“The Handmaid’s Tale” just ended, but between its loose ends and an imminent sequel, it sort of didn’t. “Ted Lasso” said goodbye, but now it’s coming back. “The Walking Dead” wrapped up, only to roll out a horde of zombie spinoffs. “Mission: Impossible” featured a “final reckoning,” but one reckons the movies won’t stay on the sidelines for very long.
It’s hardly a surprise that studios and producers would feel a powerful lure to extend the lives — and profitability — of valuable franchises. “Intellectual property” might not be one of those terms that freely trips off the public’s tongue, but even neophytes recognize that anything successful is apt to be replicated or revived in some form.
Still, the ostensible hedge-betting in ending TV or movie series has a way of creatively undermining finales — or really, “finales,” to the extent they often lack the finality that many have come to associate with the promise inherent in the word.
Schemes to maximize returns on existing titles have also taken various forms, including the movies spun out of “Downton Abbey” and “Sex and the City,” with the latter eventually becoming a series again.
The desire to keep hits alive reflects understandable pragmatism on the part of studios, but such commercial considerations come with the risk of potentially alienating, or at least irritating, viewers. How often can you bill something as a “series finale” — only to see it magically return in relatively short order — before your best customers begin to feel a little like Charlie Brown, with Lucy dangling the football in front of them only to yank it away?
“The Handmaid’s Tale” had actually already hung around too long, creatively speaking, which became more apparent over the arc of the last two seasons. However timely and urgent the show felt thanks to real-life echoes of women’s rights and theocracy when it premiered in 2017, the character drama inevitably took over and at times labored to explore new avenues.
Adapted from Margaret Atwood’s 2019 book sequel, Hulu’s upcoming sequel series “The Testaments” picks up 15 years after the original novel, practically requiring that while some doors closed, others had to stay open.
Sometimes, the decision to end a series is less about completing a story than creative bookkeeping. Specifically, finishing one series and then relaunching a new one offers a chance to hit the reset button but essentially continue the experience, reducing costs associated with cast members whose deals gradually become more lucrative with built-in raises over time.
“The Walking Dead” became a poster child for that, concluding the flagship series in 2022 after 11 seasons before greedily splintering in multiple directions with the subtitled “Dead City,” “Daryl Dixon” and “The Ones Who Live” (which brought back Andrew Lincoln and Dana Gurira), each built around beloved characters from the original show.
In an interview when the main series ended, executive producer Angela Kang described “Walking Dead” to Entertainment Weekly as “the zombie story that never ends,” which frankly sounds more like an AMC executive’s balance-sheet vision than a creative North Star.
Occasionally, the “finale” description also gets tossed about rather loosely, a case in point being “S.W.A.T.” The police drama concluded its run on CBS in May, only to see production company Sony Pictures Television unexpectedly announce a spinoff series a few days later, “S.W.A.T. Exiles,” bringing back star Shemar Moore and jettisoning the rest of the cast.
TV economics might no longer support the kind of later-season bounties talent enjoyed in the past, when shows like “Friends” and “The Big Bang Theory” hit the 10- and 12-season marks, but again, the details tend not to mean much to those viewers who spent years watching a certain show and want a definitive payoff for their investment.
“Ted Lasso” certainly felt like it had given fans precisely that when the Apple TV+ comedy concluded its Emmy-winning run in 2023, but after months of speculation, the service confirmed in March that a fourth season is on the way.
“Like, we buried it … we all cried, we had a funeral,” co-star and producer Brett Goldstein joked on NPR’s “Wild Card” podcast after the announcement. “Are you saying we can bring anything back? It’s too much power.”
Apparently, though, you can bring anything back. And part of the finale discussion is really a media story, since the hoopla surrounding series sendoffs benefits news outlets that eagerly join in the hype and capitalize on the traffic, posting breathless recaps and reviews within moments of the last scene, implying a finality that later turns out to be at best misleading.
Who lived? Who died? Is it really over? Wait, you mean “Dexter” isn’t really dead? He was shot and lying in a spreading pool of blood!
If answering such questions requires a small case of myopia, or at least a measure of naiveté, hey, times are tough all over, who’s to judge?
Media consumers are somewhat more sophisticated now — and have more means at their fingertips to hunt down information about their favorite shows — but that doesn’t mean they’re necessarily able to ascertain when a finale isn’t really a finale.
Will studios, networks and the media outlets that follow them pay a price for that should viewers wise up to the fact that what gets billed as “series finales” turn out to be less than advertised with increasing regularity? Alas, we might have to wait for the sequel to find out.
