“All Bad Things Must Come To An End”

Andy Greenwald has a theory about why, despite living in the Golden Age of television dramas, he’s seen great shows struggle with their finales:

In retrospect, I think what confounded and disappointed loyal obsessives of The Wire and The Sopranos wasn’t the specific ways they chose to go out but that the endings had to be specific at all. Both shows transcended their settings to become wide-ranging, rewarding hobbyhorses for the men behind the curtain. Putting a fulfilling period on such magnificent, digressive sentences proved to be nearly impossible. How do you condense the life and death of a major American city into a montage? How to cram the banality and barbarity of modern life into a close-up and an order of onion rings?

Why he believes Breaking Bad will come to a better end:

Breaking Bad, to its enormous credit, isn’t about everything. It’s about one thing and always has been: Walter White’s calamitous path not from Mr. Chips to Scarface but from homeroom to the gates of hell. This framework has provided creator Vince Gilligan with a relentless, furious focus usually only possible after a few hits of the blue. Everything that we’ve seen these past five seasons, from airplane collisions to cartel killings, has spun out from Walter’s initial decision to edge up to the line separating legal from illegal, good from truly awful, and then run right over it behind the wheel of a hideous, taupe, SUV. And every step he has taken — from half-measures to full-on slaughter — we’ve taken right alongside him. We know exactly where we’re going because we’ve never lost sight of where we’ve been.