Sticking The Ending

We talk a lot around here about how poorly streaming services treat the properties they represent. How shows get dropped after one season if they haven't picked up traction. How multi-season arcs just fall right off that cliff they thought they were hanging onto, leaving everyone who cared high and dry and wondering what the hell happened. Shows with decent ratings get canned because something else might do better or come to a juddering halt because one of the leads did something the platform doesn't want to be associated with.

It's not like the old networks were more forgiving or responsible or artistically committed. If anything they were worse in all respects but they were also slower, steadier, less flighty. They did drop shows fast if they didn't pick up an audience but first they'd shunt them around the schedules a bit and maybe try a second season with a new theme tune and title sequence to see if there was any movement. And they always had the holy grail of syndication in the distance so there was some motivation to keep the momentum going, once they'd gotten the train rolling.

It was a real surprise to see news reports predicting "Wednesday could run for seven seasons". Not only is that very specific, it seems counter to any previous logic. Shows last as long as they hold an audience, keep their stars and someone crucial to the production process doesn't get a better offer.

And seven seasons of Wednesday, with the slight evidence of just two seasons to go on, wouldn't mean even seven years, which would itself be a long time in streaming culture. The show first arrived on Netflix in November 2022 and the second part of the second season has just aired, almost three years later. If they can't speed that up, completing seven seasons of Wednesday would take a couple of decades! The students of Nevermore Academy are going to look about as convincing as teenagers as the cast of Grease! by then.

But I'm not here today to talk about Wednesday. I haven't started on the second half of the new season yet. (By the way, as an aside, the post I did on the first half of the season was the least-read of all the posts I published during Blaugust, according to Blogger's page-view stats, which I find fairly reliable. By quite some margin, too. Given the supposed popularity of the show, that seemed surprising, until it occured to me maybe people didn't even click on it in fear of spoilers. If that was you, maybe go back and read it now?)

No, today's subject is a show that not only managed four seasons before it ended but which also came to a close in a dignified, coherent and satisfying fashion. It can be done, which makes me wonder a) why it isn't done more often and b) why it was done like that for this particular show.

At this point, if this were a podcast, I could come in with the big reveal. Unfortunately, that doesn't really work with a blog or at least not a heavily illustrated one like this. Everyone who cares knew what the show was as soon as they looked at the image at the top, although I did try to pick one that wasn't totally obvious.  

It's Upload, of course, the Amazon Prime show about a near-future digital afterlife, where anyone rich enough can have their brain scanned (And their head literally exploded.) so their memories and personality can be uploaded into an eternal spa weekend. I posted about the first season here and the second here, although neither season got a post of its own. 

I seem to have omitted to mention the third season entirely, all of which does tend to suggest I wasn't that engaged with the show. That would not be true. I really liked Upload. It was one of the first shows I got into, when I started watching TV (Well, streaming TV...) regularly again after a decade and a half of not watching anything at all (Thanks, Covid.) and that's perhaps why it made an impression that's lasted.

In production terms, Upload has done quite a bit better than Wednesday, in that it's only taken five years for four seasons to make it to the screen. Granted one of those seasons is really only half a season but still. 

In fact, no two seasons of Upload have the same number of episodes, which is odd. The first has the most with ten, the second has seven, the third eight and now just four in the final season. They also vary quite a bit in length, with most hovering around the half-hour mark you might expect for the sitcom the show was originally promoted as being but the final season stretching out past forty minutes each time. 

Although it's very much a comedy and it does rely heavily on a specific situation, Upload never was much of a sitcom. Struggling to describe the first season, I called it "partly a romcom with a lot of rather unsubtle social satire ladled on top but it's more a murder mystery". The mystery got solved but the drama just grew and grew until it turned into a world-wide conspiracy. The comedy stuck around and as for the romance... there was always a lot of romance, all the way to the very end. 

When it came to the second season, I expressed some concerns about "huge chunks of the premise, let alone the plot, not making any sense at all if thought about for more than a moment", something that never really changed. But as I also said, it didn't matter because the characters were engaging and so well-played they made me want to know what happened to them, whether it made any sense or not.

When Season Three came to an end I was unsure whether there would be a fourth. It did end on a cliffhanger but then don't they all? I'm not even sure why writers bother any more. It can't be much of a motivation for viewers, the way it used to be in the network days, when you knew if the story was still going, a show would be coming back because cancellations were always signalled way in advance and writers had time to re-write before the final episodes.

