What’s a mistake, and I think unhealthy, is to believe that a series’s worth is retroactively determined by its ending, no matter what came before it. Because that promotes an even sadder idea: That it’s a bad move to invest too much in any story, because it might eventually let you down.
A great gymnastics routine is flawless. A great work of art has memorable flaws. It has rough, unfinished edges that never stop chafing no matter many how many years they roll around in the rock tumbler of your subconscious.
The last episode of “The Curse,” for instance, may have been simultaneously the most amazing and maddening TV finale I have ever watched. At the end of this uncomfortable marriage dramedy, the home-flipper Asher Siegel (Nathan Fielder) woke to find his personal field of gravity reversed, an extended sequence of Kafkaesque slapstick that ended with his falling upward to a frozen death in orbit.
The finale was brilliant, or it was pretentious. It upended viewers’ expectations, or it got weird for weirdness’ sake. What it absolutely did not do was stick the landing. It literally did the opposite, sending its protagonist sailing off into space and leaving us to crane our necks to the sky and try to make meaning of it. I’m still working on that.
That’s the other thing about the concept of sticking the landing: It implies that judgment of a finale is immediate and immutable. We watch, we scribble on our score cards, we declare the series in or out of the pantheon. (Don’t get me started on “the pantheon.”)
As a critic, maybe I’m supposed to pretend to that kind of finality. But I know it’s a lie.
I was moved by the “Breaking Bad” finale when it aired; now I think it was … fine, but a flat, something-for-everybody ending from a series that peaked a couple of episodes earlier. I was lukewarm on the “Mad Men” finale and now find that it, like nearly everything about that series, holds up better on rewatch than maybe any show of its era. A decade later, I can at least appreciate what “How I Met Your Mother” was trying to say about embracing second chances and not assuming that your own story is over.
It’s been years since these series ended and I’m still not done with them, nor are they done with me. This is at least one good thing about “Did it stick the landing?”: It is a meaningless question, but it gives us an excuse to ponder and talk about meaningful things. Maybe what matters most is neither the journey nor the destination. It’s where we let our minds travel after we’ve landed.
