 

It’s Marty in the sopranos.