In the summer of 2014, I was sprawled across my bedroom floor with my laptop for company when I stumbled upon Friends. It took me just twenty minutes to become completely besotted with six fictional people. The next day, I told my best friend about my newfound obsession, and he responded like a true friend would: by handing me a pen drive loaded with a sketchy torrent of all ten seasons. From that day on, every night, I would bury myself and my glowing ThinkPad under the blanket and try to cram in at least four episodes before sleep claimed me. Friends became the first television world I truly inhabited. So when I finished ‘The Last One,’ I experienced a kind of grief I’d never known before. It was my first heartbreak.
Since then, I’ve developed a habit that, when articulated out loud, sounds fairly ridiculous: I don’t let my favourite shows end.
In the fifth semester of college, I was living with my cousins. Every evening after dinner, we would gather in the living room to watch Jane the Virgin together. The idea was to spend time with my aunt, but these watch parties became more passionate: full of debriefs, debates and wild conspiracy theories. On the night we were to watch the final two episodes, I bid my cousins goodnight and went to bed early.
The next morning at breakfast, my cousin moved loudly. She dragged her chair back with force. Fidgeted as she sipped her coffee. Bobbed her knee incessantly under the table. As I offered her a banana, she finally broke the fourth wall. “How can you not want some kind of closure?” she asked, attacking her French toast. I shrugged. “I read how it ends,” I assured her with airtight logic, “but if I don’t see the last episode, I can always go back to it like I’m watching it for the first time.”
Most people I know baulk at my twisted version of permanently delayed gratification, but I’ve found a kindred spirit in my friend, 26-year-old creative Akanksha Kimothi. However, the other day, when I sent her a reel about the long-rumoured Mitch & Cam spinoff, she confessed she had actually finished Modern Family a few weeks back. I froze in my chair, staring at my phone in utter betrayal. I knew that, like me, she had dropped the show mid-season at least three separate times in the past—and not out of boredom but dread. As Luke hit a growth spurt with every season, it turned into a reminder that time was marching forward and the Dunphy kids would soon leave the nest for good. BeforeFleabag I could fully process this information, she sent another text: “I still can’t finish Fleabag, though. I just wouldn’t know where to go next.”
Gurugram-based copywriter Kunal Gunwari has his own list of shows he’s been putting off. “My dopamine receptors have been fried,” he admits sheepishly. “I frankly cannot watch something without keeping my phone away.” Except Ted Lasso. “I loved it so much I realised I can’t rush through it,” he tells me with some guilt for putting his beloved jocks on hold. But isn’t slowing down for the things you love the purest form of affection?
To state the obvious, I love things that refuse to end—much like my bottomless Coke from Taco Bell. Yet somehow, my IMDb top 10 includes a show that spends an entire season teaching you that everything eventually must. The Good Place is a masterpiece about the afterlife, frozen yogurt and the messy poetry of moral philosophy. As my flatmate and I binged our way through it, we reached that terrifying moment when Netflix warned us it would play the finale in five seconds. I knew what was coming. After fixing the architecture of the universe, Eleanor, Chidi and the gang would dissolve into specks of stardust, letting their stories rest forever. There it was: a cosmic narration giving me a cosmic lesson about letting go in its very last episode—absolute, unadulterated psychological warfare.
