I’m like, genuinely so sad about that ending. Why spend so much time gaining the trust of your audience in regards to ensuring that you will treat your characters with love and kindness, only to do such a disservice to so many of them? Why make a show whose entire premise is based on relationships and character development, only to undo so much of it in the last ten minutes? Why start your show with a character being asked to leave by his ex-wife, only to end up ignoring the pleas to stay from someone who loves him? Why establish a home and found family, and a solution to include his son in this new life, just to undo all of it?
Why have your female lead whose journey has been in part about deeply yearning for a meaningful “thunder and lightning” romantic relationship end up with a nameless character with no discernible personality that has 5-10 minutes of screen time in one episode halfway through the last season? Why center season 3 on the development of Jamie and his relationship w Roy only to have them get into a physical fight over a girl, whom neither of them ends up with definitively anyways? Why have him make that gross and mean comment about the leaked video? Why show him building a new friendship w Keely only to reveal that he actually is still trying to fuck her?
I get the idea of Ted being a Mary Poppins, but that doesn’t work so well when many of the characters don’t really get happy endings, and he returns to a life without a majority of the relationships that have been the center of the show being intact. Also, this concept is undermined by the fact that he did not have to leave! Mary Poppins leaves bc she is a magical being and she has to! A completely feasible solution was offered to Ted to stay and he didn’t even consider it. Also, why did he seem so hollow and checked out for so much of the episode? His lack of emotional response to any of his goodbyes felt so strange. Also, he wasn’t even at Beard’s shitty green screen wedding? Also, Beard left Ted to marry his lowkey abusive girlfriend?
And WHY bring Nora Ephron and soulmates into all of it for exactly zero payoff? You don’t get to say “rom-communism” and not have one single well-explored and established romantic journey with a happy ending. The magic of Nora Ephron is that soulmates are real and endings are happy; that when she shows you two people are meant for each other, that is exactly what you can expect to see. So like, literally why bother bringing those concepts into this show and highlighting them so often only to completely abandon them?
