Penny Dreadful: On Final Seasons and Fan Respect

Showtime monster mash Penny Dreadful ended not with a whimper on Sunday, but with a title card simply saying The End. It put a cap on 27 episodes of Victorian elegance, of poetic dialogue and battles with both Satan and Dracula, and came after a death that would have greatly changed the complexion of the show going forward, had the show continued for a fourth season. Yet there had been no indication that the third season of Penny Dreadful was to be the final chapter for Vanessa Ives and her band of merry men, a deliberate choice made by Showtime President David Nevins, who told Deadline that he thought revealing the ending before the season began “felt like a massive spoiler and it felt disrespectful to the experience that people were having with the show.”

Try as they might, though, Showtime wasn’t able to escape disrespecting its audience, as the network effectively pulled the rug out from under Penny Dreadful‘s small but fiercely loyal fan base by not giving the show the victory lap that it deserved. Instead of allowing the show’s audience to savor every moment of gothic goodness that came their way, knowing that this would be the last time they saw this character or that location, the network allowed fans to find out the fate of their show through Youtube videos (featuring creator John Logan and star Eva Green getting around one minute each to eulogize the show) that were released too early. While a network allowing a creator to execute their vision and nothing more might be an ideal situation, especially when you consider how many Showtime shows have been forced to run long past their creative peaks (e.g. Dexter, Weeds, Californication), I simply don’t buy Nevins’ logic that not announcing the final season as the final season would be the best thing for audiences.

For one, Showtime has a history of allowing shows to have one (publicized) final trip around the sun. And it’s not just “spoiler-proof” comedies like Episodes, Weeds, and Nurse Jackie that are getting the boost from a final season; Showtime has concluded plot-heavy dramas like Dexter, The L Word, and The Tudors in the same manner and not a word was ever said about said final season announcement paving the way for spoilers or the final season announcement itself being a spoiler for any show’s ending. Plus, there are countless announced final seasons every year on television (recent inclusions range from Justified to Parks & Recreation to Switched at Birth) and of the responses one hears after said announcements come down, both from media and fans, no one has ever said that they know how the show is ending because of the very fact that its ending has been announced. It’s such a strange line of thinking that either supposes that the exact ending of Penny Dreadful was inevitable (it wasn’t) or incredibly predictable (again, it wasn’t) or that every television show that’s had an announced final season has had their endings spoiled by the internet (doesn’t happen), so not only is Nevins forgetting the history of his network with comments about withholding a final season Penny Dreadful announcement, he’s vastly underestimating the project that he’s portraying himself as being so hell-bent on protecting.

By that logic, aren’t early renewals destructive to the way people watch shows? Similar to how announced final seasons are viewed, if you know that something got renewed five episodes into a 12-episode season, you adjust the way you watch, as there’s a safety and comfort that comes with knowing that you have more than seven episodes of story remaining. You know that the show will be able to further explore the world it’s already constructed, so any dangling plot threads or seemingly underwritten dynamics could be better serviced in a second season. Characters you might’ve been otherwise worried about feel more protected due to their importance in the show’s universe. Early renewals remove the anxiety that comes with watching television and makes every corner writers paint themselves into seem less like a dead-end and more like a puzzle to figure out in the next season; things aren’t going to get bad enough to where a show blows itself up and can’t piece itself back together again. If Showtime really believes that final season announcements act as spoilers, why do they renew anything before the end of their respective seasons? Wouldn’t, say, Billions getting renewed two episodes into its first season indicate that A) both Paul Giamatti and Damien Lewis would be back and B) neither of their characters will be so far down that they won’t be able to get back up?

And then there’s the matter of John Logan, who purportedly came to the decision to end Penny Dreadful after three seasons while in production on season two. Yet there’s no evidence that Penny Dreadful was to be a shorter show and couldn’t have gone for longer than three seasons, which is something that made the show’s conclusion, however natural it might’ve been in the eyes of Logan, all the more painful. Granted, knowing that a show had a certain plan and failed to complete it can feel horrible (e.g. Enlightened and The Borgias coming up one season short of their respective three- and four-season plans, respectively), but at least you knew that a lengthy run for either would be out of the question. You didn’t have to worry about seasons five, six, or seven because you were preoccupied trying to get the show to three and four. Whereas with Penny Dreadful, there was the shock of the cancellation/conclusion along with the surprise of the show supposedly not being built for a longer haul, even though the conclusion was supposedly a purely creative decision and Showtime had commissioned everything from games to comic books in association with the show. Had Showtime and/or Logan sewed the seeds of a shorter run earlier in the show’s life span, even if they never gave a specific number of seasons to look for, a cancellation after three well-regarded seasons, especially with the show gaining awards traction recently, wouldn’t have been such a disorientingly huge shock. Yet if simply shocking audience was their goal, that speaks to the character of both the show’s creator and the network itself.

Penny Dreadful was an underappreciated gem of a television show that featured the greatest performance on television for three years running in Green’s Vanessa Ives, a marvel of raw intensity and physical commitment that was exhilarating to behold. It was a beautifully human look at what it is to feel inhuman, like an outsider in a world you don’t understand, and deserved far better treatment than it got from Showtime. Not only was the show not given a chance to say goodbye, it was thrown in the weakest time of year for the network (spring) and not given anything resembling a lead-in (e.g. it only ever had combinations of Nurse Jackie, Californication, House of Lies, Happyish, and Dice, while it aired several weeks this past season with repeat lead-ins), thereby putting it behind the 8-ball when it comes to its standing against the rest of Showtime’s drama slate. Given that it was inarguably one of the best received shows on Showtime for the duration of its run, this is a show that should’ve been given a stronger platform on which to stand, a way to get the network into the world of genre television while keeping a monstrously talented cast on its airwaves for as long as possible. Instead, though, Showtime hid Penny Dreadful under the shadow of Game of Thrones and decided that rather than allowing a critical darling one final moment in the sun, they would get cute about its cancellation and treat its final season as if it were a bad news item to bury on a summer Friday afternoon rather than a source of pride.

Of course, not every show has to run in perpetuity and if this is the ending that John Logan envisioned, then I can respect that. It’s just that times in television are such that alienating your audience like Showtime did with the delayed Penny Dreadful announcement, as well as the shaky logic President David Nevins used in defending the decision to delay said announcement, might not be the best idea. While pay cable networks put less emphasis on live ratings in lieu of critical buzz, awards standing, and general brand management, you still want your audience to prioritize you above the litany of other networks offering scripted programming or streaming platforms that have quickly gotten into the original content game. That makes establishing a relationship with the audience extremely important; you want your audience to know that if they invest the time, energy, and emotions into one of your projects, they’re not going to be taken advantage of and that whenever possible, they’ll know when something they love is to be taken from this world. To assume that the twists and turns that audiences appreciate in fiction should translate to real life, to assume that fans will appreciate being thrown for a loop by an entity that should have their interest at heart, is foolhardy at best and egregiously disrespectful and full of contempt at worst. So while Penny Dreadful might have deserved better treatment from Showtime, given how creatively strong it was and how different it was from the typical pay cable offering, the Penny Dreadful audience deserved much better than it ended up getting, as well.