I quit a show at the end of season six last month. Not because it got bad — it didn't, exactly. I quit because I finally admitted the thing I'd been avoiding for two years: nobody making it had any intention of finishing it.
You can feel it when it happens. The plot stops moving toward something and starts moving in a circle. A character gets a revelation in episode four and unlearns it by episode nine. Someone leaves town and comes back. A question gets answered with a better question. It's not storytelling anymore, it's maintenance — keeping the machine warm so the subscription renews.
I'm done with it. I don't trust a show that won't end.
An Ending Is a Promise.
Here's what I mean by trust. When you start a story, the person telling it is making you an offer: give me your attention and I'll take you somewhere. Not somewhere pleasant, necessarily. Just somewhere. There's a destination and I know what it is and you don't yet.
A show designed to run forever can't make that offer. It structurally cannot. If the destination is "until the numbers drop," then every episode is a stalling tactic dressed up as a plot. The writers aren't lying to you on purpose — a lot of them are furious about it too — but the shape of the thing is a lie. It looks like a story. It's a subscription retention product with actors in it.
A story that can't end can't mean anything. Meaning is what happens when something stops.
And I think that's the actual reason so much of this stuff evaporates the second you finish it. You watch sixty hours of something and a month later you couldn't summarize it for a stranger. Not because you weren't paying attention. Because there was nothing to summarize. No shape. Sixty hours of middle.
Four Seasons. That's It. That's the Whole Argument.
Almost every great show I can name got somewhere between three and five seasons and then had the decency to die. The ones that went longer are remembered for the years before they overstayed, which is a strange kind of tragedy — a show can retroactively damage itself. You cannot say that about a book. A book is done. Nobody ever ruined a novel by writing more of it after everyone loved it.
Television is the only medium where success is punished with dilution. A movie makes money, they make another movie, fine — that one's separate, you can ignore it. A show makes money and the reward is that the thing you loved gets stretched until you can see through it.
Seasons I gave that show before I quit. Roughly ninety hours. I could not tell you what it was ultimately about, and I'm now confident nobody involved could either.
I'll go further. I'd rather have a great show that gets canceled abruptly at the end of season two than a good one that limps to season nine. At least the canceled one has edges. At least it stayed a specific thing. There are shows I still think about that got yanked mid-sentence, and they live in my head permanently, whereas the ones that ran a decade live nowhere.
This Is a Money Problem, Not a Talent Problem.
I run businesses. I understand exactly why this happens and I'm not pretending it's a mystery.
A finished story is an asset that stops producing. An unfinished one is a reason to keep paying. Every incentive in the modern setup — every single one — pushes toward extension. Launching something new is expensive and risky. Ordering season seven of a thing people already tolerate is cheap and safe. If I were sitting in that chair with those numbers in front of me, I'd probably order season seven too, and I'd feel fine about it right up until I got home and turned it on.
So I don't blame the executives, exactly. I blame the arrangement. We built an entertainment economy where the correct business decision and the correct creative decision point in opposite directions, and then acted surprised that everything feels like it's made of gum.
Same thing killed the franchise movie, by the way. Nothing resolves anymore. Every ending is a doorway. You don't get a conclusion, you get a hook, and the hook is for a thing that comes out in three years and will also end in a hook. It's an infinite hallway of setup with no room at the end of it.
Every ending became a doorway. It's an infinite hallway of setup with no room at the end of it.
What I Watch Now.
Limited series. Miniseries. Six episodes, one arc, the whole thing conceived as a finished object before anybody rolled a camera. Eight hours that actually add up to something. When I see "limited" on a title card now I relax the way you relax when a contractor gives you a fixed price instead of an hourly rate.
And I've started asking the question before I invest instead of after: does this thing know where it's going? Sometimes you can tell from the first two episodes. There's a tightness to writing that has a deadline in it. You can hear the ending pulling on the dialogue even in the pilot.
If I can't tell, I wait. I'll let a show finish and then decide whether to start it, which is apparently a controversial position now — people tell me I'm missing the conversation. I don't care about the conversation. The conversation is forty thousand people speculating about a resolution that the writers haven't decided on and might never write. I'll join the conversation when there's something to talk about.
Finish Things.
The older I get, the more I respect anyone who ends something on purpose. Bands that broke up instead of releasing a fourteenth album. Businesses that shut down cleanly instead of zombie-walking for six years. Writers who typed the last page and put it down.
Ending something is harder than continuing it. Continuing is the default — it requires no decision, no courage, no point of view. You just keep going because going is what you were already doing. Ending requires you to say out loud what the whole thing was for.
Most shows won't say it. That's the tell. That's why I don't trust them.
I'm not going back for season seven. Say what it was about or let it go.