Everything is so fractured now, with so many streaming platforms, most of them requiring an opt-in, paid subscription, and with shows not infrequently swapping from one service to another, it really doesn't feel at all like the old days, when there was a kind of certainty, not to say inevitablity to it all. Around this time of year there'd be a whole big deal about the Fall Season shows. You'd see them trailed over and over on the stations you watched and you'd know what was coming whether you cared about it or not. 

Was that better? It could be stultifying, sure, but you knew where you were.

I didn't even notice that Upload was back until a few days after it had happened. None of the media outlets in my feeds mentioned it, Prime didn't plug it in the top attractions they were showing me and I certainly didn't get any emails about it. None of the streaming services seem to send out promotional emails the way most gaming companies do, even though several of them have my email address. 

I only noticed by chance that it was back, when I was scanning down Prime Video's horrifically jumbled and messy home page. It was somewhere down on about row five or six, off the bottom of the screen. Given they clearly have data to tell them I watched every episode of the previous seasons, you might have thought they'd want to let me know there was another but apparently they don't care.

So, was it any good? Well, let me see if I can answer that without spoilers... 

... maybe some spoilers in a general sense....

... I mean, even if I say it was satisfying or if it was disappointing, those are kinds of spoilers...

...so if you want to keep your own view absolutely pristine, now would be the time...  

And we're back. And no, I'm not going to drop any big reveals of the plot or the details but I am going to give away the emotional tenor of the ending. It was good. It felt satisfying. It had some light and shade and a little more nuance than perhaps I was expecting. 

In fact, I'd go so far as to say the production team and the writers have left themselves just enough wriggle room to carry the whole thing on at some unspecified time in the future, if the opportunity arises. It wouldn't be the first time a show with a planned ending turned out not to have ended after all.

Assuming that doesn't happen, though, I'd imagine most viewers will feel they can live with the way it finished. It's mostly a happy ending. Most of the characters you like get to walk off into the sunset with the love of their life (Not that all of those loves can actually walk...) The bad guys get what's coming to them, or some of them do, at least. I was very happy with the resolution of Ingrid's arc, she being my favorite character. I wouldn't have predicted it after Season One, either, so that's a gold star to the writers.

As for the plot, in keeping with the entire series, none of it really bears close examination. Or casual examination. Any examination at all, really. If I started picking holes, we'd be here 'til Christmas. But none of that matters. If you start with an unrealistic proposition, everything you build on that foundation is bound to fall apart if you lean on it. So don't lean on it is my advice. 

Just lean back and enjoy it. Let it wash over you and pick what sense out of it you can. It's stuffed full of topical references and tiny satires that spill out all over the plot for no good reason so why not just indulge yourself? 

I'll just mention one of those: the Millennial references. They stood out for me. I hadn't even tried to date the whole thng until then. It's in "the future" but if they'd ever said how far I'd missed it. This time, though, there were a couple of scenes with some very specific data points, namely that the central characters, all of whom seem to be in their thirties (Ingrid, specifically, is thirty-four in the final episode. Nathan, according to Wikipedia, was 27 when the series began.) have Millenials for parents. 

On the most commonly-used generational timeline, the last Millennials would have been born by 1996. The children of Millennials, for the most part, are Gen Alpha, for which as yet there is no agreed date-range but which is broadly seen as covering the 2010s to about now. Even the oldest Gen Alpha wouldn't be hitting thirty until around the middle of the century and most of them will get there after 2050.

Which doesn't seem that crazy. I'm so used to everything set in "the future" seeming to imagine decades of technological development telescoped into a few years that it seems strange to see extrapolations from current experiments being given something approximating a reasonable development arc. We could have self-driving cars, digital brain scans and sentient AI by the 2050s or 2060s. All of that is being worked on right now. I mean, we won't but it's not like saying we'll have terraformed Mars or perfected matter transmission by then.

So, that's Upload for you. A very enjoyable show, often funny, sometimes exciting, always heart-warming, never made a lot of sense. I did tear up a little, right at the end, even though the final scene had been telegraphed for most of the last episode. 

I'm sorry to see it end but I'm very happy to see it end so well.