"Weekend" magazine - "The Daily Mail" - 1st August, 2015
Christopher Stevens - My View - "Too many dramas are cheating us with woolly endings", says the Mail's TV critic.
"A bestselling author once revealed to me the secret of great thriller endings: write them first. 'Readers won't buy the next book,' he explained, 'unless I deliver a completely satisfying finale. So that's where I start. When I've got a fantastic ending, I work backwards.'
TV writers could learn from this - because too many recent dramas have delivered climaxes that are frustrating, disappointing or simply make no sense. The Syndicate on BBC1 was a painful example. This six-part serial about the tensions at a stately home where the servants win the lottery had a promising set-up: at the moment the winning numbers were announced, one of the parlour maids went missing. The story proceeded through a muddle of flashbacks and, despite great performances from Anthony Andrews and Lenny Henry as the lord of the manor and his obsessive gardener, the plot was soon hopelessly confused. But we kept tuning in because a messy middle can be forgiven, providing the ending ties up everything in a spectacular bow. Instead, all we got was a fistful of loose ends and a depressing sense we'd wasted so many hours on a fraud. A rotten finale leaves everyone feeling cheated.
Sky's much-hyped Arctic horror serial Fortitude served up another howling disappointment. Record audiences switched on for the opener after an animatronic polar bear prowling London Underground stations stirred up publicity. But ten weeks later, after no end of bar brawls, snowmobile chases, gunfights on glaciers and prehistoric insect swarms, the final episode was as soggy and shapeless as a shovelful of slush. All those bewildering plotlines tailed away in an apathetic tangle of shrugs and evasions.
The success of TV soaps is partly to blame. Many screenwriters, including The Syndicate's Kay Mellor, learned their craft on show like Coronation Street, which have no ending: characters leave, scandals are revealed, but the plots stretch on forever. Unlike novelists, who must engineer their books to a brilliant conclusion, many TV writers simply never learn how to end a story. Chris Chibnall won acclaim for the first series of his eerie Broadchurch - but squandered it on the ending for the sequel. I challenge anyone who sat through Broadchurch 2 to remember how it eventually finished.
Another child murder serial that had the country gripped was The Missing, starring James Nesbitt as a grieving father whose five-year-old son vanished on a family holiday in France. The writers made the mistake of an ambiguous ending, which let the viewers make up their own minds about what really happened. I'm sorry, but that's exactly what we don't want. There's truly nothing worse that something that fizzles out without a proper …"