Send ‘em home happy. If you spend season after season, year after year with a show and a cast of characters, you want their final notes to be pleasant ones. As viewers, we’ve also invested in them. We’ve committed to their journeys by that point. To have them end in pain or tears or frustration would be too much after all of that. And most series, no matter how dark or cynical they may be, oblige their audiences on that account.
In the 20 years since The Sopranos first took to the airwaves, scores of shows followed in its footsteps, imitating its dark-hearted approach, novelistic bent, and antihero bona fides. In the ensuing two decades, television’s level of moral complexity rose; the chances to see protagonists make ethically questionable choices soared, and examinations of the grim underbelly of everything that TV once made bright and clean became legion and fashionable. But for all the titans who emerged in Tony Soprano’s (James Gandolfini) wake, few if any have had the stick-to-your-guns conviction to finish their runs on a note so bleak, a loss so complete, or an ending of such unmitigated tragedy.
