LITTLE ROCK — In this season’s opening episodes of Gossip Girl the gang was once again on the trail of a missing Serena. (She’s disappeared before.) She was keeping secret the fact that she had slept with a boyfriend of Blair’s (not the first time); the two women weren’t on speaking terms (as usual). Dan was writing a tell-all (again). And Rufus was making waffles. (It’s what he does.) If it seems as if the show had visited this territory before, it had.
But the Gossip Girl writers had not run out of ideas. No, they were creating mirror-image bookends to the show’s first seasons, demonstrating how the characters had come full circle. They were doing the part-triumphant, part-sad job of wrapping up Gossip Girl.
After six seasons that show went dark this month, one of several notable series, like The Office and 30 Rock, that are ending their runs this television season.
Shows go off the air for a variety of reasons: tanking ratings, tanking ratings and, of course, tanking ratings. But sometimes, rarely even, shows go off the air not because of advertising concerns or profitability but because the people who write and produce them decide that it’s time.
That’s not to say that these shows are leaving as the critical and ratings darlings that they once were; critics have faulted all these shows as being stale and past their expiration date. Renegotiating with actors, writers and producers often creates too big a dent in profitability, and when contracts are up, a show is lucky if the star, now popular, is still willing to come to the table.
The producers must face a big question: When do you call it quits?
For Gossip Girl, the answer was easy. “Shows like these aren’t designed to run forever,” said Josh Schwartz, series co-creator. “It was a combination of having a great long run, watching these characters grow and mature, and” - maybe most aptly - “being at the end of a six-year contract that everyone had been under when it started.”
In addition, he said, “there comes a point creatively where it feels like having an endgame is a terrific way to energize a show late in its run.”
Gossip Girl could have continued for years, in the tradition of Beverly Hills 90210 and One Tree Hill. Teenagers, after all, do grow up: Let actors and characters come and go, and keep the spirit of the show alive. Instead Gossip Girl rolled its eyes at the thought, introducing Sage, only to have her trumpet the end: “No one reads Gossip Girl anymore,” she told Serena.
Likewise, when The Office began its ninth season, it seemed like a show that could go on forever - which was, in fact, a possibility.
“We could keep the show going for many years and keep refreshing it with new cast members,” said Greg Daniels, one of the show’s creators and executive producers. “We hit a fork in the road this season, trying to decide if we’d go that way, or if we’d end it now with as many of the original cast members as we could.” It came down to whether The Office was about a paper company and the people who worked there, or about this particular set of people who worked at a paper company.
“You just can’t expect people to play the same characters for 25 years,” Daniels said. It’s a rigorous job, all the more so on The Office, where so many of the actors are also writers and producers.
Exhaustion is also partly to blame for the curtain on 30 Rock, which is ending Jan. 31. But a bigger reason was the eagerness of the staff to pursue other projects, especially the in-demand creator, Tina Fey, who stars as Liz Lemon.
“People want to move on and have to move on,” said Robert Carlock, an executive producer of 30 Rock. “A show has a half-life, an isotopic decay, and you have to be sensitive to that. The thing that kept us on the air was that we tried to make it very good. The last thing that Tina and I wanted to have happen was it to stop being good.”
Carlock said writing and producing a TV show is like being chased by something that’s faster than you: “You want to catch it before it catches you. You never run out of ideas. We still have ideas, especially because it’s a show that deals with topical events. But the monster that’s chasing you will inevitably get you.”
So, beginning last season, the writers kept the end in sight. Since the show is centered on Liz’s desire to find happiness, it was time to find her someone appropriate.“We had to stop with the guys who have hooks for hands and who pull guns on her on airplanes,” Carlock said. They introduced Criss (James Marsden), a guy who wanted to settle down with her and wasn’t too crazy. And there were larger stories to tell too - about Tracy, Kenneth, Jenna and of course, Jack.
“We needed endings for nine or 10 different people,”Carlock said. “How do you do that for everyone?”
Schwartz said, “The arrows that point you toward your series finale are usually seeded in your pilot.”
Endings are delicate. “People have been tracking these characters’ emotional lives,” Schwartz said. “But you also want to leave things a little open-ended so that these characters can live on in the audience’s imagination.”
Above all, though, “you make a finale for the fans,” said Stephanie Savage, co-creator of Gossip Girl. With that in mind, the show answered the real question asked in the first episode - and in the opening credits of every episode - by finally revealing the identity of that digital interloper, Gossip Girl.
The finale of The Office - which will probably be broadcast in May, an NBC spokesman said - presented itself pretty clearly in the pilot as well. In a format that’s been imitated by Parks and Recreation and Modern Family, the series is ostensibly a documentary about an office.
“I’ve wanted to show this documentary for a long time,” Daniels said. “It seems like the perfect time. Nine years is a long time.”
And of course there will be sad goodbyes. Schwartz and Savage said they’d miss their cast and crew. Daniels spoke softly about shoots that were chaotic at the time but fondly remembered. And Carlock grew wistful over the stories he’ll never tell.
“After the last table read we started talking about the term ‘Grand Poobah,’ how Fred Flintstone and Mr. Cunningham were grand poobahs of their lodges,” he said. “Someone suggested that Jack become grand poobah of his men’s club, and that was the first moment we realized that we couldn’t have anything happen to Jack.
“He will never be the grand poobah. It was sad.”
Style, Pages 45 on 12/30/2012