Euthanasia pops up in many films and TV series, but in
The End the idea is the very core of the10-part series.
The series opens with recently widowed Edie (Dame Harriet Walter,
The Crown, Killing Eve) trying to kill herself, when she’s interrupted by a fire starting in her living room. Determined, she hurls herself out of a window, but is carted off in an ambulance. This prompts her daughter Kate (Frances O’Connor), who escaped her suffocating British upbringing and moved to the Gold Coast years earlier, to ship Edie to Australia and re-house her in a gaudy, upmarket retirement village, replete with seniors in white slacks playing cards and taking aqua-fit classes; everything the dour Edie hates.