I Think About This A Lot: When Stories Are Over
Your favorite show is canceled. What do you do? Get bummed out. Move-on. Watch some reruns. Two of my favorite shows recently have been canceled, Mindhunter and GLOW. (There’s another story with GLOW, that can be found here.)
I don’t understand the logic behind petitions to bring back a show. This makes television like a commercial transaction, that audiences since they pay with their interest, can make it happen. FOr this sake, let’s call television art (which I believe, but I know it is a stretch for some.) But it never works out. Remember when Community came back? Arrested Development? Veronica Mars? Exactly.
This conflates with ownership of characters, with the dangling possibility that it is only possible. Why not let our characters go? What are the stakes of not having them anymore? But we are cultural gluttons, thinking that enjoying something means having more of it. That a continuation of the stories (in canon) will satisfy the itch, But it never does. It has to end sometimes. And it usually ends with a whimper.
Why not sit with the sadness that comes with a show ending, a book is finished? Isn’t it better to have those stories live inside its hermetic existence, forever perfect how you remember it? For commercial reasons, sequels and reboots are brought back to cash in on nostalgia, but does it ever fill the void?
This has made me think of a scene from the YA novel The Fault In Our Stars. The main characters, Hazel and Augustus, young and cancerous, visit Amsterdam to seek out a reclusive author (Van Houten) of their favorite book. In the book, the plot is never resolved and things are left nebulous. Hazel demands the author to tell them what happened to the characters in his book:
“Right, but surely you must have thought about what happens to them, I mean as characters, I mean independent of their metaphorical meanings or whatever.”
“They’re fictions,” he said, tapping his glass again.“Nothing happens to them.”
“You said you’d tell me,” I insisted. I reminded myself to be assertive. I needed to keep his addled attention on my questions.
“Perhaps, but I was under the misguided impression that you were incapable of transatlantic travel. I was trying . . . to provide you some comfort, I suppose, which I should know better than to attempt. But to be perfectly frank, this childish idea that the author of a novel has some special insight into the characters in the novel . . . it’s ridiculous. That novel was composed of scratches on a page, dear. The characters inhabiting it have no life outside of those scratches. What happened to them? They all ceased to exist the moment the novel ended.”
“No,” I said. I pushed myself up off the couch. “No,I understand that, but it’s impossible not to imagine a future for them. You are the most qualified person to imagine that future. Something happened to Anna’s mother. She either got married or didn’t. She either moved to Holland with the Dutch Tulip Man or didn’t. She either had more kids or didn’t. I need to know what She either had more kids or didn’t. I need to know what happens to her.”
Van Houten pursed his lips. “I regret that I cannot indulge your childish whims, but I refuse to pity you in the manner to which you are well accustomed.”
This chilled me to the bone. (I mean, aside from the cancer). It made me reckon with my own identity, as someone who has been invested in books, film, and tv that I feel my own self is inseparable from what I like. Where do the characters go? Can I accept that they are just gone? Then there’s the implication to demand stories is childish.
I must add that there are reasons to save shows, like One Day at a Time, when they represent much-needed narratives.
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