Breaking Up With Your Favorite Shows is Good

Glenn died on a Sunday. I watched his eye pop out of his head, and it was a moment so visceral that I remember exactly where I was when it happened. On my couch, next to my best friend, at home. (It also helps that my friend took a photo of me watching it.) I remember having a feeling then, at the end of the Season Seven premiere of The Walking Dead, that this was the end of my road with the show. I didn’t need to see anymore; this relationship had run its course. I had been there to see Carol Peletier step into her truth and shoot a child in the back of the head. I watched Andrea die a vicious tortured death, but it was pizza boy-turned-hero Glenn dying that was punctuated my journey.

I’m reminded of that episode every time I see a preview or commercial for the AMC series, which returned last night for the season premiere of the second part of its three-part, eleventh and final season (*catches breath*). I feel a warmth in my soul every time I see Carol and Daryl still alive, knowing good and well that our paths diverged at the right time. I broke up with The Walking Dead when I needed to, and it was one of the best pop culture decisions of my life. That freedom has been found through a number of break-ups: Grey’s Anatomy, The O.C., and Game of Thrones—I haven’t finished any of them. As a society, we reward the completionism, but I think thats wrong. Sometimes, it’s best to say goodbye on your own terms.

Brian Mahl

Of course, it’s not a decision you make lightly. I’m a Survivor purist, still watching after 42 seasons. I know what it’s like to commit for the long haul. But at a certain point, especially when it comes to narrative shows, you get this pang deep in your gut when you know a series has run its course, even if it’s a long ways off from ending. It’s one of the facets of British television that I love so much—international television, as a whole, has a much better reputation when it comes to letting a series end after just a couple of seasons. Many times, just one!

But American television is plagued with examples (jumping the shark, if you will) of series that were allowed to trudge on despite clearly having run out of ideas. Did E.R. need to drop a helicopter on Dr. Romano in Season Ten after the man lost his arm to a helicopter the season before? Did we need an entire season of Dr. Meredith Grey lying in a state between life and death due to Covid? Why did Roseanne and her family suddenly win the lottery in a dizzying final season of Roseanne? Who needed a Hillary Clinton-soaked reboot season of Will & Grace?

If networks aren’t going to do the work for the viewer, then the viewer has to bear that responsibility on their own. The first time I drew the line in the sand was back during the heyday of The O.C. In 2006, in the third season finale, Marissa (Mischa Barton) gets in a car accident with Ryan (Ben McKenzie), and the whole thing plays out like the ominous, mid-2000s Romeo & Juliet tragedy the soapy teen drama purported to be, brilliantly soundtracked to Imogen Heap. And though there was no crystal ball that revealed the shit show of a college season that would ultimately punctuate the series the following year, I knew in my heart that Marissa’s death was the end of the road. And I’ll never know what happened, in full, because I decided my own ending. I did for myself what series creators could not be responsible enough to do for me.

Fox

For the most dedicated of pop culture fanatics, it’s an act of self-care, because those of us who really really love television? You’ve stuck with something too long. It’s not too different from a relationship, honestly. You end up on the couch, kind of bleary-eyed because you’re supposed to be there but not particularly because you want to be. You get to the point where you don’t even remember what you watched because you don’t care. Where would The Office exist in your mind if it had ended when Michael Scott left? Or if How I Met Your Mother got to the damn point around Season Six? Choosing your own end point means that you can remember that feeling of a good TV show for all the things it was, as opposed to all the ways it eventually failed.

Glenn died on a Sunday, but in a way, so did everyone else on The Walking Dead. Maggie, Rick, Michonne—I told them all goodbye because I knew, at that point, that was the best thing I could do. I liked it that way. I still do.

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