Today it was announced by series creator Greg Daniels that The Office would be ending at the conclusion of this upcoming ninth season. This marks a bit of a cultural history in any number of ways, but there is an important storytelling piece to examine here as well.
The 2004-2005 freshman class of television shows was one the strongest in the history of the medium: The Office, House, Lost, Desperate Housewives, Battlestar Galactica, Grey's Anatomy, Veronica Mars, CSI: NY, Medium, Boston Legal. Many of these shows were if not hits (and many were) then important television works that defined the last decade. This is not only in the world of television but the larger popular culture.
To quantify the impact of The Office on society would be folly (and one I'll undoubtedly save fully for its finale next spring), but suffice it to say that certain character archetypes, the rise of the documentary style of filming, and "That's what she said" can find their contemporary roots in this seminal series. The Office has had and will continue to have a long-lasting impact on the tools we use to tell comedic stories.
What the end of The Office says about traditional storytelling and, more importantly, serialized storytelling is a different matter all together. Most everyone knows that a story must have only three things to be a story: a beginning, a middle and an end. That's what is so great about a movie or a play: within a few hours you can get a complete (and hopefully fulfilling) story. Television on the other hand is by nature an elongated form. It may take 13 hours to tell the story or, in the case of Gunsmoke, 635 hours to tell the story. The struggle for the production team that makes a show and the network that airs a show is how long does a story need to take and how best to tell that story while balancing the financial needs of the business.
Take my beloved Breaking Bad for instance. The story has been from the very beginning how a normal man goes from beloved teacher to criminal kingpin. Creator Vince Gilligan knew the story was going to end, he just didn't always know when or where. An agreement was reached with AMC to end the series at the end of this current fifth season. It was best creatively for the story to end. However, business wise, Breaking Bad was getting bigger ratings and more cultural attention each year it was on the air. Pulling the plug would mean a loss of income for AMC. The final deal allowed AMC to split the season into two parts, air them over two years and increase the earning window of the series. This was a win for all parties, save perhaps the audience who will have to wait for 10 agonizing months between episode 8 and episode 9.
The real issue comes when the networks and production team cannot come to a mutually beneficial agreement. Veronica Mars ended far to soon, as did fellow 2004-2005 freshman alum and one season wonder Jack & Bobby. The creators would have loved to have the stories end later than when it became financially responsible to end them.
A different situation happens when your show is a major success but has in its narrative drive both a natural end and the potential to tell a significant amount of stories. When Lost debuted, it was a huge cultural touchstone. People were interested and excited about the storytelling and intrigued by the mysteries at its core. For a while it looked like it would be bigger than The X-Files. Naturally ABC wanted to milk the series for as long as possible and the producers riding high on the overnight success were eager to please. Then as the stories became more obtuse, as questions were answered with more questions and as the narrative drive of the series became controlled by really cool fifth act reveals, the audience began to contract. The third season of Lost, while not as turgid as the seventh and eighth seasons of The X-Files (I still maintain that The X-Files ninth season was very strong), was really just wheel spinning that served only to deflate egos and depress audiences. A deal was struck to end the series after three more years, and the producers could re-craft their storytelling with an end in mind.
Then there are the Offices, the Desperate Housewives, the Houses: truly serialized stories where an end point isn't prescribed. This is the basic paradigm of serial programming from the beginning of television. The framework of the story allows the story to go on forever if need be. There can always be one more event that happens to a beloved group of characters. The stories need not end for the audience's stories don't; we watch because we are. It's only when we choose to stop watching these stories en masse that these stories end, usually with a sigh from critics that these open-ended stories have over-stayed their welcome. While this is often true, too often what the critics are really saying is that they are disappointed that a particular on-going series didn't find a plausible way to be a closed-ended series. But that was never the intent; the story was designed to go on forever. We, critics and audiences both, have an intrinsic need to see a story end. It's the DNA of the storytelling premise. It's this conflict of purpose and need that can make or break the finale of a serialized program.
Too often our inherent need for closure sends our heroes on trial and then off to prison or has the entire news room (except Ted) fired or places the series inside a snow globe. There must be a long and ever lasting finality to it all. The better ending for these truly serialized stories are ones where we can see our time watching these characters is just over. They will continue to have their stories; we just won't see them. Think Sam closing the bar for the night or another battalion of ambluances entering the ER bay or the entire Barone family sitting, eating and laughing. Individual characters may have closure to their storylines, but the frame of the story keeps going. It's certainly a more hopeful conclusion.
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