The end of The Affair

All’s well that ends well, wrote Shakespeare. The same man (unless you believe in the conspiracy theory of The Bard by committee) also wrote “If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly.”

So what are we to make of that very modern writing dilemma? To end something slowly and well, ah that’s the thing. Not via a playwright (although plays can often be long enough) but for the show-runner of the multi-series drama.

These episodic dramas which, often through the demands of US television, go on for five or six series very often have one thing in common – they start with rapturously received reviews and end in reviled finales. Worse, if you’re House of Cards, and the star and executive producer is Kevin Spacey. Sometimes the ending is inevitable. When Bartlet’s Presidency was over, so was The West Wing.

The one-off six-part dramas like State of Play or Edge of Darkness are less popular in America than the more lucrative multi-series option. Homeland is a good example of a series which, with Damian Lewis as a supposed war hero-turned-terrorist, could well have benefitted from one series which ended with a bang. Big Little Lies, based on Lianne Moriarty’s book, was another. Big Little Lies, season 2, was not based on a book. It showed.

The howls of anguish around could be heard over Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin’ on Tony Soprano’s diner jukebox when his family took their last bow on HBO. Many seemed convinced that Game Over on Game of Thrones left what they saw as the wrong person nearest the Throne. Don Draper may have found his Californian place of Zen in the last embers of the slow-burning Mad Men. Critics and those happy-go-lucky types on Social Media didn’t. Terence Winter’s Boardwalk Empire and Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom both seemed rushed to a conclusion when HBO decided to make their final series much shorter.

This also happened to the initially well-received psychiatric drama, In Treatment, which saw Gabriel Byrne take home a Golden Globe. The Irish actor Byrne played a shrink, which is what HBO did to season three (28 half-hour episodes shown over four days) after seasons one (43 episodes) and two (35). It ended, with Byrne’s character in inner turmoil, with something of a whimper.

What’s relevant to In Treatment was that it was an adaptation of Hagai Levi’s Israeli drama, BeTipul, where playwright Sarah Treem cut her teeth writing for television. Treem seems to have learnt from this on The Affair, which she and Levi co-created. The Affair won Golden Globes for Best Drama and its female stars Maura Tierney and Ruth Wilson.

After five series, Treem was left with the task of wrapping things up and it is not a spoiler alert to say she utterly nailed it. The show’s title reflects its narrative and, after Wilson asked to leave after Series 4, and another star Joshua Jackson also left, the final episode – which aired a couple of weeks ago on Showtime in the US and Sky Atlantic – was a triumph.

Treem knitted together closure for the principal characters, where the viewer demanded it, the appropriate levels of messiness for the whodunnit which was never solved and a moving arc around The Waterboys’ anthem Whole of the Moon. The song began and ended the final episode itself.

It is a hard trick to pull off, to guide a much-loved show to its final stop after many series. If the aphorism “Dying is easy, comedy is hard” is overused, it doesn’t apply to drama. Ricky Gervais and John Cleese had the sense to say goodbye after two series each of The Office and Fawlty Towers.

The best series finale of all time was probably Six Feet Under, Alan Ball’s drama about a family of funeral years. The final minutes unfolded over many years, as it killed off its characters one by one in the future, to the soundtrack of Sia’s Breathe Me.

In its own way, quite Shakespearean. Everyone dies.