"I'll finish the series and then stop"

Some readers will grant everything and hold out for the end of the series. Four episodes left. Once it's done, the evenings go back to normal. The overrun is a temporary thing with an end date.

Ask when a series ends. The drama with the lake has eight episodes and a final scene that sets up the second series, because that's how series are made now, and the second series is already in the row underneath, and the countdown at the end of episode eight offers it. The end of the series is another cliff, larger, and the next one is a whole new set of doors.

And when the second series ends, there's the thing the row recommends, chosen for you by what you watched, and it's very like the thing you just finished, and its first episode ends on a door. The catalogue doesn't have an end. It's built not to, and every series in it is built to hand you to the next, and the plan to finish this one and stop is a plan with no place to stand, because there's no moment in the catalogue at which stopping is what happens next.

This isn't a criticism of the shows. Good series set up their next series. That's craft. It's a description of the shape of the thing you're inside, which is a sequence without a natural stop, and inside a sequence like that, waiting for the end is waiting for something the sequence is designed never to provide.

There's a smaller version, which is finishing the episode. You're twenty minutes into the third one and the belief says you've started so you should see it out. Twenty minutes in is twenty minutes into an episode you didn't plan, and the remaining twenty-five buy you nothing but the next cliff. Stopping mid-episode feels wrong and is fine. The show will resume from the same second tomorrow, which is a thing television can now do and couldn't when the rule about finishing what you started was made.

So "I'll finish the series and then stop" has the order wrong. The stopping has to come first, as a thing you do at the credits, and then the series gets finished at a pace you set, one or two a night, over a fortnight, with the ending arriving on an evening when you can go to bed on it rather than at twenty to midnight with the alarm at seven. You'll still see what happens. You'll see it at a time you chose, which is the only way anyone has ever seen the end of anything and remembered it.