I really like the HBO show
”
Sex and the City.
”
It’s been on for six years. Next week is its final episode. Then
it will be gone.
I really like the HBO show “Sex and the City.” It’s been on for six years. Next week is its final episode. Then it will be gone. It won’t be on any more. Oh, well. Guess I’ll start doing something else at 9 on Sunday nights.
Now America, was that so hard? Why can’t you do that? When did the demise of popular television shows become the subject of national poignancy? Of course, its source is the networks that are kissing off the shows in a crass attempt to milk as much as possible out of a moment, but of late we have let ourselves get sucked into the phenomenon, and I for one am more than a little embarrassed for my fellow countrymen.
It started, I suppose, with the last episode of the mega-popular show “M*A*S*H,” as the network went to extraordinary lengths to build up our last opportunity to see that wacky gang of medical malcontents whom we had all grown to love and cherish. Movie-length last show, interviews with the stars, retrospectives, sociological commentary on the series’ place in our cultural history – they pulled out all the stops to insure that there wouldn’t be a dry eye in the nation by the time they were done with us. Lost in the weeping and wailing for the end of an era was the mundane fact that it was a HALF-HOUR SITCOM. I mean, we’re not talking about the assassination of Gandhi here. But everybody had a tissue-filled good, bittersweet time, and if it were a unique experience, well, we all can be forgiven for getting a little goofy every now and then.
But now it has turned into a cottage industry. This year alone marks the end of “Sex and the City,” “Fraser,” and – Katy bar the door – “Friends.” The ongoing commemoration of the latter appears at present to be functionally without limit, and given the derivative nature of program creation in TV-land, I would not be surprised to see a new sitcom next season whose plot is what happens during the last season of a popular television show. If they call it something evocative like “Friends Again” or “Old Friends” or “Even Friendlier,” it could probably become a big hit, and when it finally runs its course years from now they can base a still-newer show on what happens during its final season. That, having become a big hit, could in turn spin off a new show that … etc.
Maybe it’s just me, but I chafe at the regimentation of emotion these events seek to create. Do we have some national need to periodically bundle up all the things we are sad to say good-bye to and visit them on a shared occurrence? Does the very term “final episode” press a buried button in our psyches that makes us get all mushy? These are television shows, people, not the family dog.
Friends (and friends of “Friends”), Americans, countrymen, lend me your tears. I come to bury Phoebe and her crew, Fraser and his neurotic brother, Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha, not to praise them. The syndicated reruns that series do live after them; the first experience of their racy humor is oft interred with their bones. So let it be with above-average sitcoms. The noble networks say the actors were ambitious, and Jupiter knows they have all, all walked away far richer than any of us will ever be. They have brought the craft of screenwriting home to our homes, whose laughter did our general demeanors fill. When the poor have cried, they have given us pleasant trivia and happy endings. Ambition should be made of sterner stuff. Now, enough already. Let us all chant together, “We are real, they are not, we are real, they are not …”
