Catchy conclusion: The Mad Men finale

Now, in what so many TV critics have hyped as the ‘golden age of quality television’, most shows that make it past a first season do get a chance to end gracefully. That’s great, but it also raises the emotional stakes; even programmes with cult followings get a big sendoff that fans will over-analyse on the internet for days and weeks afterwards. Parenthood’s January finale drew only about 5.5 million viewers, a relatively small number for US TV, but the show trended on social media for days before and after it aired. For comparison purposes, consider that the M*A*S*H finale, the most-watched broadcast of scripted television in the US ever, attracted 106 million viewers.

Finales are inherently difficult to master: up to hundreds of hours of television, aired over several years, come down to one episode, one final scene. Viewers expect more from their finales these days. And they rarely get what they’re hoping for. As Rolling Stone critic Rob Sheffield, an avowed Mad Menfanatic, wrote on the occasion of the finale: “Series finales always suck, and everyone knows it, but TV shows still feel obliged to keep attempting them. The idea that a show needs a finale is just one of those daffy ideas America took to heart in the 2000s, like MySpace, the Zune… or the concept of Paula Abdul judging a singing contest. It was a confused time.”

Despite such confusion, there are some elements that can help finales rise to their inherent challenges, or at least survive them, with a series’ legacy intact.

Looking for closure

For starters, having something interesting to say helps. No one doubts that Mad Men’s final moments had a point. It resulted in exactly the kind of discussion that makes a finale resonate – we watch quality dramas, after all, so that we can have the lightly intellectual cocktail party chatter they inspire. Mad Men’s ending invites comparison to that of its spiritual father, The Sopranos, for which Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner was a writer. That series’ ambiguous, cut-to-black 2007 finale enraged viewers who demanded a clear resolution for its characters – but it allowed for a debate that cut to the heart of the series itself. Either Tony Soprano died, or he didn’t. But the important question may have been: why does it matter to us so much to learn how he died? Why did we need to see him die? He would die eventually, because humans do – and the show’s major theme was always inevitable mortality, the ways we often misuse our fleeting time.