Well, That Was Underwhelming!
It’s not easy being a series finale. The ending should make sense and not leave fans hanging, at least not too much. Let’s see why and how some famous TV shows ended their relationship with faithful viewers in such a heartbreaking fashion. And in case you were wondering, there will definitely be spoilers coming up!
Battlestar Galactica
Making about as much sense as a short-circuiting Cylon, the finale to this often-praised sci-fi reboot kicked narrative logic to the curb. Perplexing revelations culminate in the New York City of the characters’ far, far future—leaving fans far, far behind.
British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB), Battlestar Galactica (2004–2009)
Chuck
Fans may prefer to forget how this series ended, with Sarah Walker losing all her memories. Maybe someone should’ve chucked this script overboard and tried again.
Fake Empire, Chuck (2007–2012)
Dexter
This Showtime drama about a tormented repeat offender in the slaying department seemed to offend with this finale, in which Dexter fakes his own demise and adopts a new life as a lumberjack. The credibility of this finale crashed faster than you can shout “Timber!”—though, a limited revival may have patched some of the wounds.
Showtime Networks, Dexter (2006–2013)
Dinosaurs
Jim Henson puppets! Cute dinosaurs! Jokes and good times in distant prehistory! Then the Ice Age shows up and obliterates everyone. Not an ending that got the warmest of receptions.
Jim Henson Productions, Dinosaurs (1991–1994)
Entourage
Viewers like happy endings, but in a show that revolves around aggressive self-indulgence and limited self-awareness, replacing Hollywood decadence with lives filled with family duty and honor just didn’t quite seem fair.
Fear The Walking Dead
Sometimes a finale just confirms the zombie-like decline of the whole series. This spinoff of The Walking Dead offered dubious genealogies and the glossed-over offing of a character’s father as it laid this unloved sideshow to an overdue and unmourned rest.
American Movie Classics (AMC), Fear the Walking Dead TV Series (2015–2023)
Game Of Thrones
The show’s creators faced the challenge of wrapping up the series before George RR Martin had caught up! The final season felt sloppy, and the final episode rushed, as fans puzzled over plot twists–including a surprising and unlikely ascendant to the Iron Throne.
HBO, Game of Thrones (2011-2019)
Gilmore Girls
A Netflix revival of this charming mother-daughter series turned the original series’ ambiguous ending into a bland, uninspiring tale that ends with a now-pregnant Rory repeating all of her mother Lorelei’s mistakes.
Dorothy Parker Drank Here Productions, Gilmore Girls (2000–2007)
Girls
The finale capped Hannah’s transformation from a privileged city girl with many nuanced challenges to a tediously responsible mother in upstate New York. The fate of series regulars is barely mentioned as the series closes with more of a turgid evolution than satisfying resolution.
Apatow Productions, Girls (2012–2017)
Gossip Girl
Even the show’s creators admit they didn’t originally intend Dan to be the show’s pivotal secret blogger, which was implausibly revealed in the finale despite the character’s frequent shock when reading the very posts he supposedly wrote. Meanwhile, it’s revealed Nate is apparently destined for a high-flying political career. Viewers of this finale would likely have voted for different results on both counts.
17th Street Productions, Gossip Girl (2007–2012)
House
Heartstrings were brutally pulled when viewers sat through House’s funeral, only to learn the doctor had faked his own demise, leaving the show open to a bitter diagnosis of misdirection and implausibility.
Heel & Toe Films, House (2004–2012)
House Of Cards
After Kevin Spacey’s real-life impeachment, this Netflix series shuffled along without him to an implausible finale with an Oval Office stabbing. For loyal fans of this once-mesmerizing show, this really did cut deep.
Media Rights Capital (MRC), House of Cards (2013–2018)
How I Met Your Mother
Divorce and eternal sleep cast a gloomy pall over the finale, reversing a full season’s worth of marriage between Robin and Barney, and a full series’ worth of hoping the question of “how I met your mother” had a much cheerier answer.
