series finales always break my heart, and i watch them anyway

A lot of people love referring to their lives as a TV show, joking that there’s always a new cast of characters for each season of their life. There’s always an implied longevity of the show itself, that this show can run on for so many seasons, that there are no permanent endings, just brief ones where a cast shakeup is the worst that can happen.

Having lived through many TV spring seasons, I’ve experienced the birth and death of countless shows. Some were canceled too soon, and some delivered endings that were loathed or lukewarmly embraced by fans. Importantly, some ended with undeniable closure.

This spring, several of my favorite shows ended on their own terms. I had known they were ending for at least a year, or two in some cases. But reading a headline isn’t the same as watching the credits roll on the final episode and knowing there is nothing new after.

One of the first shows I ever fell in love with was BBC Sherlock (yes, I can hear your sigh from here). In middle school, I made my entire family sit and watch the Season 4 premiere on PBS on New Year’s Day. And when Season 4 Episode 3 aired and I watched the final montage of John and Sherlock, I sobbed my eyes out. My dad laughed at my distraught reaction before reassuring me they would surely make more episodes, that the show couldn’t be over like that.

Somewhere deep in my soul, my 12-year-old self knew the series had ended. With how painful that experience had been, you’d think that I’d swear off television shows to avoid ever feeling that way again.

In June 2019, on a fateful road trip, my sister and I watched Good Omens for the first time. It was the summer after my first year of high school, and I had barely made it through my freshman year in one piece. Nearly 7 years later, I had the opportunity to watch the series finale for work (hi, TV critic era!).

The wonderful thing about getting the screeners before the official premiere meant that I had plenty of time to unravel the knot in my chest. The horrible thing about getting the screeners two weeks before the official premiere meant that I had to process everything alone.

To be fair, I generally liked the ending. I knew it would be divisive, and I cherished the ability to form my own opinion about it before the internet inevitably began shouting about which cameos weren’t included and what they expected to happen. Series finales are hard because it’s almost impossible to please everyone with an ending.

Weeks after watching the finale, I still walked around feeling tender and raw, as if I were in my own skin for the first time. I turned the ending over and over in my head, obsessing over it, but bound by the embargo. I wanted to talk about my feelings on it, but knew for certain that nobody else could understand why I felt this way.

As I began to process my emotions, I realized that my reaction wasn’t just because of the story, though the last thirty minutes were some of the most heart-wrenching moments I’ve experienced. The fresh pain after watching mattered because I didn’t want to confront another ending.

Around the time I watched that series finale, one of my other favorite shows got canceled—Gen V, one of my favorite series about college student superheroes struggling to do the right thing. I felt like something else I loved was being ripped away from me, that I was losing too much all at once with no way to handle it.

Here’s the real kicker: all of this was happening within a month of my college graduation.

It’s strange. Even though I have primarily unpleasant memories in college, I found myself taking note of what I’d miss in my final days. I reflected on four years of my life, finished.

In many ways, the college itself was ending, too. The dining hall and campus center were both getting torn down over the summer, replaced by a shiny new campus center. The resource centers at the campus center hosted farewell parties, and the dining hall began reminding everyone that their last meal for their semester would be the last one at the dining hall forever.

A friend recently confessed she was terrified of graduating, even though she had secured post-grad plans. When something ends, perhaps the fear lies not in knowing what’s beyond, but in losing the stability of knowing that something that has always been a guarantee will no longer be one.

But even with this knowledge, I reassured my friend, “You have your whole life ahead of you.”

Good Omens Season 2 came out the summer before my sophomore year, a few months before one of the worst periods of my life. Around that time, Hozier released his album, Unreal Unearth, which I looped on repeat all throughout 2023 and into 2024. The song that stuck with me was “Abstract (Psychopomp),” particularly the lyric: “Darling, there’s a part of me / I’m afraid will always be / Trapped within an abstract from a moment of my life.”

The song itself is about Hozier’s memory of watching someone running into traffic to pick up an animal that had been hit by a car. In his Apple Music interview, he explains that the song “sees all of this tenderness and somebody going to great risk to try and offer some futile gesture of care towards a suffering thing. But it’s also about acceptance and letting go.”

The thing about series finales is that they aren’t actually the end of a show. A TV show can live on well after its ending. You can rewatch it anytime, but it’ll never be the same experience as watching it for the first time, not knowing what's ahead, but knowing you will have to let go by the last scene.

TV is not like real life. You will never get a specific period of your life back. There’s no replaying the moments, just the memories, a hazy proxy for the real thing. Perhaps that’s why nostalgia is so powerful.

This feeling of confronting an ending is akin to that of moving out of a childhood home. The house will always be there, and you can return anytime you like. But all your memories and all the emotions you experienced while living there are gone. Other people can see the house too, but the house looks the same to them before and after your move. They cannot understand what it’s like to lose that part of you.

I’m terrified I’ll stay trapped in sentimentality forever, trapped in an abstract of my life. I’m terrified that I’ve wasted the best years of my life feeling awful, that college was supposed to be the best time of my life. I have written about endings many times, but I’m still not sure I have figured out how to live with them.

Some days, I’m the animal in the road, waiting to be picked up and loved for the life I have left. Other days, I’m the person running into traffic, diving to save some dying thing. Either way, I cannot escape time, I cannot escape memory, and I cannot escape endings.

Without getting too spoilery, what struck me the most about the Good Omens ending was that it returned to the question of fate and whether we can change anything about our lives, if it’s all one game of cards for the universe. Perhaps everything we do is a “futile gesture of care towards a suffering thing.”

The finale postulates that even in all the pain and loss, love and hope will always find their way. Even though sorrow and endings may feel, ironically, never-ending, there will always be something that comes after.