My favorite finale of the season
The main TV season has come to an end, and I’ve been working to catch up on all the finales I missed while flying through New Mexico. My favorite so far, in terms of its utter, absurd, unbelievably crazy levels of ridiculousness has been the finale to Private Practice. In it, Maya and Dell are in a car crash, and while Addison tries to figure out how to save Maya’s unborn baby while also preventing Maya’s permanent paralysis, Maya’s father Sam unknowingly operates on the guy who smashed into their car. Meanwhile, Cooper and Charlotte decide to get married, Violet and Pete get back together, and Naomi’s boyfriend lies to her about receiving a new treatment for his end-stage ALS, with the help of her other sort of boyfriend. At the same time, Amelia freaks out about her surgical competence, and then even though Addison is able to save Maya and the baby’s life, it’s actually Dell who dies suddenly from an undiagnosed brain bleed. Which is a shame, because it seems like just a few episodes ago that his ex-wife died in a massive explosion, which means his young daughter Betsey is now parent-less. And then at the end Addison sleeps with Sam, after Naomi gives them her blessing. All of this happens in just one hour of TV – about forty-two minutes, not counting commercials.
I know.
Sorry, Dell. Your minutes are numbered.
Yes, this is a particularly egregious example of finale mayhem from Shonda Rhimes, whose flagship show Grey’s Anatomy went with the classic “there’s a shooter roaming the hallways of this hospital” technique for its final episode of the season. At least the Grey’s finale got two hours to fully milk all the terror and heart-pumping melodrama – Private Practice tried to pour twenty-two buckets of crazy into a one-gallon Ziploc bag, and the result is about as watertight as a sieve. With a hole in it. I really think it even beat out last year’s finale, in which one of pregnant Violet’s crazy patients showed up at her house and cut Violet’s baby out of her womb while a conscious Violet attempted to coach her in order to save the baby’s life.
Cooper proposing to Charlotte, while many people he loves are dying
And that right there is why I have continued to watch Private Practice, even though it is arguably among the worst primetime soaps out there. Every time you think you’ve achieved some kind of limit about how much crazy plot you can fit into an hour, Private Practice says, “You know what? I bet I could squeeze another marriage proposal somewhere in there.” But the real spectacle comes from watching the writers attempt to create dialogue for characters with supposedly realistic lives and personalities inside the show’s manic-depressive funhouse universe. The results are particularly apparent in this last episode – at one point or another, almost every character looks at someone else and says, “Why does this sort of thing keep happening to us?” “Why can’t we catch a break?” “What other terrible things could possibly happen?” “When will this awful day ever end?” The result is kind of amazing. It’s as though you’re watching an insane show where the characters have become self-aware and are beginning to voice their dissent against being perpetual martyrs to over-the-top melodrama. Violet really voices it best, while they all sit in the hospital waiting room. “Once again, here we are, in the same place, with somebody else… I just want to scream, to whoever keeps doing this, to just stop. Stop bringing us here.”
Violet, unlikely voice of reason (thanks, The Soup)
It is my dearest wish that what we’re witnessing on Private Practice are the first inklings of a deeply devious meta-fictional long con, three seasons and countless births, deaths, and forcible C-sections in the making. Here’s how it would go down – first, it’d just be one or two characters wearing “Shonda Rhimes, puppet-master” tshirts. Then, the characters would gradually refuse to participate in their own over-dramatic death scenes, begin to find each other neither repulsive nor alluring but merely “nice,” and slowly, the show would grind some kind of Beckett-esque halt. With a long sigh as I acknowledge how unlikely that scenario is, I set aside this season’s Private Practice finale as one of my favorite of the season, and can only hope it keeps doing what it does best next fall. Maiming, screwing, baby-swapping, evading the police, aborting, bickering, screaming, marrying, healing, killing, and of course, dying.
My mom was over at my apartment and we were watching the penultimate episode in this series, because she watches it semi-regularly along with Brothers and Sisters and a couple other prime-time dramas. And, when we got to the end and I called that the ambulance tearing in to the parking lot was going to hold the pregnant teen daughter, mom got all disgusted and said — and I quote– “Everything is such a soap opera these days.”
And I was like “………..when you choose to watch Private Practice, you sacrifice your right to make disparaging comments about things being ‘such soap operas.’ Being a soap is the only thing it does.”
Being a soap is the only thing Private Practice does, but it does it with such glee and wild, unthinking, exuberant abandon. “Let’s do an Octomom story,” it says, “but let’s make her a surrogate mother who’s getting paid to have the babies, and then let’s put her in a coma.” And then it says, “okay, so that’s the A plot for that episode, but we need some other unrelated deaths and mental breakdowns to really flesh this thing out.”