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I think there’s two kinds of shows, and this notion is true for one of them.
Burn Notice had a crazy and weird set of dramatic final seasons. I never bothered with them. But previous seasons were excellent things with only a few minutes focused on the central plot of unraveling the Burn, the rest devoted to serials of helping some innocent person evade a gangster. Always enjoyable.
But there’s other shows where all they are building is plot anticipation; just a growing feeling of “I wonder how this will end”. I’ve even become alerted to video games doing this with excessively long running series, or anything touched by the creator of Kingdom Hearts.
Each solid piece of media should have an enjoyable ending to it - even if it’s also building towards future endings.
I mean, a show tells a story with a start, a middle, and an end. Each of these sections rely on the previous one to build a world that the watcher can engage with it. If one of these is bad, it reflects on the entire show.
And out of these 3, I would argue that the ending is most important. The ending is what the entire story has been building to. All interactions and choices made have lead to this one point. And if all of those choices lead to an ending that is poorly made, it makes those choices that the characters made feel pointless. It leaves a bad taste of the possibilities of a better ending for the show.
The last season of GoT invalidated all of the growth that was witnessed in all the previous seasons, ruining the story.
How I Met Your Mother’s last season broke a spell that was over me, thinking that any of the characters were decent people. And allowed me to look at the whole thing without any of the nostalgia that carried me throughout the show. Was a young adult with questionable opinions that got better as I got older. The show seems to have never done so. And so I can say that the bad season did ruin the rest of the show, as I may have never given it a critcal eye if they had written it better.
What a stupid logic.
The ending of a series can completely destroy all the meaning and character development of said series.
Or let me put it differently:
Essentially what this is saying is “it’s about the journey, not the destination”, but ultimately it’s a pretty flawed notion. It doesn’t matter how pretty the journey is if you’re going to someplace to get tortured or beaten.
Also, as far as people go; you may cure cancer, but you can still suck. Steve Jobs sucked. He died a stupid death because he didn’t listen to anyone about curing an easily curable cancer. Something which also defined his career, as he never listened to anyone about computers and technology, meaning his stuff sucked all the way up to the 90s.
If a show tells you it’s building to something, then fails to deliver, it has disrespected all the time and effort invested.
See:
Lost
Battlestar Galactica
How I Met Your MotherI personally, just ignore the ending, and appreciate the amazing time I had leading up to it. xD
Or when it ends on a cliffhanger just to get canceled. That really ruins how I feel about a show.
Really putting the “ass” in comparison there. Also, if a person say… wrote a best selling beloved children’s book series, but then heel-turned into a piece of shit, it absolutely does ruin their entire body of work for a lot of people.
Like, this happens, what is the comic even talking about?
Context can certainly change over time. If Rudy Giuliani died in 2002, he’d be remembered as ‘America’s Mayor’.
If a story doesn’t have a satisfying conclusion, then I would say starting the story is pointless.
in the same way, if someone cures cancer and fucks one chicken…
I heard it was an osterich. Allegedly.
This comic is out of touch with the politics of Netflix style script writing where there’s no story arc being followed.
Do Netflix shows even get to a finale? Unless its an enormous hit like squid game or stranger things, they just cancel it.
“Too late, I’ve already drawn you as the soyjack”
Shows sort of suck after about the 5th episode. They all start doing filler at some point.
You should go back and watch network television shows. There’s so much post-commercial recap, start of the episode recap, “gotta fill my 43 minutes” and “gotta make 20 episodes” filler that you will greatly appreciate modern streaming shows.
I had been meaning to start Game of Thrones, but hearing that the ending sucks kind of killed all interest for me.
The problem with Game of Thrones is this:
They ran out of material to adapt. They hit a wall where they ran out of books and had to adapt Martin’s PowerPoint slides, and it shows!
Well when the preceding story is contingent on it leading to a satisfying conclusion, that being 99% of the shows I’ve seen critiqued this way… I’d say it’s a valid conclusion.
Like a punchline is to a joke, the ending is the most important part of a story. The conclusion gives the journey meaning. Blowing the ending can - and often does - retroactively ruin an entire narrative. This comic is akin to saying “a bad punchline doesn’t ruin a whole joke.” It does. In the same way, a bad or missing conclusion undermines the narrative as a whole.
I mean it varries a lot, a lot of shows put huge emphasis on building up to an ending.
I would say probably the biggest example would be lost… it feels like it’s building up to something special all throughout… it’s just like “a few more pieces and it will finally make sense”.
Then you get an ending that… well if anything can be improved with small edits.
