__twocolumncontent.jpg)
Editor’s Note: Spoilers Ahead
You can’t get much clearer than posting “The End” across the screen.
That’s exactly how Showtime’s Penny Dreadful wrapped up in Sunday’s season three finale, which also marked a surprising farewell for fans of the series.
Creator John Logan told Variety that ending after just 27 episodes “feels right.”
“Some poems are meant to be haikus, some are meant to be sonnets and some are meant to be tone poems,” he said. “And this was meant to be a sonnet.”
Logan is also adapting Patti Smith’s Just Kids for Showtime, which will air as a limited series focusing on the singer and poet’s relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.
The Emmy-nominated show featured a group of 19th century supernatural misfits. It closes with the death of Eva Green’s character Vanessa Ives, who is shot by her werewolf love Ethan Chandler (Josh Hartnett) to save London and the rest of the world from Dracula.
“It gives closure to Vanessa Ives, and without Vanessa Ives, the show shouldn’t go on,” said Showtime President David Nevins.
The decision to end the show came in season two, Logan told Deadline.
“For me artistically, it was sort of middle of the second season, so about two years ago when I was planning out the third season I realized where it was heading,” he said. “Because at its core for me the show has always been a woman grappling with her faith and at the end of the second season Vanessa stepped away from Catholicism, from religion, and so the third season had to be for me about her clawing her way back to God.”
Nevins said Logan laid out the reveal while pitching season three.
“In a very short amount of time he persuaded me that this was the bold choice to make and you listen to your creators,” Nevins said to Deadline. “Then it just became a question of how do we handle that information.”
Showtime decided to keep the ending under wraps because it felt like a spoiler that would be disrespectful to viewers’ experience with the show.
“I knew it’s going to be very emotional and I imagined Sunday to be even somewhat traumatic because people have a very deep emotional connection to these characters, but it seemed like why should we spoil that?” Nevins said. “Why should we sort of lessen the blow? Because that’s what TV and certainly good storytelling is about — creating an emotional experience. So it’s going to end with a card that says ‘the end’ and let people live in that experience and then we explain that on Monday morning.”
Tags: