My people,
We have reached the end. Jim, June, Mo, you have been excellent, insightful, sharp-tongued company, and I am despondent that your missives will no longer be flooding my inbox. Inevitably, as we wrap up, there suddenly seems to be so much more to talk about: Weird ratings data points! The fact that How I Met Your Mother is another show I should have mentioned when talking about shows that have been going for way, way too long! And then there, off in the distance, just on the other side of New Year’s, await new episodes of Girls, Justified, Community, and The Fosters —plus new series like HBO’s Looking and True Detective and even a Flowers in the Attic remake, starring Sally Draper no less. (Where is TV on incest right now? It was all the rage two years ago.) If 2014 is not as good a vintage as 2013, it will surely be at least as interesting.
Endings, as TV series continuously demonstrate, are hard. (Do you know what aired its final episode this year? Whitney. Time really flies when you are watching TV all day.) You can go out with a cockamamie whimper like Dexter and piss off almost everyone, or go out with a Nazi-killing bang like Breaking Bad and still irk someone (like me; I still think the finale took it a little too easy on Walt). The only solution, apparently, is to be Kenny Powers, who can finish his show imagining—among other things—that his daughter grew up to be Lindsay Lohan and have it be, somehow, perfect, or to be as flawed as Smash, in which case a middling duet between your two leads of wildly divergent talents was really all anyone could expect of you anyway. In other words, I bid you adieu with the hopes that you are now imagining the musical version of Kenny Powers’ life, as performed by the original cast of Smash. Perhaps NBC’s next live musical spectacular?
But seriously: May your new year be happy and healthy and full of great television. I’ll be reading you all as voraciously as ever. It’s been a pleasure.
Willa