20th Century Fox Television, How I Met Your Mother (2005–2014)
Killing Eve
What the scriptwriting gods can give, the scriptwriting gods can take. After the two antagonistic leads finally turn romantic during a climactic road trip, one gets permanently removed from the board–and not the one you’d think from the title of this spy series. Unimpressed fans, robbed of a happy ending, found it all very nefarious.
Sid Gentle Films, Killing Eve (2018–2022)
La Brea
Challenged to neatly tie up a mere five previous episodes, the writers chose to skip, hop, and run through important plot points in a finale that was just too rushed to properly digest.
Matchbox Pictures, La Brea (2021–2024)
Little House On The Prairie
The series’ original actors had mostly moved on by the time season 9 wrapped up, so this story of pioneer spirit ended with less of a bang and more of a whimper. But wait! Michael Landon and Karen Grassle show up in a TV movie—that sadly destroys beloved Walnut Grove and fans’ hopes for a satisfying ending.
Ed Friendly Productions, Little House on the Prairie (1974–1983)
Lois & Clark
It’s hard to make a good series finale when you don’t know it was going to be the series finale. So it’s perhaps forgivable that viewers were left up in the air when Clark finds a baby wrapped in a Superman blanket, with a note saying it’s his and Lois’s. So many questions. So few answers.
December 3rd Productions, Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman (1993–1997)
Lost
With so many complicated plotlines, it was perhaps inevitable that any finale would lose the plot of some of this show’s complicated threads. But putting the characters into some sort of purgatory definitely left many of the series’ fans in their own special kind of hell.
Mad Men
The finale nicely places some of the show’s leading characters in reasonably happy places, but Don Draper concludes his long search for the meaning of life with a lonely, hollow realization that in the end, positive emotions are just another ad campaign.
Lionsgate, Mad Men, (2007–2015)
Northern Exposure
After creators Joshua Brown and John Falsey left the show, the story of a young urban doctor in small town Alaska started to display some worrying symptoms. Halfway through the final season, Rob Morrow, playing the doctor, walked out during a contract dispute, and the “Tranquility Base” finale left viewers feeling anything but tranquil, as the fate of John Corbett’s disc jockey and other characters struck a wrong note.
Cine-Nevada Productions, Northern Exposure (1990–1995)
The 100
Here’s another time viewers hoping for an uplifting ending to a favorite series of theirs were severely disappointed, as prospects for Earth’s survivors seemed even more bleak than usual. Fans hoping for sunnier days likely graded the finale as something close to zero out of 100.
Alloy Entertainment, The 100 (2014–2020)
Ozark
Viewers might’ve felt a bit conned when the talkative heart of the series, Ruth Langmore, was silenced for good by a character introduced only in the final season. Famous for her acerbic retorts, Ruth wasn’t even allowed a sweary final speech in the finale.
Zero Gravity Management, Ozark (2017–2022)
Pretty Little Liars
There’s nothing like throwing in an unknown evil twin to make viewers think a season finale, in truth, amounted to a pretty rotten time!
ABC Family, Pretty Little Liars (2010–2017)
Quantum Leap
The natural ending for this body-hopping series would be for Sam to finally do his quantum leap back to where he started. But the show’s producers hoped for more time. When the series was instead canceled, any remaining hope was dashed by a title card that confirmed Sam will never ever make it home, so there was no happy reunion with his off-screen wife.
Belisarius Productions, Quantum Leap (1989–1993)
Roseanne
So, the Conners win the lottery in the bumpy final season, and then in the finale, Roseanne reveals she made it all up for her autobiography! Oh, and Dan shuffles off the mortal coil, but don’t worry, he gets resurrected in a revival—before a real-life Twitter scandal led to the curtains closing for the title character.
