What’s a show that had the perfect series finale?
I am not really a series person, which makes this prompt harder than it should be. There is really only one show we binge watched: Green Wing.
It was a British comedy set in a fictional hospital, East Hampton Hospital. On the surface, it was a hospital comedy, but that makes it sound much more ordinary than it was. Green Wing was surreal, frantic, awkward, ridiculous, and oddly tender.
Even an ordinary walk down a corridor could become comic. A painfully awkward workplace conversation might suddenly give way to someone sliding along on a trolley like a deranged penguin. The show kept shifting gears: realism, then absurdity; embarrassment, then slapstick; chaos, then a sudden moment of melancholy.
The humour came from the characters. They were vain, insecure, romantic, deluded, incompetent, fragile, self-important, needy, and lost. Exaggerated, yes, but recognisable. Perhaps too recognisable.
That is what kept the show from becoming merely silly. The characters were ridiculous, but they were not treated with cruelty. You laughed at their flaws, but you also recognised them. Their absurdity had loneliness underneath it.
So when the show ended, it could never have ended neatly. But a tidy ending would have felt false. Green Wing needed an ending that was chaotic, emotional, surreal, and slightly unhinged. And that is what it gave us.
There are actually two endings: the end of the second series, and then the final special. That seems fitting too. Even the ending did not quite behave itself. Perhaps that is what made it right.
A perfect finale does not have to explain everything or resolve every loose thread. Sometimes a perfect ending is simply one that remains faithful to the story it has been telling all along.
That seems true beyond television. Some endings in life are neat. Most are not. Some resolve. Many leave loose threads. Some arrive with speeches and farewells. Others pass quietly, and we only recognise them later.
Perhaps the best endings are not always the cleanest ones. Perhaps the best endings are the ones that do not betray the story.
The Afterword 
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