Last hurrah that bombed
QUESTION What is regarded as the most disappointing finale to a popular TV series?
THE two-part conclusion to Seinfeld, the well-loved US sitcom famously described as ‘a show about nothing’, would have to be a contender.
In this finale, aired in 1998, the four main characters – Jerry, George, Elaine and Kramer – are arrested after reacting with mirth while witnessing a carjacking.
They are put on trial, charged with failing to uphold a legal requirement that bystanders help out in such situations. In the courtroom, a host of familiar faces from previous shows are brought forward as character witnesses for the prosecution, aiming to establish a pattern of bad behaviour from the defendants. The foursome are ultimately convicted and sentenced to a year in prison.
The show’s ratings were impressive, but the reaction was almost universally negative. Entertainment Weekly critic Ken Tucker’s appraisal was fairly representative of the response, as he opined that series co-creator Larry David, who wrote the episode, ‘took the idea that these are essentially unlikable people and ran with it, mainly leaving out the jokes’. Elaborating, he added: ‘It’s as if David forgot that in nearly every episode invoked, the gang was made to suffer for whatever wrongdoing they committed... This crew led miserable lives, and we relished their exceptional pettiness.’
USA Today’s Robert Bianco was similarly scathing, writing: ‘Seinfeld was never a show about nothing; it was a show where nothing mattered. The characters took nothing seriously except themselves. And last night, they even undercut that.’ He added that ‘it may remind viewers of the last episode of NBC’s St Elsewhere, which basically told faithful fans they’d been wasting their time on a child’s dream’.
Show star Jerry Seinfeld later admitted to some regrets over the finale, saying: ‘There was a lot of pressure on us to do one big last show, but big is always bad in comedy.’ He said comedy should be ‘small and cheap and quick’, adding ruefully that the ‘hardest thing’ in this field ‘is to have the biggest laugh at the end’. Louise Wiseman, Cork.
THE finale to the ninth season of the well-loved US sitcom Roseanne provoked some very strong reactions – many of them negative. The double episode aired in May 1997, and was intended as the programme’s last hurrah, though the show did come back for a tenth season much later on, in 2018.
The ninth season had already caused some discontent, as it embarked on a dramatic change of direction, with the blue-collar Conner family becoming rich beyond their wildest dreams thanks to a lottery win.
The final episode pulled the rug from underneath fans once again, as the title character, played by Roseanne Barr, revealed that the entire season had all been an elaborate fantasy she had created, to escape her grim reality.
Among other revelations, viewers learned that her husband Dan did not actually survive his heart attack in season eight, as they had been led to believe.
Unsurprisingly, there was a great deal of negative reaction at the time, and retrospective appraisals have been similarly critical.
Writing in Time magazine in 2013, critic Gary Susman said the series-ender was ‘off-the-rails loopy’, adding: ‘Some critics saw in the finale an allegory for Roseanne’s showbusiness career; by becoming rich and famous, she’d turned into an unbearable diva who’d forgotten the little people — not just the ones she’d created, but the ones who watched every week.’
And reflecting on the bizarre finale in 2017, Guardian writer Lucy Mangan opined: ‘If you were feeling very, very generous, drunk or both, you could say that the finale was a last-minute admission of how wrong Barr had gone, an attempt at course correction and apology in one.
‘But if it was... it was far too little of either, far too late.’ Cameron Donnelly, Dublin.
QUESTION What is dark energy?
DARK energy is a hypothetical form of energy thought to permeate all of space.
Observations of distant galaxies and cosmic microwave background radiation suggest the universe is expanding, and that this expansion is accelerating. In the absence of energy, we would expect the expansion to be slowing down, due to the gravitational attraction of matter.
Dark energy is one of the key components of the standard cosmological model, referred to as the Lambda-CDM model. Here, ‘Lambda’ represents the cosmological constant, which is a place-holder for dark energy.
Credit for its formal proposal is given to two independent research teams: one is the High-Z Supernova Search Team, led by astronomers Brian P. Schmidt and Adam G. Riess. They conducted observations of distant Type 1a supernovae to measure the rate of the universe’s expansion and found evidence for an accelerating universe. The Supernova Cosmology Project, led by Saul Perlmutter, arrived at the same conclusion.
The true nature of dark energy is one of the greatest mysteries in modern cosmology. It is called ‘dark’ because it does not interact with electromagnetic radiation (such as light), making it undetectable through telescopes. A. P. Pritchard, Oxford.
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