Resumen: In Film Noir, the ending is crucial for reaching an understanding of the moral stance of
the narrative. TV Series, however, offer a fragmented structure¿episodes, hiatuses, and
seasons¿, which prevent the audience from grasping their full meaning until the initial
conflict-the one that launches the series and structures the narrative-is definitively
resolved. In a television landscape where the story is becoming ever more sophisticated,
one of the great advances of ¿complex TV¿ (Mittell, 2015) revolves around the notion
of the ¿ars moriendi¿ (Harrington, 2012) of audiovisual fictions: the ending of a TV
show increasingly aims for circularity, emotional climax, reasonable surprise, and
internal narrative coherence. But, also, a good ending usually provides some kind of
moral closure.
Following the classic authors who have studied Film Noir (Frank, Borde and
Chaumeton, Schrader, Naremore), one can highlight two prominent features of the
genre: ethical ambiguity and a final sense of despair. This notion of moral uncertainty,
existentialism, and even nihilism that typifies the Noir genre has become a sort of cliché
because, as Skoble (2006) has studied, we can find moral clarity and redemption already
in several classic Noir examples from the 40s and 50s.
Consequently, this article attempts to explore how some recent American and
British TV-Noir shows are addressing this issue by undermining one of the main
thematic and ideological features that both spectators and critics usuall