There is, in these ironized minglings of comedy, tragedy, and time, a sense of quiet resignation. Imminence, made immanent. “Welcome! Everything is fine,” reads the text, painted in cheerful green on a blank white wall, in The Good Place, reassuring the newly deceased that the ceasing isn’t so bad. It’s a version of the thing that Forever’s June (Rudolph), confused by her death rather than saddened by it, asks of Oscar (Armisen) when she realizes that she is now what the show terms a “former”: “So we just keep … going?” June wonders, incredulously. “I mean, how long does this go on for? I mean, what’s the point of all this?”

Oscar’s reply is both searing and blunt: “Well, what was the point of the thing before this?”

This is, in its way, precisely what Kermode was getting at when he spoke and then wrote of apocalypse: Here is the sense of an ending, absorbed, through our entertainments, into the dull mundanities of everyday life. Death as a metaphor for marriage. Death as another chance. Death as a chronic condition.

The atomized End-feeling is not limited to sitcoms. You can catch hints of it as well in “Bandersnatch,” the Choose Your Own Adventure–style Black Mirror episode that stubbornly rejects the beginning/middle/end format of the traditional narrative, and that summons, in its way, social media’s endless streams and feeds and flows—a willful end to endings. There’s some End-feeling, too, in this moment’s heady barrage of reboots and remakes and revivals—approaches to art that take on the anxiety of imminent endings by insisting that endings are never, really, final. To be a consumer of pop culture at this point is to be constantly mourning lost things—and also to be told, just as constantly, that the mourning is out of place. It is never to know, for sure, whether Tony Soprano is actually dead.

But it is also to know that he has, in some sense, been dead all along. One of the first lines of dialogue in The Sopranos finds Tony, the mob boss, attempting to explain to his new psychiatrist why he’d had a panic attack. “It’s good to be in something from the ground floor,” Tony muses, ostensibly talking about the family business. “I came too late for that, I know. But lately I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over.”

Dr. Melfi’s reply, written for 1999 but all too relevant, still, for 2019: “Many Americans, I think, feel that way.”

Kermode wrote The Sense of an Ending within the psychic clouds of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; today’s world retains the threat that terrified his, but also compounds it. Our anxieties radiate and insinuate. They have slipped the bonds of tragedy. The Good Place began as a whimsical meditation on interpersonal ethics; it has steadily tightened, over three tremendous seasons, into an indictment of the wrenching complications of goodness itself: how hard it is to act ethically at this moment when, just as the Post suggested, everything you can do will be done within a world that is losing its bearings.