This last month, as people all over the world were ringing in the New Year, another event was taking place both on the big and small screens.  Netflix’s flagship series Stranger Things was ending it’s 9 year, 5 season run and unlike other premieres on the streaming platform, it wasn’t rolling the season out with all episodes available at once.  Instead, they released the final episodes of the show in three batches; four episodes during the Thanksgiving holiday, the next three on Christmas Day, and the final episode would premiere on New Year’s Eve.  Clearly Netflix wanted to allow their audience to savor this moment over a longer period of time, allowing anticipation to build before the final episode would drop.  But that wasn’t all they were doing.  In select theaters across the country, they would also be playing the final episode on the big screen at the same time it premiered on the platform.  This was especially impressive, given Netflix’s traditional aversion to the theatrical experience.  There are only a few TV shows that could generate this kind of anticipation for it’s final episodes, and especially rare for it to warrant four walling the experience in a theater.  But Netflix wanted this show to go out with a bang, and now the world has had a chance to digest this final run for the series.  And the response has been, well to put it lightly, lukewarm.  In general, the final episode’s response has garnered generally positive remarks, but the consensus is also that it was more good than great.  And there is also a fairly vocal contingent of viewers out there who were really let down by the final episode.  But, what is especially interesting is seeing just how extreme the reactions can sometimes be.  There are tons of videos online slamming the final episode of Stranger Things as a betrayal to the fans, that the show is now considered a failure because it didn’t end the way they wanted.  Stranger Things is only the recent big franchise to face this kind of scrutiny, as bringing a long running series to an end has become an increasingly difficult thing to do in today’s media landscape.

There’s something that should be understood about any development of a television series and that it’s not as easy as it may seem.  Coming up with a killer concept for a show and then selling that to a network or streamer almost seems like the easy part.  After that comes the execution of that idea, and this is where things can get complicated.  What is true for most shows is that they have the benefit of novelty in their first season.  That was definitely the case for The Duffer Brothers, the duo behind Stranger Things.  Their hybrid of Spielbergian adventure tropes and Stephen King style horror really caught the attention of audiences when it first premiered on Netflix in 2016.  It wasn’t authentically unlike anything else on television at that time.  And it quickly grew a following, becoming a true cultural phenomenon.  The thing that really helped the show develop it’s quick rise in esteem with audiences was the fact that it had a very easy entryway into it’s story.  The 80’s era aesthetic was great nostalgia bait, and the tightly scripted story kept the plot moving at a strong pace.  Not only that, but it was also exceptionally well cast, especially with it’s child stars, most of whom were making their debut with this show, as well established veterans like Winona Ryder and David Harbour who saw this show propel them to new heights.  If the show never got a second season, you could still tell that it felt like a complete work in it’s 8 first episodes.  But, like most successful shows, there inevitably needs to be more.  Stranger Things got a second season renewal fairly quickly, and that puts a whole new level of pressure on the creators of a show.  Not only do you need to do it all again, but you have to make it even better.  There has been talk that the Duffer Brothers didn’t have a plan past season one, but that is almost never true of anyone who sells a show.  All writers who pitch shows knows that they need to have long term strategies in their pockets just in case their show lasts beyond it’s first season, especially if they are telling a serialized story.  Throughout it’s 9 year run, the Duffer Brothers have always had to prove themselves to get that next season greenlit and keep it going for one more run.  But, they were also well aware that it could all just stop without warning.

To their credit, they knew that this couldn’t go on for very much longer.  While it was only 5 seasons long, with less than 50 episodes in total, each season came with lengthy breaks in between.  Seasons 1 and 2 followed in quick succession, but then it took 2 years to get the third season, then three years to get season 4 (mainly because of Covid) and then another three years after that to get the final season.  And in all that time, the cast themselves were also growing older.  The child stars were now all in their 20’s, and it was becoming harder with each passing year to make us believe they were still teenagers.  So, there clearly needed to be an endgame, and it was time to execute.  But what is particularly interesting about each progressive season of Stranger Things is that each season keeps building in scale.  If you watched seasons one and five back to back, you would be amazed as the scaling up the show went through.  Netflix opened up their wallets for the final 8 episode run of the show, putting nearly half a billion into the season.  That makes it one of the most expensive shows ever produced, which is remarkable given how it started as just a small nostalgia driven horror series.  But, when things scale up at this rate, this is where some shows begin to fall apart.  For the Duffer Brothers, the question that keeps being asked about how they handled the final season was if this was truly their vision from the get go, or were they being mandated by Netflix to go big and loud in their final season.  The biggest criticism levied at the final season was that it felt bloated and lacked the tight scripting of the first couple seasons.  Most of the final season involved a lot of talking about the plot rather than characters actually doing anything.  But, even with everything as big as it is in the final season, the Duffer Brothers still executed a plan to tie everything up.  This often becomes the biggest problem with most shows that try to come to a satisfactory end.  Sometimes the story becomes too big and unwieldy to ever be wrapped up in a way that pleases everyone.  The fact that even though it ran for nearly a decade Stranger Things didn’t have too many episodes over that span of time, making the overall story far less of a quagmire to regin in.

