Dear AMC: Just Cancel "The Killing" Now

Spoiler alert: This article discusses the events of the first season of AMC's The Killing.

It wasn't a show we intended on covering, but for the last three months, I've been so high on The Killing, AMC's murder mystery that devoted its entire 13-episode first season to a single murder, that I've been sneaking my praise of it into my reviews of other shows.

On Sunday, the show had its season finale. And I now take back every nice thing I said.

The show that started its season with the advertising tag-line "Who killed Rosie Larsen?" didn't answer the question. Instead, it revealed in the last few minutes of the finale, completely out of the blue, that one of the two detectives on the case, Holder, had sabotaged the investigation. The very final scene was a cliffhanger of sorts, with all the suspects gathered around the wrongly-arrested one, as if to say, "Ha! You still don't know who killed Rosie!"

Basically, the show s**t all over its viewers.

It didn't even make sense. If a show is going to leave a season on a cliffhanger, aren't they at least obligated to make it clear what happened? But viewers were mostly just confused. Holder had sabotaged the case in such a way that the "evidence" would never hold up in court, so the person arrested would clearly never be convicted — and Holder himself would be strongly suspected of forging evidence. He seemed so proud to have "gotten away with it," and yet he obviously hadn't. So how dazzled with him, and the show, can we the viewer possible be?

Until the finale, The Killing had received plenty of critical praise — although it had its detractors too, many of whom felt that the show, which seemed so very proud of its "anti-conventional-TV-mystery" cred, had a predictable formula of its own: spend each episode strongly implying that some new suspect was guilty of the crime, leave the episode in a cliff-hanger, then absolve that suspect early in the next episode, so the detectives could move on to the next investigatee.

True, it got to be somewhat predictable, but this formula didn't bug me as much as it bugged others — it was hard for me to see how you could draw the investigation of a single murder out into a whole season of individual episodes without presenting new suspects along the way. Besides, we learned a lot about the central murder along the way — information that I was sure would all clearly point to the actual murder, but only in retrospect.

Nope, as it turns out. The season finale did exactly what almost every episode before it had done: reveal the suspect to be false and leave us with a cliffhanger — albeit a particularly confusing one. In the end, we've collected all this "evidence," but with no point to any of it.

And I wasn't the only viewer to feel cheated and jerked around. Maureen Ryan at the Chicago Tribune got the ball rolling with her furious take-down, which began with, "I hated the season finale of The Killing with the burning intensity of 10,000 white-hot suns." AfterEllen hated it too (and like me, felt betrayed for recommending it to readers), as did plenty of others.

The reaction on Twitter? Blistering, with sentiment running at least five to one against the finale.

Hitfix did an interview with the show's showrunner Veena Sud who did herself no favors, saying things like:

I can tell you there will be a resolution to this investigation in season 2 and there will also be the emergence of another case in season 2, but I can't tell you specifically where either of those happen.

The other thing I just want to say is that the show itself is a real invitation to try something really new. And I know that some people may not be so happy that we didn't tie it up in a bow at the end of the season, but we never promised that, and we're trying to do something different here.

The mystery will be resolved when the show comes back a year from now? On one hand, why should I believe her? She clearly enjoys pissing off "confounding the expectations" of viewers. And on the other hand, why should I care? I care who killed Rosie Larsen now because I just watched 13 episodes, and I'm emotionally invested in the show. I didn't care before I watched it — and I'll care a lot less a year from now when I've mostly forgotten it. (Not that it matters how much I'll care then — I'll die before I ever watch another episode of this horrible show, not after the careless way they've treated me.)

How any producer of a TV show (or any TV channel) could not understand this, I honestly do not know.

As for being "different," I love shows that take chances. But coherently and organically — not merely for the sake of being different. If The Killing had turned into a musical comedy in the finale and had its lead characters spent the hour doing the can-can on top of a giant pinata, that would've been "different" too — but that doesn't mean it would be interesting, or fair, or satisfying. On the contrary, it would pretty much be a big "f**k you!" to the viewers, who had invested lots of time and spiritual capital into this show.

Truthfully, it still might've been better than this ending.

The finale had a few defenders, including one at the Atlantic Monthly who argued, bizarrely, that TV shows don't owe their viewers anything at all, that they apparently exist solely so their writers can follow their muse and express themselves.

If that's really an artist's attitude (and it seems to be Sud's) — if they can't concern themselves with the annoying, mosquito-like whine of the audience — well, the system has an immediate self-correcting mechanism: namely, that audience will immediately stop watching. I know I will.

Still, I suspect Sud thinks that most viewers are simply not clever or unconventional enough to appreciate her "bold" and "daring" vision. But keep in mind that these viewers who are now all so upset? We're the same ones who stayed with this show through thirteen moody, slow-paced episodes, mostly praising it every step of the way. If we were smart enough to appreciate the first twelve episodes, why couldn't we understand the last one?

Another critic argued, even more bizarrely, that at least everyone's talking about The Killing and AMC. Well, yeah, everyone's talking about it — to point out how passionately they hate it, and to vow that they'll never watch another episode (and that they might also look at all future AMC shows with suspicion, as, again, I know I will). There is such a thing as bad publicity, and this is absolutely it.

AMC had already renewed the show for a second season, based on the early praise and ratings. But at this point, that is insane. They should cut their loses, cancel the show, and start over.

An abject apology from all involved is clearly in order too.