Show’s over: What happens to superfans when their favourite TV show ends?
In 2007, when David Trotter, a now 42-year-old playwright from Croydon, found out that the Neighbours production team were in London to film characters Karl and Susan getting married, the first thing he did was call in sick. His plans for the day had changed. “I basically just stalked them,” he says now, with a hint of shock at his own behaviour.
A lifelong love of Neighbours led Trotter to that day. He’d started watching the soap at six-years-old, and as a teenager, he’d spend his evenings on the landline, talking about the show with friends. He says the show helped him accept his sexuality as a gay man, and overcome severe anxiety after he developed epilepsy aged 15. “I was so anxious all the time,” he says. “The only time where I could just escape was watching Neighbours. I found it therapeutic.”
So, when it was confirmed last week that the show is ending after a staggering 37 years, Trotter was devastated. “My heart just sunk,” he says. “It's been the one constant thing in my life.” Other fans were crushed, too, with a petition to save the soap already amassing more than 65,000 signatures. But when a cherished show comes to an end, what more is there to do than sign a petition? What becomes of the hardcore fans when the show they love ups and leaves them?
Trotter is active on Twitter as part of the Neighbours fandom, where he tweets his thoughts on episodes, often to hundreds of reactions. “As dramatic as this sounds, it’s almost like a collective grief,” he says, when asked how the wider fandom is coping. “For some people, and for me, it's more than a TV show. In a way, it's part of my identity.”
Dr Charlotte Stevens, a lecturer in Media and Communications at Birmingham City University and an expert in fan studies, says that the way fans navigate the end of a favourite TV show differs. “A lot will depend on how tightly-knit the community is and the circumstances of a show ending,” she says. While fans of Neighbours may not have anticipated the soap ending, fans of other shows might have been prepared for it, and therefore made peace with it.
“I was okay with it ending just because I'd rather see them wrap everything up in an intended way,” says Matthew (known as ‘Peeebs’ online), a 27-year-old utility worker from Canada. He is talking about the end of Arthur, the longest-running animated children’s series in history, which drew to a close in February after 25 years. Matthew started watching Arthur as a toddler, and “never really stopped”. He runs a Twitter account dedicated to the show, where he shares memes and short videos — a tweet he shared in 2020, featuring a clip of the much-memed moment where Arthur clenches his fist in rage, has been viewed more than seven million times.
For Matthew, the end of a show doesn’t necessarily dictate the end of a fandom, and he has no plans to stop his content. “The fandom may dip a little bit just because the show has ended,” he says, but he stresses that Arthur content, from books to podcasts, will keep the character alive. “By no means is the character Arthur gone, and I don't think the fandom is going to suffer because of that. I think it'll just continue on,” he says. He has made friends on the back of his Arthur posts, and believes that they will stick around even though the show has ended. “Once a friend, always a friend for me,” he says with a shrug.
Fans were prolonging their obsession with their favourite pieces of popular culture long before social media existed, Stevens says. In the early 20th century, for example, fans of horror films would share their thoughts and analyses through posting letters and fanzines to one another. “In that sense the substance of the continuation is much the same as it has been for decades,” she says. “The only thing that’s changed is the speed of the conversation.”
It’s undeniable though that social media has opened new doors in allowing fandoms to continue expressing adoration for their favourite show — even if that show ended years ago. Lauren, a 21-year-old aesthetician student in Massachusetts, runs Desperate Housewives fan page @wisteriawomen on Instagram and TikTok, despite the show ending in 2012. Her content is varied. Sometimes, she’ll post polls for her followers, asking questions like ‘which housewife has the nicest house?’. Last week, she shared ‘then and now’ photos of each cast member, and the post received 4,500 likes.
“I feel like nobody loved the show the same way I did,” Lauren says now. “So I just wanted to make some sort of community where I can find people that love the show as much as I do.” More than 20,000 people now follow the account, and some of these have become “close friends” for Lauren. “There was a girl that I met through it - I live in the US and she lives in Brazil - and we got so close that we would send each other Christmas gifts,” she says.
Dr Rebecca Williams, a lecturer in Media, Communication and Culture at the University of South Wales, refers to this phenomenon as “post-object fandom”, or “fandom of any object which can no longer produce new texts”. In a 2011 article in The International Journal of Media and Culture, Williams explains how, once a show has ended, “people may continue to self-identify as fans of objects, persisting in watching DVDs, buying merchandise, or discussing the fan objects with fellow fans.” In simple terms, despite a beloved TV show ending, our love of it doesn’t have to, and the people we meet from within the fandom are still there, too.
“After a while, you stop talking about Neighbours, and you start talking about things going on in your life,” Trotter says of the people he has met through his Twitter account. At some point in the journey of fandom, the people he spoke to were no longer just fellow fans. They had become friends. “I think, ironically, the fact that it's ending is what's gonna bring us even closer together,” he says.
Shawn, a 30-year-old supply chain manager in Canada, runs an Ugly Betty fan account on Instagram, sharing funny quotes and memorable clips from the show. As a gay man, Shawn says he was “comforted” by Betty and her experience of being different. “I really do think the show gave me so much at a time when I needed it, at very formative years of me figuring out who I was,” he says. The fan account is his way of saying thank you. “In a weird way, I want to give something back.”
Despite Ugly Betty ending in 2010, Shawn is still regularly contacted by fellow fans from the UK, the US, India, China and France, who are keen to share their experiences with him of how the show helped form their identities — a term Williams refers to as “reiteration discourse”. “I didn't ever expect people to share their personal stories with me,” Shawn says. “I never thought I'd be talking to strangers across the world. I’ve definitely made some friends.”
Not all fans have the same post-show experience, though. Jessica Tansley, a 26-year-old communications specialist and former Glee fanatic, says that the show’s gradual decline and controversies (three main cast members died between 2013 and 2020) “make watching it back hard sometimes”. However, Tansley can’t shake the show’s influence over her past and her future. “I still listen to music from the show regularly as I basically grew up with it, “ she says. “And the Glee cast version of most songs will be playing at my wedding next year.” Tansley met her fiancé in a cinema toilet — they were both there to watch Glee: The Concert Movie.
The shows are over, but for many fans, the communities they’ve found remain. It’s not all happening solely online, either. This year, Trotter is planning a meet up with fellow Neighbours fans from across the UK.
For now though, he’ll keep tweeting out his thoughts on every episode, right up until the very last one. “It's going to be the end of an era,” he says. “But we’ve got each other. It’s so corny, but it kind of goes along with the song: ‘that’s when good neighbours, become good friends.’”
