Yesterday I watched the Dollhouse finale, and as much as I loved the show, I’m not terribly sad to see it go.
Maybe I should qualify that statement. Would I have loved to see another three years of the show? Yes. After all, any Joss Whedon on television is always good. Was the second season amazing-beyond-words? Absolutely. But there are two primary reasons I’m still not sad to see it go.
The first is that, as amazing as the second season was, I can’t help but feel that what made it so great was the fact that Whedon was fairly confident almost from the beginning of this season that he would not be getting a third. Ratings were not great, and when the second season premiere aired, I remember reading something about how Whedon was currently in production of the fifth or so episode. So the writing was on the wall.
Now, let’s look at the show beginning with the fifth or sixth episode. That’s when Whedon began really pulling out the stops, telling all the stories the show had the potential for in the long run because, let’s face it, there wasn’t going to be a long run. You want to see the Attic? We’ll take you to the Attic. Who’s behind Rossum? We’ll show you who. What’s the larger agenda of the Dollhouse and the tech behind it? Here you go. All in all, the second season had a sense of urgency that was lacking in the first, and that urgency only came about because the show wasn’t going to make it past this year.
Season one of Dollhouse was great as set-up, but the meat of the show was really in the back half of that second season. And that half probably would’ve looked a hell of a lot different if Whedon was guaranteed another year or three.
But here’s the other reason I’m not sad to see it go. We got two great seasons of television, which is always a good thing. And, if a series is particularly well done, it shouldn’t matter if it was cut down in its prime or when the creators decided to terminate it.
As I’ve said before, the television series is the form that is most capable of mimicking our lives. As such, a television series effectively becomes a somewhat arbitrary snapshot of a period of its characters lives. This point is most accentuated by The Sopranos, a series you all know I love and cherish. In terms of dramatic structure, that series reached its “climax” well before its finale—perhaps when Carmela asked Tony to leave the house, perhaps in the second series when Tony seemed to have been learning from all his past mistakes, or perhaps it was as early as the second season finale and the death of Big Pussy.
Whenever it happened, however, one point is evident: the sixth season of The Sopranos was the season that happened after the story had ended. Hell, it even begins with Tony’s symbolic death: Uncle Junior, due to his dementia, shoots Tony, sending him into a two-episode long coma where he experiences what his life would have been like if he had escaped his family’s business. The third episode of the season centers around the rest of the cast moving on as if Tony has died—Silvio has taken over as interim head of the family, business goes on as usual. In that episode, we get a glimpse of life after Tony Soprano has “died.”
Of course, the sixth season did bring a type of resolution to Tony Soprano’s story, but it’s a resolution that paradoxically proves my point that it shouldn’t matter when or how a series ends. There’s a great deal of thematic resolution in the course of the season as it really hammers home the entropic arc of the series as a whole. But as for the actual plotlines themselves, there isn’t much there. Tony is looking at several indictments in the near future. Silvio’s still in a coma. The final, seemingly arbitrary cut-to-black reveals the true nature of open-ended, longform, episodic narrative.
The Sopranos simply followed its characters around as they lived their lives. The only true ending to the series would have been everyone dying. Anything less really was an arbitrarily-chosen endpoint.
(of course, some would argue that the final cut-to-black is meant to indicate Tony’s death, and while I don’t necessarily disagree with that interpretation, I feel that the question of whether Tony lives or dies at the end of the series is, ultimately, inconsequential for a number of reasons that I will probably enumerate in some future column; because I’m sure what you really, really want is to listen to me blabber on about The Sopranos some more)
Back when Deadwood, another series near and dear to my heart, was canceled after its third season, I remember there was an outcry from the fanbase looking for some type of resolution to the story, prompting series creator David Milch to devise a plan to create two Deadwood films that never materialized. Nonetheless, I say it doesn’t matter that we didn’t get “resolution” to the story, whatever that might mean. Deadwood had no overarching plot the way a show like Lost does, so that certainly wasn’t what any one meant. Yes, there were a number of sub-plots dangling at the end, but there were a number of subplots dangling at the beginning as well—just as some stories in a pilot are begun in media res, so should some stories be left at the end.
We got three fantastic fucking years of television from David Milch with Deadwood. The fact that he didn’t get to write a “proper” ending to the series in no way alters that series’ greatness. You can still watch it and study it and tear it apart all you like. The show was about a camp of people living their everyday lives in a frontier town, a point accentuated by the fact that each episode of the series took place over the course of one day. There wasn’t meant to be a “resolution” to those stories.
And just to drive home the point, I read in an interview with David Chase, the creator of The Sopranos, that he wrote the fourth season finale unsure of whether or not there would be a fifth year to the series. As such, he planned that finale as a series finale. Ditto with the fifth season finale. You see, most TV shows—and here I’m exempting heavily-serialized shows such as Lost—are not novels, a point that we sometimes forget. They do not have a beginning, middle, and end as we commonly understand them. In fact, I’d argue that we need a somewhat different language to describe the dramatic structure of a TV series. What that language is, I’m not sure, but I’ll probably spend another column talking incessantly until I figure out what it is.
And that, my friends, is why I wasn’t sad to see Dollhouse go. Bet you thought I’d completely lost track of my original point, didn’t you?
For today’s musical interlude: go here and listen to the Sleigh Bells’ “Crown on the Ground.” It’s like a revelation.
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