How to end a TV show

Ending any story is hard, but that’s especially true of mystery-packed TV shows. Series like Lost initially hook viewers with constantly building secrets and questions, to the point that they can often seem incomprehensible. But the promise is that it will all pay off in the end — a feat that few shows ultimately manage. This creates tension as viewers try to put all of the pieces together while hoping that the show’s creators know what they’re doing in the long run. The latest example is From on MGM Plus, a Lost-style horror series that just wrapped up its penultimate season, with a fifth and final one coming in 2027. Naturally, endings are currently top of mind for the team behind the series.

“Making this type of show, you’re making a contract with the audience,” says From’s creator, John Griffin. “You’re saying, ‘Look, if you guys get invested, we promise we’re going to take you somewhere worth going.’”

From tells the story of a group of people in a small town that they’re unable to leave, all while dealing with prowling monsters, a dwindling food supply, and other existential threats. The season 4 finale was perfectly indicative of how these shows often work, mixing intense drama and bizarre mysteries. A beloved character turned into a monster, and there were more than a few unexpected deaths, strange and violent weather patterns, potentially fatal dream sequences, and some upending of the rules that everyone has had to live (and die) by over the last four seasons.

Tracking everything that has happened so far is a huge challenge with a show like this — both for viewers following along at home and those working on the show. According to showrunner Jeff Pinkner — who previously worked on series like Lost, Alias, and Fringe — the solution is fairly straightforward: remembering what’s most important.

“One of the challenges of making a show this complicated is that we’re expecting an audience to watch a show this complicated,” he explains. “If we had some kind of master document that we were relying on, or that was necessary for us to hold it all in our heads, we would be expecting too much of the audience. The honest truth is, we hold it all in our head because that’s what the audience has to be able to do. We only want it to be as complicated as we can pay attention to.”

Knowing how the series will end from its very beginning helped the creators of From stay focused on reaching that conclusion even as they delved into side mysteries. Unlike many shows, they always had a specific end goal in mind while making narrative decisions. That doesn’t mean that the show hasn’t changed from the initial vision, though. Griffin likens the experience of creating the show to that of a road trip, where there isn’t necessarily one straightforward journey, but the final destination remains the same. “We set out with an intent, and on any journey things change and things evolve along the way,” he says. “Some of what was planned in the beginning was jettisoned in favor of other roads.”

According to Jack Bender — an executive producer who directed many of From’s episodes, and is perhaps best known for directing the emotionally charged Lost finale — one of the strengths of long-form mystery television is its team’s ability to change and adapt. While the creators might have concrete ideas in mind initially, those can shift based on everything from fan feedback to input from other members of the crew, whether it’s the actors or production designers. “That’s one of the great creative things about this kind of storytelling, where you have 50 episodes to tell this story,” Bender says. “It gives you time to go off into the woods and take little detours, and still get back on the path of where you’re going.”

One of the difficulties, however, is that there are no guarantees in the world of television. From’s creators may have had an ending in mind from early on, and they may have planned for a story that spans five seasons, but getting there depended on the show reaching an audience and getting renewed multiple times. That outcome wasn’t assured. It’s a reality that most TV writers have to contend with, but it becomes especially tricky for a series like From that has definitive plans for its beginning and ending. Contingency plans become a necessity.

“If there came a time when MGM Plus had come to us and said, ‘Hey, listen guys, the numbers are bad, we’re going to have to wrap this up next season,’ could we have done it? Sure,” explains Griffin. “There are 9,000 ways to tell any story. But the fact that we got to let the story breathe, and let it lead us to where it wanted to go, and fulfill the original vision we all had, has been incredibly gratifying.”

All of those factors combined make pulling off a successful ending all the more significant — and rare. As M. Night Shyamalan told me ahead of the finale of his Apple TV thriller Servant, “I’m astonished now when I think of any peers who have done this.” In the case of a mystery show, the finale has a lot of ends to tie up and mysteries to reveal.

But according to the team behind From, checking unresolved storylines off of a list isn’t the goal; it’s to make viewers feel intensely about the world and characters in order to leave a lasting impression. As controversial as the Lost finale was, it’s still something people talk about today. “You only miss characters that you care about,” says Griffin. “You only miss shows that you care about.”

“We want the ending to feel surprising and simultaneously inevitable,” adds Pinkner. “We want the ending to feel like it was set up in the first frame of the first episode.”