As a fan of good television series, it's interesting for me to be watching four of them end (two for the season, two forever) at the same time. Sometimes in the harsh and pitiless world of TV, the creators of a series don't even *get* to do a good ending to their series. The classic example, of course, is Joss Whedon's "Firefly," which was cut down in mid-first-season and which, if he hadn't been able to pull off the film "Serenity" to finish things up gracefully, would have ended very badly indeed.
Leading the "good endings race" so far IMO is, of course, "Breaking Bad." That series has two more episodes to go, and is building up to present the best ending of a long-running TV show in history. At the same time, the Aaron Sorkin series "The Newsroom" broadcast its last two-parter of the season last Sunday, and I thought they did a pretty good job with it. Especially because it's still an open question as to whether there will be a season 3. The reason is, for once, *not* network caprice, but creator caprice. Sorkin is the sole writer, and he simply may not choose to go forward with such a time commitment. I for one hope he does, but he managed an ending to season 2 that play "double purpose," in that it could easily stand as the ending of the whole series if he chooses to bail. Over on BBC America, there is only one more episode of "Copper" to go for this season, and although the storytelling is more traditional and not as cutting edge as "Breaking Bad," I think they're doing a pretty good job of tying things up and leaving us waiting for the next season. The acting, writing, and production have all been exemplary so far, and I see no reason why they can't continue to be. But at the end of the pack -- and a MAJOR disappointment -- comes "Dexter. It's as if this series' creators are taking Dexter's "dark passenger" and trying to give it a bleach job. Bleeeaah. As one critic on IMDB put it, rather succinctly, if you check the stats, six of the *lowest* rated episodes of the entire series have been during this last season. Sad. They've pissed away all the interest we once had in the characters by (IMO) trying to come up with some namby-pamby ending that satisfies everyone but without exposing Dexter to the kind of Ultimate Humiliation and Disgrace that Walter White is going through. I suspect they're going to find a way to either kill him off or let him get away without any commupance for all his years as a serial killer, and that "safe path" is taking away pretty much all of my interest in the series. At this point, I'm just waiting for next Sunday so it'll be OVER, and I can stop watching it. And that's sorta the point of this rant. A good ending leaves you wanting more. A bad ending doesn't.
