I understand as well as anyone that grief can be hard, and it can and probably should be an essential part of the fabric of a show like 'The Kominsky Method.' when its two stars are of the, well, not insignificant ages that Alan Arkin and Michael Douglas are.
But come on!...
Did that really have to mean one of them being killed off between the end of the penultimate Season and the beginning of the final Season - and, to add insult to injury, having him die off-screen?!
To me; take one of the two lead characters, whose on-screen chemistry is arguably the main reason for watching the Show, out of it, and there's very little point in continuing to watch the Show. In fact I did keep watching it to the end because I'm a big fan of Paul Reiser, but for my money his character just didn't fill the gap created by Arkin's absence.
If the Series had wrapped with the death of one of the two leads at the end of Season 2 I'd have been fine with that. Instead; without Alan Arkin Season 3 seemeed to me like rather a waste of time - and yes, it did genuinely leave me grieving a certain loss. And perhaps that was the point and if it was then I have to concede that in a way it was a masterstroke. But REAL grief is not a feeling that I want to be experiencing at the end of any TV Series. There's enough real grief in real life!
I want the TV shows and movies that I watch to ultimately leave me with at least some kind of sense of satisfaction.
Death can also leave a grieving person feeling angry and cheated and although I certainly watched 'The Kominsky Method.' because it had the spectre of death hanging over it, I certainly didn't want the end of it to leave me feeling genuinely angry and cheated. And boy did I feel angry and cheated when I started watching Season 3 and realized that Alan Arkin wasn't going to be in it!!
Again there's enough feeling angry and cheated by death in real-life. I don't need it from my TV entertainment too.
It also seems rather obvious to me that Season 3 of 'The Kominsky Method.' absolutely needed to be shorter because without Alan Arkin it didn't have enough ingredients to sustain it for longer. So why didn't the screenwriters consider the possibility that a third Season of the Show was one Season too many?
And times being what they are with so many shows going straight to streaming and not getting a physical release; I'm left with only Season 1 of 'The Kominsky Method.' on the superior blu ray, and Season 2 on Netflix - to which I of course have to subscribe if I want to watch Season 2!
I do wish studios would release all the Seasons of a TV Show on blu ray once they've started, instead of leaving us Physical Media collectors with incomplete collections