Michael Feinstein Supplemental Post

 Recently I finished the first season of HBO’s new comedy series Made For Love. The season consisted of eight 30-minute episodes and I watched them over the two weeks that HBO released them. The show is a high-concept comedy where our current fears of technology and loss of privacy are used to tell a story about toxic masculinity and the ways in which relationships— like technology— force us to cede over parts of our identity and sense of self. I enjoyed the early episodes where we are introduced to the technologically advanced (but not that technologically advanced) world of the show and I quite liked all of the actors (including Ray Romano, whose sitcom I loved as a kid) who are given interesting, emotionally complex roles that also allow them to be broadly funny in this heightened world. However, despite all of this, I didn’t like the ending and because of that, in my mind, I’ve kind of written off the show. Over the last ten years, as both the amount of episodes in most TV show seasons and the duration in which I watch them has decreased, I have found myself placing more and more significance and weight onto the season and series finales of shows than I ever did before.  I watched Lost, as it aired, while I was in high school and, while I wasn’t crazy about the way it finally wrapped up, after dedicatedly watching the show for six years, one really bad episode didn’t completely color my experience with the show (and this was a mystery show where the ending/reveals meant a lot!). But if I had watched the show for the first time today—binging multiple episodes at a time on most days of the week— I know I would have balked much more at the ridiculousness of the finale. As my time with television series’ becomes truncated it becomes more difficult for me to see them as made up of separate, different, episodic pieces that make up a whole. Instead, closer to how I view film, television seasons— and sometimes entire series— have become one unified piece, making the line between a finale falling short and a season/series disappointing all the more thin.