Let's talk about this TV show's terrible ending
Let's talk about this TV show's terrible ending
Because it really is epicly awful.
Yo! If you haven’t seen the HBO TV show Run, I’m about to spoil the shit out of it. Consider yourself warned …
Hello! It’s the weekend, so it’s time for a bit of an admission. Around this time of year, us critics get a bit bored. It’s winter, after all, and there isn’t much to do. Thanks to Coronavirus, it’s even worse than it normally is. Movies aren’t being released, many concerts aren’t being held, and major albums are still being delayed.
The NZ International Film Festival and the NZ International Comedy Festival usually keep us going through these shivery months, but the first has gone online, and the second has been completely canned. That’s pretty stink.
We’ve got to do something. So we start writing lists. Over the past couple of weeks, ever since the calendar ticked over to July 1, you might have seen a few of them splashed about the place, mid-year compendiums about the best movies and music, that kind of thing.
I even wrote one myself, about the best TV shows of 2020. It wasn’t an exhaustive list by any means, something I admitted to in a ridiculously long ‘NB’ posted at the bottom of the blog. If you read all the way to the bottom, you’ll know what I’m talking about. I made a few stark admissions I probably shouldn’t have.
As it turns out, I’m not the only one that added an NB to my list. Vulture’s pop culture critics compiled a similarly-themed list, but included an NB that puts my NB to shame. Their NB is so harsh, it makes my NB look like a litter of puppies born on Christmas Day, then covered in glitter and given little elf ears to wear.
Their NB was so incendiary, I couldn’t believe what I was reading. Flustered, I scrambled together a tweet about it, then hit publish without checking it over for typos.
Here is that terrible tweet, in all its glory …
Three likes! About what it deserves. Anyway, to recap: Vulture put together a list of the top 25 TV shows of the year, published it, then, when one of its critics decided they were offended by the ending of a show included on that list, they edited it to remove that show entirely, replace it with another one, and then detail this incident in that “a brutal” NB.
I don’t know about you, but if I had anything to do with Run, I’d be feeling pretty damned terrible right about now.
So let’s talk about that show, because after reading that NB, I had to watch it, I had to finish it, I had to see for myself what was so offensive about its finale. That wasn’t a difficult task: I had already seen the first four episodes that were sent to critics when I reviewed Run for Nine to Noon. There were only three more, a mere 90 minutes of TV. How bad could it get?
Turns out, it gets pretty bad. Run is a show with a premise that might have made a better movie than a TV show: two exes who haven’t seen each other for 15 years keep their agreement to elope on a train together when they send each other a text message containing one word: “Run”. Then they have to deal with the fallout of their decisions.
I like that idea. It’s a good idea. It’s even better when you add Merritt Wever - the best thing about Nurse Jackie and pretty much every other show she’s been on - into the mix. Domhnall Gleeson is the dude, and he’s fine, I guess. Fleabag’s Phoebe Waller-Bridge executive produced Run, so that’s a good thing. It’s on HBO, another good thing.
There are lots of good things going for Run. So how come it ends so terribly? Lots of reasons, really. It doesn’t have enough plot, substance, character depth, or dialogue to sustain all seven episodes, so that’s a biggie. Also of concern is that for much of the show’s duration, its tone lurches all over the place and gets handsy like a drunk boss at a Christmas party.
At times, it tries to be a light-hearted rom-com, a dark look at the human condition, a murder mystery, a middle-aged careful-what-you-wish-for cautionary tale, a weird Fargo-esque character study and a madcap road trip. Unless you’re Michaela Coel and you made the genre-fluid I May Destroy You, you can’t do all those things, and you can’t do them all properly.
You can’t spend two entire episodes on a train without giving the characters anything to do. As good as she is, you can’t give Phoebe Waller-Bridge a bad American accent and a few stuffed animals and expect her to save the show. You can’t rely on the chemistry of your leads - and they do have chemistry - to make everything else work. You can’t just throw a dead body into the mix on a whim.
And you can’t end a show, in which the main character leaves her husband and kids to reunite with her ex from 15 years ago, with her returning to her family who pretend she didn’t just spend the past week bonking her ex on a train, and expect the audience to accept that.
Because that’s exactly what happens at the end of Run. And that ending is dopey, lazy, sad, pathetic, lame, crass, silly, weird, rude, abrupt, insulting and incredibly fucking stupid.
Here are my feelings on the show in the most simplest terms: it starts good, goes bad, gets a bit weird, then gets better again, before going completely off the rails by the end. A bit like this column COVFEFE.