The episode begins with John and Carolyn in a couples therapy session. We watch them fall in love with each other again—they even return to Panna II, the restaurant where they had their first date. Can you talk about that decision, showing them mending their relationship?
Simpson: Everyone knew that he’d moved out. We knew that it was rocky, and they were having good times and bad times. We knew that she had committed to going to this wedding, and they were in couples counseling. In terms of the unknowable question of “what would happen if they hadn’t gone down on the plane,” I think our tendency was to lean toward hope and toward positivity.
We wanted to go back to that Indian restaurant. We wanted to go back, after two really intense episodes, to the romance between the two of them. Lean in to the idea that the show’s about how relationships are tough. You have a great romance that has to live in the reality of a marriage. What we wanted to lean toward was a hopeful ending amidst all the tragedy.
How did it feel shooting the finale?
Simpson: It was very emotional for the actors. We had this really intimate experience between Paul [Anthony Kelly] and Sarah [Pidgeon]. Then we landed on bringing all our cast back together again. We mostly shot in chronological order, and we were saying goodbye to people as we went along. This cast had really gotten close, especially around the wedding, when they were spending a ton of time together.
The Indian restaurant, that was actually one of our toughest days. I think that both Paul and Sarah were having a lot of trouble saying goodbye to the characters. And it was hot outside, even on a day when it was usually cold in New York. There was a lot of stumbling with the lines. They were trying to figure out how to say goodbye to these characters they’d lived with for a long time.
The second half of the finale is focused on the family’s reaction to John and Carolyn’s deaths, specifically that of Caroline Kennedy (Grace Gummer) and Ann Marie Messina (Constance Zimmer). What was it like turning the story to those characters?
Jacobson: As you make a show, what you learn along the way is how great those performances were from our supporting cast. [We wanted to] give them some closure as avatars for the audience—giving the audience some time to process the loss as well, through actors who could just really devastate you without it ever feeling maudlin.
Simpson: One of the most emotional days was the moment when Caroline breaks down in the kitchen. Grace had given us this restrained performance. She’s playing a woman who doesn’t show a lot of emotions, who doesn’t wear a heart on her sleeve, who’s much more restrained than her brother. We built up to this moment where she’s in the kitchen, and she doesn’t want Ed [Ben Shenkman] to come in because she knows that if he comes in, it means that her brother is dead, and she can’t take any more loss. Grace had been circling and circling all morning, being quiet in a room by herself, and then she just completely unloaded and broke down. You saw the full breadth of what she’d been doing all summer—playing this restraint and playing this reserve—all collapsing and flowing out onto Ed. The entire cast cried as we were doing that.
