It’s not that often that you get to watch a series finale of a show. One reason is that you have to actually follow that particular show. There are so many TV choices nowadays (even with the advent of the DVR) that it’s fairly easy to bounce from show to show without getting particularly attached to any of them. The other reason is that most series have a short leash from television networks, and it’s rare that in this day and age a show will actually come to fruition and end on its own terms. That all being said (although also aided by the magic of the DVR), it’s got to be exponentially more rare to watch two series finales on the same night. What might make it even stranger (given the fact that I’m a dude), is that the two shows are from The CW (formerly The WB): Smallville and One Tree Hill.
I remember that One Tree Hill originally piqued my interest before the 1st episode even aired. Even though I only sparingly caught a couple random episodes of shows like Dawson’s Creek, I secretly always liked some of those girly teen dramas…however, if one of those shows could actually use something like basketball as the main backdrop, I could talk myself into watching it without at the same time feeling like I needed to hand over my man card. I watched every episode of the first season, but about midway through season 2 it became hit or miss for me, and that was pretty much my relationship with the show from that point until the end of season 4. Honestly, at that point I was pretty much ready to drop the show altogether, but that is also around the time that Krissy and I started to get serious about each other, and it just so happened she was a One Tree Hill fanatic. The problem was that this was also the point when the show, which was borderline lame from the beginning, started to really go south. From a marketing perspective, I feel like the original basketball angle was an attempt to draw in people outside the normal teen serial drama audience, and it probably worked. At least, it worked on me…at least, it did at first…but after a while I think the reality of the situation started to settle in, which was that this was a teen serial drama, and the majority of its viewers were always going to be teenage girls. I think the show started to reflect that, as from episode to episode there seemed to be less and less “guy-centric” basketball scenes. Also, the show kept adding more and more characters, as I think the writers realized that there weren’t enough people for the main characters to bed-hop with. Seasons 5 and 6 pretty much saw the show’s complete transition from whatever it was originally intended to be into what was basically a nighttime teen soap opera. The general theme was, in the words of Jay-Z, “Sex, murder, and mayhem – romance for the streets.” While the plotlines were suspect and the acting was weak, it at least made for semi-entertaining TV…but seasons 7 and 8 were borderline unwatchable at times. For starters, Lucas and Peyton (who were 2 of the original core 5 cast members of the show, but had really become the 2 stars) decided to leave the show. The show decided to add what seemed like 10 new characters to try to make up for it. Making matters worse, all of the remaining characters were made to be “good guys” even if they had had a dark side to them in the past. The writers seemed to try to make some of the new characters “bad guys” at 1st, but even all of those characters shortly, to use a pro wrestling term, “turned face” and became good guys as well. For the last two years, the show didn’t really seem to know what it was or what it wanted to be. In fact, if you read IMDB’s little synopsis about the show you would think you were watching a completely different show in 2011. There was no more real backstabbing because everyone somehow turned into a good person. No more backstabbing also meant no more really crazy, yet entertaining, plotlines. (The show tried to introduce a couple dramatic plots such as a psychotic stalker girl and a mystery drunk driving accident, but they just didn’t really work.) Instead, the show seemed to try to morph into some kind of hour-long quirky sitcom, which is hard to do when none of the actors are really funny. By the end of the last season, most scenes featured either this kind of “comedy” or a couple of the characters sipping a beer and trying to say something deep and introspective…except none of them really had anything to be introspective about. It was kind of sad really. People talk all the time about athletes who don’t know when to hang it up and try to continue their careers a couple seasons too long (see Favre, Brett), but the same can be true for TV shows as well (not that One Tree Hill was ever some kind of cinematic marvel to begin with). The fact is that Krissy and I probably fast-forwarded through at least 25% of the final season (especially scenes with Chase, Millie, Nate and Haley’s kid Jamie, or one of Julian’s lovey-dovey rants to Brooke). I guess we continued to watch mostly just because we felt like we were invested in the show…we had watched basically from the first season on; might at least see how everything turns out…but as stale as it had gotten, you understand why TV networks have such a short leash for shows to begin with.
Smallville is a different story all together. Whereas One Tree Hill probably dragged-on a season or two longer than it should have, I feel like Smallville could’ve given us a couple more seasons without any complaints. First, I have to say that I’m a sucker for anything Superman-related. I wouldn’t classify myself as a so-called “fanboy,” but this show would have been pretty sorry for me not to have been interested. I wasn’t a collector, but I used to read the comics. I would race home from the school bus when I was kid to try to catch an episode of the Superman cartoon show. Even the most recent Superman movie that came out, which was a flop, I liked…so, you get the point. With that being said, probably the only Superman rendition more iconic than Smallville was the series of Christopher Reeves movies. And yet, some could argue that Smallville even tops that (and that’s saying something given the number of times Superman has been rebooted in mainstream American media). On a side note, I would be interested to see what kind of numbers Smallville did in terms of viewership over the years. I’m sure it didn’t rate comparably with hit shows from past years, but it had to at least be one of the WB’s/CW’s higher rated shows to have lasted 10 seasons. I would have been interested to see if the show would have been better received if the writing and acting was better, but in terms of paying tribute to the Superman mythology while playing up an angle (starting during Clark Kent’s adolescent years and not fully transforming into Superman until the final episode) that hadn’t really been covered before in the whole Superman genre, I think the show did a great job. And the acting and humor was cheesy at times, but it was almost as if the show knew it was, and eventually it seemed that the writers would work cheesy lines into the script in a way that the show was almost poking fun at itself. Still, while his acting left something to be desired, they couldn’t have casted a guy in Tom Welling (the actor that played Clark) who looked more the part. I guess that’s half foresight and half dumb luck, but by the last couple of seasons Clark’s character just looked exactly like how you would picture a young Superman looking in your mind’s eye. Anyway, I know there are some episodes that I missed throughout the years, but looking back at the IMDB episode listing there are so many episodes that it’s hard to tell which ones I missed and which ones I just forgot. I would say that I have seen almost every episode in seasons 1-3. In seasons 4 and 5 I probably saw most but not every episode, but looking back now I think I may have missed most of season 6 and all of season 7…in a way these were probably the worst seasons to miss as Lex and Lana were pretty much written out of the show by killing off their respective characters (neither ended up being completely “dead” and would later return in short reprised roles). Season 8, which is when Krissy and I jumped back into the show, introduced a bunch of new central characters, and missing most if not all of the previous 2 seasons left us with a lot of extra blanks to fill in. In the end, while Smallville never really got the amount of acclaim it probably deserved, 10 seasons was a good run. Being that it lasted 10 years, it’s going to be strange to no longer have it on the air. Smallville, as corny as it sounds, is a show that I grew up with, and I thought the last episode did a good job of completing the story they were trying to tell. Maybe with the help of iTunes I will start over from the first episode of season 1 in the not too distant future, and fill in some of those blanks that are still there.
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