We have a good many other examples in recent years of shows and franchises that have attempted to close the book on their stories to varying degrees.  The year 2019 in particular was especially noteworthy for franchise capping finales, and it also showed us the different extremes between how to end the story the right way and the wrong way.  On the good side, we had the Marvel Cinematic Universe close out what would be known as their Infinity Saga with the record-shattering blockbuster Avengers: Endgame (2019).  Pretty much across the board, the movie was hailed for it’s exceptional handling of how it ended it’s story, which spanned over 20 movies over ten years.  No other film in the world was more anticipated than this one, especially after it’s predecessor Avengers: Infinity War (2018) shocked us with one of the most devastating cliffhanger endings in movie history.  But the reason it worked was because there was a plan from the get go about where Marvel wanted their multi-franchise spanning narrative to go, with seed planted across multiple films, all culminating in this final event.  The same couldn’t exactly be said about the other major two franchises that closed their stories that same year.  Game of Thrones was undoubtedly the biggest television series in the world during it’s run in the 2010’s.  And through seven seasons it was unwavering in it’s audience appreciation.  But it’s eighth and final season was a different story.  Something was off about the final stretch of episodes, like it was speed running through too many important events in order to get the show over with much quicker.  The short and oddly paced final season of Game of Thrones felt like a different show entirely from all the seasons that came before it and audiences felt that the they weren’t being rewarded for all the time they invested in this story.  Part of why things were so disjointed was because the show had far exceeded the source material it was based on, the original books by author George R.R. Martin, who gave show runners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss the broad strokes, but not all the details about how the series would end, so a lot of it was up to their interpretation, which probably ran contrary to what fans wanted.  And then there was the unmistakable failure of Star Wars Episode IX -The Rise of Skywalker (2019), a movie that is a clear representation about the dangers of executing a multipart story without commitment to a plan.

The two latter examples are perfect illustrations about the risks involved in developing a story to span many years without a clear idea about how to execute the final phase of that story.  It’s easier to fly the plane than it is to bring it down for a safe landing, to use an apt metaphor.  While it is fun to build anticipation and provide twists and turns that can change the course of the story at any moment, eventually every story needs to come to an end, and this can often be the trickiest part.  One of the most basic lessons in screenwriting is learning the three act structure.  Sure some writers play around with linear storytelling and try to break free of act structure, but the vast majority of stories told follow this principle, where the first act introduces character, their world and the inciting incident, then act two proceeds with ascending action until the story reaches a turning point, which then leads to a climatic third act that brings the story to an end.  Most popular shows get that first act right and then has a little too much fun in that second act, losing too much focus leading into that third.  It’s hard to bring the story to a close when you’ve set up so many side characters and subplots to fill out that middle part of the story.  For Game of Thrones, things got a little too complicated, with so many main characters that became fan favorites populating the storyline.  In order to bring closure to all that, the show would’ve need at least a full 10 episode season rather than the 6 that it got.  Unfortunately for Benioff and Weiss, they never expected to be the ones to bring this story to a close.  They were adapting Martin’s novels, and unfortunately he hasn’t published a new volume since 2011, the same year that the show started airing.  So they had to improvise in the last stretch of the show, interpreting the broad strokes that Martin had given to them.  They clearly didn’t deliver for most people, but it was almost an impossible mission to accomplish.  It should have been easier for The Rise of Skywalker, but that was a whole different level of failure in execution.  It’s been pretty well reported that the Sequel Trilogy of Star Wars was put into motion without a clear endgame about how it would end.  It started off strong with The Force Awakens, but Rian Johnson’s trope killing second chapter The Last Jedi took some bold swings that divided many fans, and in a panic Lucasfilm decided just a year and a half out from release to scrap what they were doing for Episode IX and start from scratch, creating a wholly unsatisfactory finale that tries to please everyone and instead does the opposite.  Improvisation only gets you so far as long as you can “yes and” each segment of your story correctly, and Star Wars did not do that.

