This year's most highly anticipated series finale is The Shield. The FX cop show's seventh season will be its last, and it has a lot to live up to. Coming after finales like The Sopranos, series creator Shawn Ryan could take some pointers.
Shawn Ryan on The Shield Finale
"I've paid a lot of attention in the last couple years to the finales of shows that I really admired," said Ryan. "There are shows that I thought were fantastic that had what I thought were weak finales and shows that had really great finales. Obviously we will strive to fall into that latter category. I think the one thing I've learned is that the shows that stay true to themselves in their finale rather than try to do something that was outside the umbrella of what they usually did, those were the finales that for me succeeded more. I think if and when you watch the finale, it will feel like The Shield universe. It will feel completely appropriate and we hope that you'll be knocked over by it."
But don't get too obsessed with the end. There are still 12 more episodes leading up to that. "The second to final episode is extraordinarily as satisfying as the final. There are a lot of episodes that I'm very proud of. What I'll say is if you've liked the show before, I think you'll very much like the show this year."
A lot happened in the past six years, so Ryan has done his best to address everything he could. "We just covered a couple of threads that had been in the back of my mind and that are definitely brought up in this final season. There are a couple of characters that are a blast from the past that we bring back and wrap up in some ways. Then there will be things that probably people look and say, 'Well, that never did get resolved.' That will probably feel a little bit like real life. We didn't feel any pressure to sort of wrap up every single thing in the world up for the final episode. I don't think that would feel right either. But for loyal viewers, there are some things that they'll tune in and some people they'll see and they'll go, 'Oh, it's cool to see that person back.'"
Ryan had to remind himself of all he's done on The Shield, because the course of the story has constantly evolved. "There was no original plan. I wrote this as a spec script and never thought it would get made. When it did get made and I had to worry about what would season one be, I worried about season one. I've always been a much more instinctual writer. Things either feel right to me or they don't, but I'm not someone like David Milch who will give you a long treatise on why certain decisions were made and why others weren't. What I can say is that the other writers, who I have to give a ton of credit to, the writers and I would sit down at the beginning of every year and we would have a plan for every season. Then around season four and five, I started thinking about how I wanted to end the show and I had some vague notions, but our show is very, very collaborative. It's not an auteur system. So we came up with a plan for this final season that we thought worked really well. Then around episode four or five, we came up with a better idea so we changed the plan. That's always been the way this show has worked best."
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