The End of Endings: Streaming Television and the Politics of Permanent Upheaval

Contemporary streaming television increasingly resists narrative closure, sustaining unresolved conflicts, unstable institutions, and unfinished futures. While scholarship often explains extended seriality through platform economics, this paper argues that streaming has transformed the cultural politics of endings. Through close readings of Severance, Squid Game, and The Last of Us, I show how continual adaptation replaces resolution as a dominant condition of social life. Streaming seriality thus operates not merely as an industrial form but as a cultural logic for imagining persistent economic, political, ecological, and technological uncertainty, reshaping expectations of history, progress, and whether crises, and endings themselves, remain imaginable.