THERE is always a curious jumble of emotions when a long-running TV series ends. While part of you desperately craves everything tied up neatly in a bow, there is a melancholy about not getting to hang out with all your favourite characters anymore (except in repeats, but that's never quite the same).
That's how I felt watching the final episode of Killing Eve in recent days. I paused it halfway through, turned the TV off and didn't revisit it again for 48 hours in an attempt to eke out those last moments with the brilliant Sandra Oh and Jodie Comer, as Eve and Villanelle, for a bit longer.
It was a similarly bittersweet vibe when I began watching the third – and final – series of Derry Girls last Tuesday evening. The six-week run will fly in. A bit like trying to hold water in your hands when, no matter how tightly you cup your fingers, it slowly-but-surely trickles away.
I've been here before, of course. Countless times over the years. I remember throwing a cocktail party in the cramped flat I lived in during my twenties as Sex and the City took a bow in 2004.
I watched alone when Friends ended a few months later, crying buckets at the sight of the gang's empty apartment as Embryonic Journey by Jefferson Airplane played them out.
Over the years, I have bid farewell to The Big Bang Theory, Desperate Housewives, Breaking Bad, ER, The Killing, Fringe, Borgen, The Bridge, Superstore and The Middle among others.
Sometimes there is joy (the sublime genius of Schitt's Creek). Sometimes disappointment (the ham-fisted ending to How I Met Your Mother). Other times frustration and confusion (I'm looking at you Lost and Pretty Little Liars).
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When Game of Thrones drew to a close, there was such an outcry surrounding the finale that, in the end, I didn't even bother watching, despite having been an avid viewer through 70-odd episodes across eight series. I must get round to it one of these days.
It is rare, though, that I don't see a TV series through to conclusion. But I do recall prematurely parting ways with The Walking Dead circa 2016 when Negan and his barbed wire-wrapped baseball bat Lucille made an appearance in series seven.
Unlike a lot of people, I didn't hate the ending to Line of Duty. The notion that the bumbling, greedy and incompetent often "fail upwards" into positions of power felt like an apt summation of modern times (testament to the ever-astute Jed Mercurio).
And, occasionally, it is not really goodbye but au revoir. Take Sex and the City, which recently returned to our screens with the reboot And Just Like That... after a 17-year absence (if you turn a blind eye to the two terrible films).
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Netflix has breathed fresh life into the hit Danish political drama Borgen, which wrapped in 2013, with a new series set to arrive on UK screens this summer.
TV endings mirror life. Sometimes it is sad. Sometimes it is sweet. Sometimes it is the proverbial serpent eating its own tail. Sometimes it simply frees up time to do other things. Now, pass me the remote control please.
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