A lot of these major franchises have to balance between being bold in their final acts while at the same time being mindful about what the audience wants.  Sometimes, one is taken into consideration more than the other.  One thing that often becomes a problem in the final stretch of writing a long form story is getting too attached to the things you create.  This is particularly true with the characters.  Something that a lot of people have noticed about shows that run for a long time is that you can tell who the most popular characters are by how much plot armor they have in the story.  Plot armor is where characters seem to defy the odds a little too well in the story and survive situations that otherwise would’ve been their downfall in any other case.  For a show like Game of Thrones, this is something that really separated the early seasons from it’s latter years.  The show was notorious for killing off main characters in sudden shocking moments, like the now infamous Red Wedding scene.  Then in the later seasons, popular characters would manage to survive in the most convoluted ways possible.  To a lesser extant, this is a criticism leveled at Stranger Things too.  But, not every story should be so ruthless to it’s characters in order to tell a compelling story.  There is a term used in writing called “kill your darlings” which is the way of telling writers to not be so protective of something they love in their story when it’s actually acting as an impediment to plot progression.  But, this saying doesn’t mean that telling a compelling story involves actually killing off characters either.  The struggle of writing is to follow the story as it progresses and find that balance that works in it’s service, even if it means being a little ruthless.  But stories need to inspire too, and sometime that involves doing something to please the audience as well.  As the story gets bigger, this balancing of plot also gets more complicated, and many writers find working with that pressure to be a bit too much.  That’s often why the longest running shows are the ones that are open-ended, where each episode is one self-contained story.  A show like The Simpsons still keeps going for over 30 years with no end in sight because there was none to start with.  It’s just a show that lets us observe one adventure at a time with the citizens of Springfield and makes every episode a continuation of that formula.

One thing that showrunners and their team of writers also have to deal with in the execution of their final episodes is the proliferation of fan theories.  The longer a show goes and the bigger a hit it is, it will inevitably bring a lot of discussion by fans around how they think it’s all going to come to a close.  Sometimes the theorizing takes on life of it’s own, and shows unfortunately end up disappointing fans because it didn’t meet the expectations that they had created in their own heads about how the show would end.  Stranger Things ran into this scenario, which resulted in a rather bizarre fan theory that there was going to be a secret final 9th episode that would be the true ending of the series, instead of the one that we actually got.  Suffice to say, the “Conformity Gate” theory proved to be nothing but a hoax, and the Duffer Brothers specifically went out of their way to say that their finale was indeed the end of the show.  For a lot of fans, it’s hard to say goodbye, and making up excuses for things not going the way you wanted it to go doesn’t mean that the show betrayed you.  Writers try their best to wrangle together a story the best they can, and then it’s a coin flip as to whether it will please everyone or not.  The only situations where it’s appropriate to criticize the work of the writers is when it’s clear they did not put the effort into making their endings work.  The way that Benioff and Weiss seemed to check out early in the writing of the final season of Game of Thrones is worthy of criticism, as is the corporate meddling and the lack of a plan that derailed The Rise of Skywalker.  But, fandoms can also get a little out of hand in the way it assesses the ending of a long running series.  A lot of people sharply criticized the final episode of The Sopranos when it ended with a non-ending as the screen cut to black abruptly in it’s final moment.  But over time, that abrupt cut has sparked numerous discussions about it’s meaning, and now it’s proclaimed as one of the most memorable finales of all time.  Oftentimes, it takes a moment to sit with the ending of a show to come to terms with how you feel about it.  In time, what we feel as a betrayal by the show with how it didn’t meet our expectations will over the years be looked at as exactly the way it should have always ended.

For many things, it isn’t just the journey that matters but also the destination.  For Stranger Things, not everything about the fifth and final season was perfect.  It had many problems to be sure and probably could have been trimmed down considerably; especially with many of those sitting around and talking moments.  But, for me as a fan of the show since it started, I do have to say that they nailed the final scene of the show.  We met our main characters as little kids playing a game of Dungeons and Dragons in a basement game room, and in it’s final scene, Stranger Things has those same characters once again playing D&D in a the basement.  It’s a full circle finale that ties it all together; these are the same characters, but they are fully reshaped by the adventure they’ve been through, and the game now hits very different for them.  It reminded me a lot of the way one of the greatest franchise finales, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) also ended.  In that movie, adapted from J.R.R. Tolkien’s novels, the Hobbits also return to their unspoiled home forever changed.  Life goes on, but it will never be like it once was.  The final scene of Stranger Things finds that same note and executed it perfectly.  In the end, for someone like me, it makes it all worth it if you get that final note right, even if everything before it wasn’t the tidiest.  Honestly, it what defines the greatest finales from the ones that are either bad or forgettable.  No one really remembers everything that happened in the final episodes of Cheers, Newhart, or The Sopranos, but we all remember Ted Danson telling a late bar patron “sorry, we’re closed,” or Bob Newhart waking up and realizing it was all a dream, or the lights literally going out on Tony Soprano.  That’s the sign of great storytelling, where the ending just feels right.  It will take time for us to fully assess where Stranger Things lies in the history of franchise finales.  It may not have been the smoothest landing, but it still got the job done.  Sure it was a tad too long, and a little overblown with big bombastic moments, but that tender final scene of friends bonding over a game they love is what brings it to a satisfactory close and that’s something that the Duffer Brothers clearly should feel proud of.  They tackled one of the most difficult jobs in all of writing and left us with something that more than anything feels full and complete.