In August of last year, it was announced that a Bonus Episode was upcoming to address story threads left dangling by the end of the second season. In October, that Bonus Episode was announced to be the series finale, the absolute conclusion. The finale was then titled “Tying Loose Ends.”
As a way of sending off the series, the creator and filmmaker behind it, Roger S. Omeus, Jr. decided to screen this finale at a theater in New York City near where a lot of the series was produced and near where Omeus lives. Omeus spoke to me by phone on Saturday, January 9, 2016, four days before the screening to give some insight on why he’s ending the series and what can be expected from the finale.
Courtesy: YouTube.com/user/pureh76
In full disclosure, I briefly worked with Omeus when he began the writing process for the second season. I attended the Philadelphia screening of Finding Me: Truth at Qfest in July 2011. I wrote a review in praise of it for WBOC.com and began following Omeus on social media. When he issued a call for writers for the second season on Twitter, I applied. I visited Omeus in September 2013 at his home in Jersey City and assisted him in crafting the episodes. I was assigned an episode, which I wrote and for which we had a table read in Manhattan in November of that year. The numbers changed, but my episode was going to be fourth or fifth in the second season.
Omeus went into production. After he completed what would be the first two episodes, he decided to screen the first episode in theaters in order to build interest and awareness of the series’ return. He held several screenings from Washington, DC to New York. I attended the screening in Philadelphia at the PhilaMOCA in March 2014.
I wanted to be on set when the episode I wrote was being filmed, but, due to budget and other issues, that episode was scrapped and a lot of the season was rewritten from the initial plan that Omeus showed me. The episode that Omeus screened in March premiered online the next month in April, but, due to all the issues, the next episodes wouldn’t premiere until November.
After that, the remaining episodes in the second season were released monthly until the eighth premiered in May 2015. When Omeus started filming in the fall of 2013, I don’t think he imagined it taking that long to finish. He had told me by email in mid-2014 that money and the lack thereof played a huge part in the delay, but so did other things. Those other things were the key topic of my discussion with him over the phone on Saturday.
The series was about four characters, four black people living in Jersey City, as we followed their relationships with outsiders and each other. What was unique was the four of them represented a range of sexuality. One was gay. One was bisexual. One was straight and one was somewhere in between if not unidentified.
Mind you, the series and the movies predated shows like Orange is the New Black and Empire, which popularized black, LGBT characters or the black, LGBT community. It comes in the wake of such groundbreaking shows such as Noah’s Arc (2005) and The DL Chronicles (2007), which started on cable TV but later became a web series too.
When it comes to depictions of the black, LGBT community, a web series has really been the only outlet. Some notable web series in that regard has been Drama Queenz, a musical comedy, and Freefall, more of a crime drama. Omeus’ series lies somewhere in between those two. The exception is that those series are exclusively about black, gay men. Other web series focus exclusively on black, gay women. Omeus’ series, however, really embraced diversity and characters of various types.
When I met Omeus in 2013, he did emphasize a desire to expand and diversify. In the second season, for example, there are people of all kinds of sexual orientations as well as women of all types, including black, white and Asian. Adding to his canvas did come with some losses though. Two actors who were important to the upcoming story left the production. The four principal actors remained for the second season, but two supporting actors who were going to be heavily-featured left or suddenly became unavailable.
Courtesy: FindingMeTheSeries.com
Those two actors and their characters were going to be half, if not a majority of the episode I wrote. Because those two characters were heavily centered around one of the principal actors, it arguably short-changed that principal actor, but Omeus was able to navigate around it. He had to figure out how to excuse the actors or go on without them. It meant tossing or putting aside my episode, but he made it work.
Once he was done, the financial issues and loss of actors in the second season had discouraged Omeus. He still had storylines that were unfinished, so he wrote a 90-page script that wrapped up those storylines or put somewhat of a period on what’s been happening to the four protagonists. Some time had passed, which allowed the two actors he lost for the second season to come back, but things fell apart again.
Courtesy: FindingMeTheSeries.com
On the day of the table read for the 90-page finale, Omeus learned he lost another actor, a different one from the ones he lost before. Later, as he was trying to schedule the shoot, he learned that he was losing yet another one. He got his two lost actors back but then lost two others. He didn’t want to replace the actors like in a soap opera. Just as before, he decided to write out those characters. Unfortunately, one of the characters going away this time was one of his four protagonists, so a significant chunk of the 90-page script was now going to be gone.
However, losing that chunk and that one protagonist, while it was a big deal, might not have been too damaging. In fact, from the way Omeus described this finale, losing the fourth protagonist takes it back to how the whole thing originally felt in 2009.
The 2009 movie, which was the very start of all this, was about three characters, not four. A fourth character was involved but more as an antagonist. The three characters were friends, best friends. They were the protagonists and that dynamic remained consistent. The series expanded to add one more protagonist, bumping up a side character from the second movie, but getting rid of that side character now merely takes things back to its roots. It forced Omeus to revert and center exclusively on the three friends again. In a sense, this finale is a full-circle moment, which a lot finales are.
Courtesy: FindingMeTheSeries.com
Yet, it wasn’t just actors. Omeus said he also lost producers and for the finale he had to do most if not all the producing himself. He still had his crew. Frankie Harley Jr. was the Director of Photography whom was hired for the second season and whom greatly increased the quality of the cinematography, but, given all that he lost and how difficult things became, he said it became clear that he needed to end this project. Omeus said he’s been developing other projects. Some of which can be learned on his website OmeProTV.com.
“Tying Loose Ends” is the finale to Finding Me the Series. It’s 54 minutes and will be screening at the Anthology Film Archive in lower Manhattan on Wednesday, January 13th at 7PM. For tickets, go to FindingMeTheSeries.com or EventBrite.com.
To check out the movies and the series, go to OmeProTV.com.
