There is a Sufi legend about a mighty king who commanded his wisest men to deliver him a magic ring, one that would make him happy when he was sad. After some deliberation, they presented him with a simple band on which these words were etched: "This too will pass."
And maybe that's the only real wisdom in the world -- the knowledge that change is inevitable, that all matter declines to chaos and things fly apart. Sic transit gloria mundi. Where have you gone, Derek Jeter, Don Draper, David Letterman? It turns out the magic ring is also cursed: It can make you happy when you are sad, but when you are happy you know that it cannot last. Sooner or later, everything regresses to the mean.
Maybe it's easy with athletes. Sports at the highest level is close to a pure meritocracy, and the margins are thin, but measurable. You lose a step, some bat speed and suddenly you're compelled to confront your professional mortality. If there's someone better, cheap sentimentality can last only so long. If you've been very good for a decade or more, maybe you'll get a victory lap around the league where your opponents give you presents. But most of them, like most of us, go quietly.
I don't know when television series first started to have finales rather than being abruptly canceled -- the first I remember was "Goodbye, Farewell and Amen," the two-and-a-half-hour final episode of MAS*H that CBS ran on Feb. 28, 1983, though I remember my parents caring about David Janssen's quest to find the one-armed man in The Fugitive. A little research turns up the surprising information that Howdy Doody and Leave It to Beaver were allowed special send-off shows. Route 66 had a finale. The Mary Tyler Moore Show ended with most of the crew at WJM being fired, carrying out their belongings in file boxes.
But those were exceptions; through much of television history shows just dropped off the schedule without the benefit of planned and marketed very special final episodes.
(This still happens in the great majority of cases. Series die all the time. It would have been nice to have one more season of Deadwood, but its creator and showrunner David Milch had other projects to explore. One of those, Luck, a collaboration with Michael Mann set in the seedy world of horse racing, ended abruptly and ignominiously in an animal cruelty scandal.)
Maybe part of that had to do with the nature of the medium; until 20 years ago or so, most TVs were relatively small boxes in which little people cavorted. Before cable, TV shows were free. They didn't have the production values or pretensions to art as the movies. People developed an easy quasi-intimacy with the TV stars they allowed in their homes -- even in their bedrooms -- every week. While Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton were faces that filled public walls, the television star was decidedly smaller than life.
It used to be that people who wanted to sound smart and culturally engaged would deny watching television. (I didn't have one for most of the '80s. I watched the MAS*H finale at my parents' house.) Now 55-inch HD flat-screens are not uncommon, programming has been balkanized into a thousand streams and television is where the most exciting stuff happens. Things change.
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There will be no more new episodes of Mad Men. As you likely know by now, at the end of the show, our anti-hero Don Draper (Jon Hamm) snapped out of his On the Road reverie while attending something like an Esalen Institute workshop at Big Sur. He realized we are what we do. So he went back to his job at McCann Erickson in New York and to advertising and created what a lot of people believe to be the most successful advertising campaign of all time -- the real-world Coke ad composed of ethnically diverse young people singing a jingle with the lyric "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing" on a hillside in Manziana, outside Rome.
(Interestingly, the jingle preceded the hit song -- there were two versions, one by the New Seekers, the other by a studio group called the Hillside Singers. Bill Backer, a former McCann Erickson creative director, thought up the commercial's concept while waiting for a flight in Shannon, Ireland. Backer told CNN he didn't care about the Mad Men finale, that he gave up on the show after a couple of seasons because it was turning into a soap opera that had little to do with the world of advertising.)
I wasn't disappointed with the way Mad Men ended, for while you could read it cynically ("turns out Draper had no interior life after all") I tend to agree with Draper's conclusion. It really is just more of the same until you die, but we can invest meaning in our lives through the way we live. For some of us, work is enough. While selfishly I'm sorry to let the show go, it ended about as well as it could have. I would like to have seen Draper in the mid-70s, confronted with polyester and malaise. I would have liked to see him in his mid-70s, staring out like Ozymandias: "Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
But that's just me being sentimental. I miss The Sopranos too. I would have liked to have followed Tony out of Holstein's ice cream parlor -- though poor James Gandolfini didn't survive his character by too many years.
Yes, the sudden leap-to-black meant the universe closed off for the Mafia don. That's what death looks like from the perspective of the protagonist, the character who carries us surrogates through the fictional universe. As Bobby Bacala said, "You probably don't even hear it when it happens." Pay no attention to David Chase's equivocations -- Tony got whacked. Too bad it was to the feeble strains of Steve Perry and Journey -- too bad Chase had to come out and tell us he wasn't using the song ironically.
I would like the story to be never-ending, though I don't know what you do after coming up with the "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing" Coke ad. (Maybe kill your soulless self? With no hell, what would be the point?) The truth is, the more compelling and authentic the drama, the more difficult it must be to try to wrap it all up with a bow. Mad Men was starting to dissipate near the end, as Don drifted into his existential fugue.
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Some loose ends should not be tied off -- Breaking Bad lost a little of its hard-won credibility with a finale that tried to satisfy the audience's desire for closure by having Walter White (Bryan Cranston) walk back his hard-won complexity for something as banal as a martyr's redemption. But how else could it have ended? Maybe White could have gotten away scot-free, maybe become a lumberjack like the serial murderer in Dexter. Honestly, that Showtime series went off the rails in its third or fourth season -- by the time it was done it hardly mattered what happened to the character played by Michael C. Hall.
Hall was, however, involved in one of the more graceful finales, that of the HBO series Six Feet Under after its fifth season in 2005. As perhaps befitted a show about a family of undertakers, that episode closed with a six-minute-long montage that ventured far into the future to depict the death of every major character in the show, expunging all ambiguity while assuring us that life goes on. Until it doesn't.
Letterman mightn't have been at the top of his game, but he was close enough. (I hadn't watched a complete show of his in years, but these days our tools allow us to compile and digest media any way we like -- I've been watching Dave on YouTube.) His sensibility is so pervasive now it seems difficult to imagine a time when chat shows existed to serve Hollywood egoism rather than deflate it. Letterman regarded celebrity with suspicion instead of awe, but like that magic ring the king asked for, there's a downside to his legacy: He's one of the godfathers of the culture of reflexive snark and cynicism.
While you can't seriously compare him to Shakespeare (can you?), Letterman is one of the reasons you think the way you do. I don't know that television has produced a more important cultural figure.
So Letterman's goodbye feels like an important moment. It feels like he left at the right time, in control of his own fate. Contrast that to poor Jon Stewart, who was in part made redundant by the ascension of John Oliver, the protege who filled in for him on Comedy Central's Daily Show a couple of summers ago when he went off to direct the tepidly received movie Rosewater.
Oliver was a hit in the big chair, and that probably led to HBO giving him his own weekly half-hour comedy news program, Last Week Tonight, that essentially plays as the sort of show that Stewart would do were he given a huge research staff, six days between tapings and freedom from a network standards and practices department. While the Daily Show will carry on with South African stand-up comedian Trevor Noah, who hosted a similar show in his home country, at the desk, Stewart will tape his final episode Aug. 6: "Thus passes the glory of the world."
I feel like Jerry Seinfeld, when asked if he thinks the weather will "stay this way."
No, no I don't.
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Style on 06/14/2015