‘George & Tammy’ creator Abe Sylvia on ending on their « Lost Highway » duet, Georgette Jones’ cameo, and why the finale was poetic, not tragic.
This story contains spoilers for “Justified & Ancient,” the series finale of Showtime’s “George & Tammy.”
In the end, George Jones and Tammy Wynette rode off into the sunset — at least on television.
Showtime’s record-breaking limited series “George & Tammy” came to a close Sunday night with the country music legends singing along to Hank Williams’ classic “Lost Highway” during a quieter moment on one of their final tours together.
Those familiar with the duo’s histories, together and apart, know they were divorced by the time they embarked on their reunion tours of the 1980s and ‘90s. Some may have expected the series, fronted by Jessica Chastain and Michael Shannon, to end with Tammy’s 1998 death, a tragic final note in a life defined by groundbreaking music and plagued by health issues and drug use.
Instead, it fades to black on one of their tour buses, with a performance from long before either Wynette or Jones reached their finish line.
“There are more traditional biopic ways we could have gone, but we leave the audiences with their voices,” series writer and creator Abe Sylvia tells Variety. “We are not going to a funeral or getting into the very sad details of Tammy’s death. We wanted to leave her, in particular, in a place of tension and beauty, not in tragic resolve.”
The finale begins with Tammy’s infamous kidnapping, which she is revealed (as many have suspected) to have orchestrated in order to hide bruises left by her abusive husband, George Richey (Steve Zahn). As she descends into a painkiller addiction, a now-sober George Jones and her family plead with her to seek treatment. On their “Together Again” tour, the pair are seen sneaking away for a late-night dalliance, evidence that their romance never died. But when he offers to whisk her away from her troubles, as he did at the start of their story, she rebuffs him.
“You’re too late,” a sunken-eyed Tammy says, as audiences get a brief glimpse of their younger selves faced with the same choice to run away in the premiere.
Sylvia spoke to Variety about crafting the closing notes of “George & Tammy,” the meaning behind their emotional final performance and why the series had to be driven by their songbooks.
You worked on “The Eyes of Tammy Faye” with Jessica Chastain, and were shooting this series in North Carolina when she won the Oscar for the role. You two are officially in the business of bringing Tammys to the screen. How long have you been working to make “George & Tammy?”
We met because of “George & Tammy,” so it actually predated “The Eyes of Tammy Faye.” My producers and I approached her about playing Tammy Wynette even before there was a script in 2011. I had just seen [Terrence Malick’s] “The Tree of Life” and I thought she would be a wonderful Tammy, and she stayed attached through a lot of ups and downs and different iterations of the project. I wrote the original screenplay on spec and she loved it, and maybe three or four years later, she reached out and asked if I wanted to write “The Eyes of Tammy Faye.” Here we are 11 years later, and both projects are in the can.
Now that the show has concluded, is there anything noticeably different from the vision you first pitched her to what audiences saw on screen?
Well, it’s six hours now, whereas the original concept was supposed to be a movie.
