#160. The Finale (Monday, February 21, 2022)

What was your best day…of coming back to something for a brief moment just to see the end?

The first three seasons of the long-running PBS Kids cartoon Arthur are the three best seasons of any kids show ever produced. And I will throw down (virtually) with anyone who disagrees.

The first of those seasons, in 1997, also arrived right as I became old enough to follow a semi-complex eleven-minute story, understand its structure and moral, and retain it permanently. I distinctly remember the first episode I watched,¹ and even now, seeing certain scenes can give me a faint sense that I’m watching this strange, hilarious new show for the first time again.

Each subsequent episode not only lodged itself permanently in my memory, but often became my first real introduction to whatever ordinary childhood subject it happened to cover—glasses, hairstylists, strict teachers, spelling bees, beaches, dinosaur fossils, imaginary friends, lost library books. (I could go on with the other fifty-two Season One episodes, but I won’t.) It sometimes feels like half of childhood—and plenty of adulthood after it—was filtered through an Arthur lens.

From second to fourth grade (and fifth and sixth somewhat less religiously), my daily after-school ritual was to make myself a small snack in the kitchen and plop down on the living room sofa to watch the TVO Kids block until dinnertime, with Arthur always, reliably in that prime five p.m. spot.

My interest falls off sharply in middle school, due to an inevitable combination of me having more things to do after school and the quality of the show starting to deteriorate. Before long, I lose track of the seasons, and eventually of the show as an ongoing thing entirely. Season Seven—I knew because the season number had always roughly matched my grade—then eight, nine, ten, all the way to the switch to Flash animation in Season Fourteen, which to me signaled the death knell of Arthur as quality children’s television. Eventually: Season Twenty-Five.

But a month before this date, I see a news article somewhere from PBS. This twenty-fifth season of Arthur will be its last. And all four episode pairs will air on the same day.

I figure I should watch, but don’t think much more about it. I also regrettably miss the five-day, twenty-four-hour marathon PBS runs of the first twenty-four seasons, only realizing it’s happening when it’s mostly over.² Then, with my anticipation having slowly ramped up, the day of the Monday finale comes.

It’s coincidentally Family Day, so I sleep in. My mom comes by late that morning and wakes me up to go cross-country skiing, because it’s a holiday and fresh snow has fallen. I tell her yes, let’s go—but I have to be home by 3:00, because I need to watch the Arthur series finale.

Yes, I literally tell her that. I even add in Mandarin, “Can you believe it’s the Arthur series finale?”

She had long forgotten most of this history. But I still remembered 1997 and early 1998, before my brother was born, when Arthur was one of the defining parts of my at-home life alongside the math drills and triple-language index cards (#89) she spent so much time on with me.

Most vividly, I remember the first Monday of March Break in 1998. Something that morning made me cry a lot (not unusual, to be fair). Then, an hour later, I saw a new episode of Arthur on PBS. The first episode of Season Two. And my mom agreed with me that this had instantly turned the rest of the day, and maybe the whole week, into something infallibly good.

Twenty-four years later, that memory comes back—only for me—as we ski along the river and drive home. By then, my anticipation has reached another level.

And so, 3:00 PM comes, and on the PBS Kids website (which is streaming the final episodes for free), I watch. The first three and a half episodes feel like a satisfying but unsettling dream. They don’t feel like final-season episodes at all, just random Arthur stories ranging from familiar material—job shadowing, D.W.’s missing snowball—to things I never expected the show to attempt: a black-and-white silent-film episode, and a pirate-cove vacation spot being embezzled by actual pirates. Most bizarrely, the first half of the final broadcast is a throwaway story called “Blabbermouth” about Buster talking too much. Near the end, Arthur acts like a complete asshole to him, followed by this unusually precise shot of Buster crying actual animated tears. (I’m not cross-referencing five hundred episodes to verify this, but it may be the only time anyone on the show cries quite like that.)

Then it’s the final episode. The final, final episode of Arthur. And despite being inexplicably short—just the standard eleven minutes instead of a full episode—All Grown Up is a legit finale. The first eight minutes are Arthur, Buster, Francine, and Muffy—the four core kids from the start—playing this weird board game that tells them their future. And then a flash forward to twenty years later. In those three short minutes that will leave viewers wanting more for eternity, we get a brief glimpse of the adult version of most of these beloved characters—who we’d gotten to know as children through over a hundred hours of past episodes. And it ends, of course, with the frame story: Arthur has finally published his graphic novel, and it recounts the whole series… starting from Season One Episode One.

Then it fades to black. What a finale.

The episode was So Long, Spanky, where D.W.’s newly introduced pet parakeet abruptly dies—one of the very few on-screen deaths in the series, I believe. Its companion was Buster’s New Friend, which contains possibly the most passive-aggressive expression of genuine forgiveness in television history. I watched both at my friend Fred Tian’s apartment, after he introduced Arthur to me as basically the incredible new show that had just exploded into public consciousness—my paraphrase of whatever seven-year-old wording he actually used.
Speaking as someone who did not actually endure the sleep deprivation—or repeated exposure to Seasons 14 through 24—I still think I legitimately could, and maybe should, have done that once-in-a-lifetime crazy thing. Or at least most of it during vaguely reasonable hours.