endings
mourning my shows
Endings and goodbyes are hard. There are little endings scattered throughout our lives that affect us in deep ways. We don’t really grieve them, but they invade our psyche nonetheless. I have cried over books ending because by closing the book when I was done was to close off characters I had become friends with, in a way. I get sad when the Word Series is over because it means that baseball is done for a couple of months. I am closing in on retirement, and I am already mourning a huge chapter of my life being finished.
Those are the small things, the endings that give us pause, that make us a little sad, but we move on from. There are bigger things like the endings that make us grieve, bring us sorrow. Death. Divorce. The end of a longtime friendship. I’m not here to talk about those horrid endings, though. I’ve done that enough. I’ve got other endings to deal with.
This was a sort of sorrowful week for me. Oh, nothing bad happened to me, for a change. It’s just that the only three tv shows I watched on a regular basis have all come to an end within days of each other. Succession, Barry, and Ted Lasso all came to head this week, leaving not only with nothing to watch, but also feeling like I lost some friends (and enemies).
In the cases of Barry and Succession, perhaps leaving all those characters behind is a good thing. They were, for the most part, toxic and evil. But oh how I liked to watch them exhibit those traits. It made for good tv. With Ted Lasso, though, the loss is more profound; I grew to love these characters, to hope and dream alongside them. I cared about them. I wanted the best for all of them whereas with Succession I wanted them all to have unhappy endings. I will miss all these shows in different ways.
I feel empty in some respect. My Sunday nights and Wednesday mornings won’t be the same. I will no longer spend all week conjecturing what will happen on each show, going over plot points, wondering how they are going to move forward or not move forward at all. I will no longer be discussing the shows with various friends, I will no longer decipher cryptic posts on twitter that just say “Oh my god, Succession!” or “What the fuck, Barry?” I will no longer keep count of how many times I cry during one episode of Ted Lasso.
I don’t really binge shows. If I’m a season behind that’s already too overwhelming for me and I don’t bother. I like my shows episodic. One at a time, a week apart, the way I grew up watching television. It gives me something to look forward to every week. I have time to savor the episodes, think about them, discuss them with people before I get to watch the next. This trio of shows gave me that for several years. Now there’s a void where all that used to be, where the Roy kids and Barry and Sally and Coach Beard all lived. They’re gone. Oh, they will always live in my head, but just as spirits who will whisper their names to me when I’m playing a trivia game years from now.
I need something new to watch, something I can dig my teeth into and really bite down. I want a series that will thrill me and consume me and make me laugh at times and cry at others. I want new characters to obsess about and storylines to follow. If I have to adapt to bingeing, I will. I just need something to fill the void. I need to be made to feel. A wise man once sang, “every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end” so I will take the two hours or so I have free now and start something new. Maybe I’ll watch some popular series I never saw when they were on tv, maybe Sopranos or Mad Men. Or perhaps I’ll get started on Righteous Gemstones.
I can be sad my tv shows are over. It’s ok to mourn something that was in your life for three or fours and now is suddenly not in your life, especially when that something was a rare source of joy for you. When you are depressed, you savor the things that make you feel something other than despair, and those three shows did that for me. I suppose this Sunday night and Wednesday morning will feel weird and empty. That will go away quick, as soon as I find something else to watch. I’ve dealt with a lot of endings in my life and I know the best way to get over losing something is to find a new something to get lost in.
As an addendum, I just want to say that Succession, Barry, and Ted Lasso are three of the best written shows I’ve ever seen. There are no shows without writers. They are the backbone of the entertainment industry, and should be treated with dignity and paid fairly. I support the WGA writers strike. Solidarity.