There is something strangely apropos about the group of shows that will be ending in 2018. Along with beloved comedies like Portlandia, Nashville and New Girl, series like Veep, The Americans, Scandal and House of Cards – all of which involve the goings-on of the political caste and have, at some point or another, drawn comparisons to the current administration – will debut their final seasons this year, at a cultural moment when the fecklessness of Selina Meyer and the dealings of Russian counterintelligence groups no longer defy imagination.
That the Trump administration contains echoes of both Veep and House of Cards is now an old adage, but both were some of the most zeitgeist-y shows of the era of Peak TV, and their departures leave a void. So, here are eight of the series concluding in 2018, some that are ending too soon and others well past expiration, and what to expect from their curtain calls.
Veep
Veep, whose star Julia Louis-Dreyfus has swept the last six Emmy awards for best actress in a comedy, will bow out with its seventh season, after its anti-heroine Meyer went from vice-president to president to, in hilariously tragic fashion, private citizen. While production on the last season was halted due to Louis-Dreyfus’ breast cancer diagnosis, it’s expected to return sometime in the spring, under the auspices of David Mandel, who took over the show when creator Armando Iannucci departed after its fourth season.
What exactly do we want from the final season of one of the best comedies of the last decade? It seemed for a moment that Selina was done chasing after the Oval Office, having found a morsel of closure in her one-year presidency; but the season six finale suggested otherwise, as Selina announced her desire to run for a fourth time. That sets things up for a political showdown between former president Meyer and that “plus-sized homunculus” congressman Jonah Ryan: seeing the two face off, with current president Montez in the mix, too, would be a fitting finish for a series that in strange ways augured the election of tremendously stupid people to public office. “She’s no longer the president running for president. She’s a person who used to be the president and is now running for president, but that never worked out too well,” Mandel told Indiewire. “It didn’t work out for Teddy Roosevelt, and it has not worked out historically when one-term presidents have tried to run.”
The Americans
Critical darling The Americans, FX’s cold war period drama following two married KGB sleeper agents played by Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell, will begin its 10-episode sixth and final season in March, wrapping up a run that’s set to be remembered squarely in the canon of this decade’s television dramas. The fifth season was not as well-received as the four that came before it, but as this tale of Reagan-era paranoia comes full circle, you can expect showrunner Joe Weisberg, a former CIA officer himself, to pull off the finale.
In the show’s timeline, 1985, the year Mikhail Gorbachev became the leader of the Soviet Union, is just around the bend. The show will inevitably grapple with what the political sea change back home means for Philip and Elizabeth, who at the end of season five elected to remain in the States rather than return to Russia. Season six will also expand on the story of their daughter Paige, who as she gets older is beginning to understand more about her parents’ extraordinary line of work.
Showrunners Weisberg and Joel Fields told Deadline the series’ conclusion has been etched in stone for years now: “Our stories sometimes change a lot, we write pretty far ahead and we’ll have ideas written down in pretty extensive thoughtful form earlier on and then some will stay with us. The ending itself has stuck since the middle of season two.”
Scandal
In how many more directions can Shonda Rhimes jerk us before Scandal ends with its seventh season? It would be unwise to guess, since the ABC drama regularly provides as many plot twists in an episode as some shows do in a season. The role of crisis-management guru Olivia Pope was made for Kerry Washington, who through six seasons has done a real high-wire act of melodrama, weathering death, lies, affairs, national emergencies and, well, scandals. She’ll begin the final season as the president Mellie Grant’s chief of staff, but it would be foolish to guess where she’ll end up. All we know, at least from hints dropped by Rhimes, is that season seven will hold nothing back. “So, next year we are going all out. Leaving nothing on the table. Creating this world in celebration,” Rhimes said in a press call. “We are going to handle the end the way we like to handle the important things in our Scandal family: all together, white hats on, Gladiators running full speed over a cliff.”
