On (un)Happy Endings In TV
Watching: Life On Mars. Probably one of the best series the BBC ever put out.
I was watching something the other night, "The Beast In Me", one of those dramas where you can tell that despite everything going horrible wrong for the hero of the story in the final episode, that everything will come right in the end. Not perfectly, of course. There’ll be a wobble, there might even be a minor betrayal, someone gets killed, and so on. But you sit there with a kind of quiet confidence, knowing that by the time the credits roll, order will have been restored.
And sure enough, it is.
People apologise. Lessons are learned. The baddie dies, horribly. The music swells in a way that suggests not just resolution, but improvement. As if everyone involved has emerged slightly better than they were before, like a set of mildly upgraded appliances. And I find myself watching this happen with a sort of detached irritation. Not enough to turn it off—you don’t, do you, you've sat through eight hours of it—but enough to feel that something slightly dishonest is taking place.
Because life, as I understand it, in my experience doesn’t tend to do this.
It doesn’t draw things to a close in any meaningful sense. It doesn’t gather up its loose ends and tie them neatly together while we look on, appreciatively. More often, it just… stops. Or rather, it carries on, but without any regard for whether the moment feels finished.
You think something is over—an argument, a relationship, a phase of your life—and then, weeks or months later, it turns up again, slightly altered, like a parcel you thought you’d already dealt with. There’s no sense of completion, only a vague awareness that things have shifted, though not necessarily for the better.
I remember once thinking that adulthood might involve a series of conclusions. That you would, at certain points, arrive somewhere definite. That things would be settled. It hasn’t quite turned out like that. If anything, the opposite. The older you get, the less resolved anything seems. Which is perhaps why these tidy endings feel increasingly peculiar.
It isn’t that I object to happiness, exactly. You wouldn’t want to make a principle of misery. But there’s something about the insistence on resolution—the way everything must be accounted for, explained, concluded—that begins to feel less like storytelling and more like tidying up after the fact. As if the story doesn’t quite trust itself to leave anything undone.
And yet, the moments that stay with you—the ones that return, uninvited, when you’re making tea or putting on a wash, at the queue in the supermarket or staring out of the window—are rarely the resolved ones. They’re the scenes that don’t quite land. The conversations that trail off. The endings that feel as though they’ve arrived a little too soon, or perhaps not at all. Nothing is fixed. No great lesson is underlined. People simply continue, carrying whatever it is they’ve acquired along the way.
I sometimes wonder if what we call a “satisfying ending” is really just a form of reassurance. A way of suggesting that, despite appearances, things do in fact make sense. That there is a shape to events, and that, given enough time, everything will find its proper place.
It’s a comforting thought. Just not, in my experience, a particularly accurate one.
Because the truth—if that isn’t putting it too grandly—is that most things don’t resolve. They fade, or drift, or are replaced by something else that demands your attention. The idea that they conclude, neatly and decisively, is largely a fiction. A useful one, perhaps. Even a necessary one.
But a fiction all the same.
And I can’t help thinking that, just occasionally, it might be nice if stories admitted as much. If, instead of drawing a line under things, → they simply stopped mid-thought, mid-feeling, leaving everything much as it was. Unfinished.
Which is to say, more or less as it is.