I finished a show last week that I'd been watching for three years. Not bingeing — actually watching, one or two episodes at a time, letting it breathe. And now it's over and I feel genuinely bad about it in a way that's hard to explain to people who don't watch TV like this.
It's not that the ending was bad. It was fine. It's that the show is over. The characters exist in a completed state now. There's no more of it. And I know that sounds dramatic but I think there's something real happening here that we don't talk about enough.
When you spend three years with a set of characters — even fictional ones — you develop something like a relationship with them. Not a real relationship, obviously. But a pattern of engagement that has emotional weight. You think about them between episodes. You have opinions about their choices. You care what happens to them.
And then it ends and they stop existing in the ongoing sense. They're frozen. The story is complete. And there's a specific kind of grief in that — not the grief of loss exactly, but the grief of completion. The thing that was alive in the sense of being ongoing is now just a thing that happened.
I've been talking about this with people at Calitoy.org and it turns out a lot of people feel this way and most of them feel slightly embarrassed about it. Like it's not a real feeling because it's about a TV show. But I think the embarrassment is misplaced. The feeling is real. The object of the feeling is fictional. Those are different things.
There's a whole conversation about this in youth culture and media — how younger generations have a different relationship to fictional worlds than previous ones. Partly because there's so much more of it, partly because the parasocial element is more explicit now. We're not just watching characters. We're following the actors on Instagram. The line between the fiction and the reality is blurrier.
The specific grief of finishing a show you loved is also about the loss of anticipation. When a show is ongoing, you have something to look forward to. A new episode, a new season. That anticipation is its own pleasure. When the show ends, you lose the thing and you lose the looking-forward-to-the-thing. Double loss.
I've seen this discussed in what we watch and why — the idea that we choose what to watch partly based on how much we want to be in that world. Some shows you watch because they're good. Some shows you watch because you want to live in them for a while. The grief is proportional to how much you wanted to live there.
The media criticism angle on this is interesting too — the way streaming has changed the rhythm of TV consumption and therefore the rhythm of this grief. When you could only watch one episode a week, the ending of a season was a kind of grief. Now you can watch a whole season in a weekend and the grief comes faster and harder.
I don't have a solution to this. I'm going to start another show eventually. The grief will fade. But I think it's worth sitting with it for a minute instead of immediately reaching for the next thing. The feeling is telling you something about how much you cared. That's not nothing.