House of Cards
House of Cards began filming its final season in October, before the revelations about Kevin Spacey’s alleged history of sexual predation were made public. And so, in a bold and costly move, Netflix decided to scrap the two episodes that had been filmed, plus several other episodes that featured Frank Underwood and were already written, in favor of rejiggering the final season around his wife, the president, Claire Underwood, played by Robin Wright.
Although the wheels fell off House of Cards around season four or five, it was Netflix’s first certified hit as a streaming service and helped popularize the idea of binge TV. A Spacey-free finale season is not just the pragmatic move for House of Cards, but the right one, too: she didn’t become president until the very end of season five, but Claire Underwood has long been the more interesting and watchable half of television’s most cunning couple. The powers-that-be at Netflix have been tight-lipped about the series finale, but chief content officer Ted Sarandos said he hoped season six would provide “some closure to the show for fans”.
Portlandia
One of the great sketch-comedy shows of the past decade or so, Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein’s Portlandia, a Peabody Award winner in 2012, will air its eighth and final season beginning in January. Somehow, this show has yet to run out of ways to lampoon Portland’s hipster culture: remember The Deuce hotel, where each room comes with a complimentary turntable? From season one’s “Put a Bird on It” sketch to the great “Did You Read It?”, where Fred and Carrie play spitfire with their knowledge of recent New Yorker and McSweeney’s articles, the show’s satire is shrewd and often absurd, and will be hard to replace once it’s gone.
With a sketch-comedy show, there’s a bit less riding on a season finale than with traditional episodic television, so Armisen’s said he and Brownstein are not planning “to make any big final statements” with season eight. “We tried to keep it like a sketch show and comedy, just because people watch it out of order. Our main goal is to keep it funny and entertaining and relevant, we stuck to that.”
Nashville
Through six seasons, the last of which premiered this January, Nashville has acquired something of a cult following, which helped salvage the show after ABC cancelled it in 2016. Afterwards, CMT picked it up for seasons five and six, with new producers at the helm and a revived fanbase. Part musical, part soap-opera, Nashville, which follows country music singer Juliette Barnes, played by Hayden Panettiere, is a fun jaunt, a countrified take on the high camp of Glee. And even though Connie Britton’s Rayna James – the former “queen of country” and rival of Barnes – was killed off in season five, the show has just enough oxygen left to croon for one more season. After fans helped give the show new life, executive producer Marshall Herskovitz told Deadline “we want to return the favor with a final season that celebrates all the joys and passions, twists and turns – and amazing music! – that made Nashville such an exciting journey for the last six years”.
New Girl
Following a three-year time-jump, the Fox sitcom New Girl (which, like The Big Bang Theory, feels like its been on air for a decade) will kick off its final installment in April after creator Liz Meriwether made a last-second push for an eight-episode seventh season. “I’m so passionate about this show. It’s been my life for seven years. I did feel really good about the end of season six, but I really wanted a chance to say goodbye to the show with a final season,” Meriwether told Entertainment Tonight.
Starring Zooey Deschanel as the peppy teacher Jess, New Girl finished season six with a classic romcom flourish, Jess and Nick (Jake Johnson) playing revolving elevators to the tune of Lorde’s Green Light before the latter professes his love. Since the show so fittingly ended things for its central couple in what was thought to be a series finale, there’s reason to believe they’ll pull it off again in season seven, not just for Nick and Jess, but for Cece and Schmidt too.
Love
Judd Apatow’s Netflix romcom will bow out after its third season, which is set to premiere on the streaming service in early March. This show can be a charmer, exploring relationships through its prickly but endearing leads Mickey, played by Gillian Jacobs, and Gus, played by Paul Rust. After a great first season, Love lost a lot of steam in season two and, as its two leads finally got together, failed to keep pace with snappier, more progressive shows that explore the ups-and-downs of millennial courtship. Love doesn’t exactly reinvent the genre – its female lead is the typical wild child, her counterpart an affable nerd – but it still contains threads of truth among its many contrivances. Speaking about season three, Apatow said, “it’s our sweetest, funniest season and ends our story in a beautiful way”, so hopefully Love will get back to its season one heights.
