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Of all the great things about television, the greatest is that it’s on every single day. TV history is being made, day in and day out, in ways big and small. In an effort to better appreciate this history, we’re taking a look back, every day, at one particular TV milestone.
IMPORTANT DATE IN TV HISTORY: June 19, 2016
PROGRAM ORIGINALLY AIRED ON THIS DATE: Penny Dreadful, “The Blessed Dark” (Season 3, Episode 9) [Stream on Netflix]
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT: It’s become rarer and rarer these days for a TV series to simply end. Spinoffs and sequels and shared universes abound. Even a show like Breaking Bad which ended its series with its anti-hero main character stone dead still managed to beget Better Call Saul to continue that show’s universe and rope old characters onto the canvass once again.
A show like Penny Dreadful that existed on the precipice of cancellation for all its three years had to thread a needle with its season finales so that they could either advance the story to the next season or serve as a satisfying conclusion to the whole shebang if that’s what it came down to. The hammer finally dropped at the end of the third season, quite quietly and without much fanfare. Fans of the show — and there were some, a small but loyal viewership for a show that was often one of TV’s least heralded greats — may not have even noticed that the season 3 finale was going to be a series finale until those two words appeared on screen: THE END.
Up until that point, nothing was done on the show that couldn’t have been undone with a little Victorian magic. Sure, Vanessa Ives (Eva Green) died in the middle of her great battle to resist Dracula. Sure, our band of heroes — “lupus dei” werewolf Ethan (Josh Hartnett), troubled inventor Victor Frankenstein (Harry Treadaway), forlorn patriarch of a dead family Malcolm Murray (Timothy Dalton) — said their sad goodbyes, to Vanessa and each other. Even Frankenstein’s monster (Rory Kinnear) emerged from the shadows to pay respects to the grave of the woman who was kind to him. This was an ending, and a rather beautiful one. But until the show told us THE END, it was always something that could be turned around or resurrected. In a way, THE END was the last kindness from a show that wasn’t always interested in kindness. The show was over, Vanessa could rest, and so could we.
