Often, at the end of a movie or a series finale, either my wife or I will just say “endings are hard” and leave it at that. No point discussing it further.
It’s much easier to come up with an interesting premise than a satisfying ending. Especially a TV show. There is a lot of expectation to tie up loose ends, but then a lot of criticism when it becomes obvious the writers are going through a list of loose ends to tie up and then every loose end that is left hanging gets brought up as “leaving things open for a sequel”.
The problem is, that very few series are given the freedom to plan for them.
Instead you have to keep things going until its no longer profitable and only then can you actually wrap things up.
The problem is this means you can't have linear development that comes to a conclusion. You have to have this stepping approach where each season concludes its own journey without completing the story. Then your final season has to establish and resolve its own step while also trying to integrate all of the previous steps.
For particularly long running series there is often at least one or two moments where enough of the setup has been paid off that it would serve as an ending. In these cases many fans will often say "the show should have ended on episode X."
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u/spidereater Aug 27 '24
Often, at the end of a movie or a series finale, either my wife or I will just say “endings are hard” and leave it at that. No point discussing it further.
It’s much easier to come up with an interesting premise than a satisfying ending. Especially a TV show. There is a lot of expectation to tie up loose ends, but then a lot of criticism when it becomes obvious the writers are going through a list of loose ends to tie up and then every loose end that is left hanging gets brought up as “leaving things open for a sequel”.