One show ends, another begins

It's officially TV season! The season of staying in over going out, of binge watching series and getting the snacks at the ready. Already it feels like the days spent outside drinking until late are long gone. And while summer is by far my favourite season, I choose to always see the best in everything. So no, the cold weather and dark mornings/nights are not for me, but all the great TV definitely is! I've just finished the last ever episodes of a couple of my favourite series and thought I'd share my thoughts, as well as sharing which series I'm looking forward to binging this autumn!

Orange is the new black

Something I've always loved about this show is its rawness; its ability to show women from all walks of life in all situations. It doesn't just show women to be delicate and beautiful and feminine, but also strong and aggressive and struggling and supporting each other. The characters and their intricacies have always made the show what it is and I was excited to see how they handled the last ever season. Given that presumably, some of the women were serving very long sentences, it wasn't exactly going to end with a happily ever after for everyone was it?

And yet, it kind of did. The thing that OITNB have always managed to maintain is its realism; its dedication to showing what would actually happen in real life. In a normal TV show, the heroine (the main female lead), would win, or get the guy or come out on top in some way. But in this show, the heroine (each of the female characters) often loses. Like Taystee (an under privileged black woman), who at the end of last season was given a life sentence for a crime she didn't commit. In normal TV world, they would prove she was innocent and she'd walk free. In OITNB, the sentence stuck, the plea failed and she presumably spends the rest of her life in prison. And yet somehow, they managed to write her a happy ending in that she found a way to come to terms with her sentence and used her time to do something valuable; becoming a teacher to the other inmates so they'd be better prepared for life on the outside.

The show pretty much did the same with all its characters too. Not all the happy endings looked like the hearts-and-flowers kind that other shows often provide but they got some kind of closure. And the writing and acting remained as brilliant as ever. Because of the style of the show, it easily could have gone on forever (new inmates, new arguments, new issues) but I think they ended it in a good place before it got repetitive. And I loved that they brought back all the OG characters in the final few scenes!

Jane the virgin

I had never heard of telenovelas before I watched this show and yet its constant twists and turns (based on the classic Latin genre) has made me want to start watching them. This show pretty much had me hooked from the very beginning when an engaged virgin, Jane, was accidentally artificially inseminated by a guy she'd previously shared a kiss with. And so ensued the greatest love triangle there ever was, with Jane swaying between her fiance (Michael) and her baby daddy (Rafael) for a good couple of seasons before eventually picking (and marrying) Michael. This was in amongst drug lords, murders, stalkers, secret twins, deranged long lost relatives, and all the classic trappings of family life across 4 generations; love, loss, anger, guilt, struggles and support.

Then in season 3, shock-horror (and spoiler alert), Michael was killed. A quick 4 year time jump later, and Jane was moving forward with her life. Season 4 was my favourite because I have ALWAYS been Team Rafael (well and truly) and that was the series when the two of them realised that their connection did (and always had) gone deeper than friends and co-parents. Seeing them fall in love for about the third time made for the greatest watching ever, but big cliffhanger (and spoiler alert) at the end of the previous season was that Michael was actually secretly alive!!!

So the last ever series began by reigniting the love triangle that had always been at the shows centre, as Jane struggled with what this meant for her life and her heart. Had she fallen in love with Rafael because Michael had been gone or was he her true one and only? Well, I was very much in the minority in still being a Team Rafael fan and the way they handled the storyline seemed to go down badly with many. But I loved it. It was very remnant of a book I read earlier this year, where her husband came back from the dead to find her engaged to someone else. I won't actually say how the show ties up but they did it very, very well and it's a show that I'm sad won't have any more new episodes again. They ended it brilliantly though!

And what am I looking forward to returning?

Suits

I have loved Suits since the very beginning and have always fancied myself as a bit of a Donna (if you know, you know), especially in the days where I was working at a law firm. The show took a massive hit when Mike and Rachael (now a Princess in real life) left but the most recent season was one that I really loved. It naturally had to go a different direction, with the show focusing on the lifelong rivalry between Harvey and Louis, rather than the bonded friendship between Harvey and Mike, but I think it worked.

It may be a different show now than the one it was at the start but it still has me hooked. I think Katherine Heigl has been a great addition too, with her character adding a nice strong female aspect that was removed when Jessica left the show a few series ago. The one thing that surely every watcher has been hoping for since the very start is for Harvey and Donna to finally get together and after endlessly toying with the idea for years, the writers finally made it happen at the back of last season! So I'm intrigued to see how that affects the dynamic in the new season, and what changes following Robert's exit (and the events that led up to it).

The Good Place

It's a slightly strange concept for a comedy but it begins with Eleanor dying and going to 'The Good Place' (basically heaven). But it turns out that she was actually a really horrible person and is there by mistake, so she tries to work on being a better person to earn her place there (with the help of an ethics professor). Spoiler alert, but after many strange happenings and many mess-ups (in terms of being a good person), it turns out that she was never in The Good Place to begin with; she was always in The Bad Place (as are the people she's befriended).

There are a few series of memory wipes, enemies turning to friends and an adventure to challenge the higher system running the whole thing but we're now on to season 4, where the whole Good Place experiment is about to begin again, but with the 4 main characters running the show (instead of being the guinea pigs). Throw in a will-they-wont-they couple (which every show needs) and I'm looking forward to seeing where this weird and wonderful show goes next!