Wind Dancer Productions, Roseanne (1988–2018)
Scrubs
Season 8 finished with an emotionally and narratively satisfying ending to this consistently enjoyable series. Unfortunately, after a change of networks, there was a season 9, centering on medical students and with few of the regulars. Execs soon pulled the plug on this pointless appendix to a once-great show.
Seinfeld
Universally reviled, the courtroom drama that ended this enormously popular show about nothing provided a parade of witnesses that prove that sometimes, despite the precedent of so many amusing episodes, nothing really can be boring.
West-Shapiro. Seinfeld (1989–1998)
7th Heaven
The final half of the season featured both an RV named 7th Heaven and a character fans thought had already been sent to some heaven or other in the first half of the season! This was a road trip no viewer wanted to take, it seemed.
Spelling Television, 7th Heaven (1996–2007)
Shameless
The writers shamelessly left viewers hanging, and even if pandemic restrictions made filming difficult, they could have had the characters who did show up at least gossip about the characters who didn’t.
Cristiano Del Riccio, CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons
The Sopranos
Tony Soprano. In a diner. Cut to black. Many fans felt this ending didn’t even warrant the term ambiguous. It was just a plainly infuriating cop-out. Instead of twisting its characters with happy or sad endings, this show decided to do neither, making it one of the most notorious series finales in all of TV history.
St Elsewhere
Don’t make it all a dream sequence. Don’t make it all a dream sequence. They made it all a dream sequence. Kind of. Seasons of scintillating storylines turned out to be the creative fantasies of an autistic boy gazing into a snow globe. For viewers, this revelation truly felt unreal.
Axelle/Bauer-Griffin, Getty Images
True Blood
Fans felt bitten, not smitten, after the suspense over Sookie’s romantic intentions ends up with her apparently choosing neither vampire Bill nor vampire Eric, but a mere mortal never seen before. There was no love lost between fans and this finale!
Your Face Goes Here Entertainment, True Blood (2008–2014)
Two And A Half Men
Series creator Chuck Lorre was still one angry man when he came up with this finale—not so gently entitled “Of Course He’s Dead, Parts 1 And 2” in not-so-fond memory of mercurial ex-lead Charlie Sheen. Lorre’s vengeful screed just wasn’t a lot of fun for anyone concerned, including the show’s audience.
The X-Files
Becoming increasingly mired in Mulder and Scully’s romantic potential and the conspiratorial koans of a smoke-clad mystery man, the series offered a finale with romantic hope, but little in the way of unraveling aliens, conspiracies, or the metaphysics of other worlds. Neither the finale or two later mini-series gave much hope that the truth really was out there.
Weeds
Flashing forward to revelations of how everyone lives happily ever after, this show may have just made everyone a little too happy by the end. Everyone except for the fans, that is.
Will & Grace
In the finale of the original series, our title characters drift apart, reuniting only when their children end up in college. Fortunately, the show’s resurrection helped rewrite that depressing commentary on the fate of overly witty friendships.
KoMut Entertainment, Will & Grace (1998–2020)
Younger
Here’s another show that has an annoying finale capping off an annoying final season, in which Liza and Charles start to reconnect, only to break up in the series ender. Plus, Liza’s flirtation with a different character bent, and perhaps broke, the hearts of fans even further.
The Blacklist
James Spader’s mysterious persona remains just as mysterious after this particularly odd finale, even by the standards of this often peculiar thriller. Hapless fans of the eccentric Raymond Reddington saw red and shouted “Bull!” in one particularly disappointing twist. Rather than meeting his end in a hail of bullets, or something similarly fitting, Reddington gets gored by a bull in a field in a Spain.
Davis Entertainment, The Blacklist (2013–2023)
The End
So whether it’s premature cancellation, creator ego, or a show’s decline that started well before the finale, there are plenty of reasons why a series ending can be abrupt, implausible, overly depressing, or even overly joyful. But one thing seems certain: endless arguments over TV finales will never see a finale of their own!
