"No no there wasn't any planned 14th season, we all saw the writing on the wall. The ratings had been going down and so fourth, that curve goes on every show and in everybody's life"
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There’s a practiced shrug in Hagman’s “No no,” the kind performers deploy when they’re asked to dignify an ending with a grand narrative. He refuses the romance of revival talk and replaces it with something colder: inevitability. “We all saw the writing on the wall” isn’t just an idiom; it’s a backstage admission that everyone in television learns to read the same numbers, the same quiet shifts in audience attention, the same executive tone when the calls stop coming.
The line works because it toggles between insider candor and public-facing consolation. Ratings “going down” is the blunt industry metric, but Hagman quickly widens it into a metaphor: “that curve goes on every show and in everybody’s life.” That expansion is doing PR work. It transforms a business decision into a natural law, smoothing away blame. Nobody failed; gravity happened. The phrase “and so fourth” (malapropism and all) even adds an unguarded, conversational quality, as if he’s too seasoned to polish the edges for the press.
Context matters: long-running series endings are rarely clean. They’re negotiations among money, fatigue, creative decline, and the audience’s fickleness. Hagman frames cancellation as maturity rather than defeat, aligning himself with the show’s arc instead of pleading for relevance. The subtext is acceptance, but also control: by narrating the end as obvious and universal, he keeps the story from becoming a postmortem. He makes the finale feel less like a verdict and more like a season change.
The line works because it toggles between insider candor and public-facing consolation. Ratings “going down” is the blunt industry metric, but Hagman quickly widens it into a metaphor: “that curve goes on every show and in everybody’s life.” That expansion is doing PR work. It transforms a business decision into a natural law, smoothing away blame. Nobody failed; gravity happened. The phrase “and so fourth” (malapropism and all) even adds an unguarded, conversational quality, as if he’s too seasoned to polish the edges for the press.
Context matters: long-running series endings are rarely clean. They’re negotiations among money, fatigue, creative decline, and the audience’s fickleness. Hagman frames cancellation as maturity rather than defeat, aligning himself with the show’s arc instead of pleading for relevance. The subtext is acceptance, but also control: by narrating the end as obvious and universal, he keeps the story from becoming a postmortem. He makes the finale feel less like a verdict and more like a season change.
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