One that made me feel like I had wasted time watching the show was How I Met Your Mother. It was a fun show and really picked up in quality in seasons three - five. They could have ended the show in season 7, really, if they had planned for it. Season 8 was kind of a bore, and season 9 was bad, as all of the season took place over a weekend. And when we got the finale of the show… I was so tired of holding on to what might come that it really hit me negatively how they ended it.
That being said, Game of Thrones ended so poorly that I was baffled as to how haphazard and dull the writing and storytelling was that I, just like a lot of others, held on to hope that the last few episodes might bring things all around. (Morgan Freeman as Narrator - It didn’t.) While cracks were showing since late season 6, the finale of that show was horrible. The payoffs didn’t come, and everything just felt so rushed, watered down, and a tremendous feeling that content was missing from the season, if they were to help make sense of the finale.
Totally agree on both.
I read the GOT books, and I’m convinced that HBO is the reason why Martin messed this all up. There was a whole other Targeryen, Aegon VI, that was running around being some charismatic cool dude and also making a claim to the Iron Throne. HBO just cut him out, and I’m convinced that what was supposed to happen was everything was him vs. Danerys at the end, and he took the iron throne, and would have been sitting on it when the dragon fried it, which would have killed him and the throne and left Danerys as the obvious true ruler because she has that fire magic.
But we’ll never know because Martin cashed his checks and peaced out.
Genuinely controversial or just bad?
The Lost finale is probably both
Unrelated, just realized how the advent of streaming has changed the way we talk about past TV series.
Before streaming we would say the Lost finale was
past tense, because it had finished airing
Nowadays, no show really finishes airing so it’s discussed in a present tense
Sorry, I’m old
Never apologize for being old
Get mad at them for having the audacity to be so young
I’m one of the weirdos who liked the finale!
What chaotic god has corrupted you for finding pleasure in something that tormented me? ;)
No idea, it just kinda spoke to me on some level. I’d still have loved tying all the loose ends, but the ending itself is fine by me.
It’s the one where the show was cancelled by the idiot studio and we never had any closure to the show so many of us really loved.
“You can’t take the sky from me…”
( ˘ ɜ˘) ♬♪♫
Don’t speak that way of The Orville
Oh no, they cancelled it? I was still hoping for a season 😢
theres also the issue that the actors dint like the in between season were so long because of it too. i believe palacki said in a statement how they cant afford(financially afford to live close to the studio) to be in a show that rarely has any seasons, she was on a podcast explaining as much on michael rosenbaums channel.
ALF got captured by the FBI
Not exactly a bad ending to the show but Dinosaurs killed off EVERYONE in the show’s finale. It was more than a little depressing.
I don’t remember that lol
Yeah, the dad and the corporation that he worked for wrecked the climate and they froze to death. You didn’t see it, but it was heavily implied if not flat out said.
The Seinfeld one always gets a lot of shit
I loved Curb Your Enthusiasm recognizing that.
“Huh, mistrial? Why didn’t we think of that before…”, yeah, I chuckled when I saw that.
Larry’s self awareness is incredible. The references in curb to it had me in tears
The Sopranos final episode immediately springs to mind
Sopranos and Game of Thrones are the ones I recall having the most uproar. To this day, new videos on YouTube about how awful they were.
It’s hard to know if GoT counts as “controversial” because it seems like everyone unanimously hated it.
This one stands out to me as it was a “love it or hate it” ending, not just terrible or a giant let down.
I like it since I learned that it ends so abruptly because the last POV is Tony’s as he dies.
That said, it whooshed nearly everyone who watched it and therefore pissed people off.
I watched it long after the fact, so I already knew about the controversy. I knew that it meant his death.
His death was also a great way to end the series, and the story arc they were in.
I even recognize the artistic merit of showing his death from his own POV.
And yet, somehow it all came together in a way that was very unfulfilling. Maybe it’s just that it’s not the way we’ve ever seen, but it felt very off.
Yeah, call it cheesy or too on-the-nose, but I think I would have preferred just having an explicit glimpse of someone about to shoot Tony. Can still do the cut to black, but there’s a split second of someone drawing a gun before it happens.
The viewers are not Tony Soprano, so it just seems weird to limit it to his perspective and obscure events to only what he would be aware of in that moment. It’s just that you have an entire series where viewers can see all of the moving parts that most characters are oblivious to, except for the very last one apparently.
These Are The Voyages is definitely unpopular
I can’t get over how Scott Bakula starred in two shows involving time travel and both had infamously bad finales.
les moonves pretty much ruined the franchise, he did the last episode that way because he wanted a “fuck you statement” to the viewers, i believe frakes did not like the episode as well.
I was advised to skip it and I still have not seen it. Don’t plan to change it. I like to pretend nothing bad ever happened to Tripp!
Stargate: Atlantis
I hated how a show about exploring and pioneering ended with them turning tail and running back home.
Also, I know it is an American show, but sometimes I would just love to see the spacecraft landing someplace other than by a national landmark in the US.
What if they had landed in say Norway, or the Gulf of Finland? The diplomacy would have been very interesting.
Afaik they were supposed to do a movie still but that sadly never happened.
I agree with you, just leaving that galaxy behind was a very disappointing ending.
they definitely were planning something in season 6, in a interview i believe they were going to have a different alien enemy(the deadalus variation enemies to be the part of the next season)
It was very sudden and jarring, I believe they only learned they’d been canceled late into the season but had plans for a movie to return them to Pegasus, which never happened.
Can’t talk about controversial TV endings without mentioning St. Elsewhere. For a long time this show had the most infamous. The big reveal that the entire run of the show took place in the mind of an autistic boy with a snow globe was not a hit with fans and remains an object lesson in how to rug-pull your fan base.
But it did lead to the fanon that, because of crossover episodes, basically all media takes place in that kid’s mind.
Including reality - “Cops” is in the crossover chain even if you don’t count celebrity appearances as themselves.
The Prisoner probably. Nothing is resolved. #6 escapes… or does he? The Individual was #1 the whole time.
Okay, but it turning out that the iconic “Who is Number 1?!” “You are Number 6” exchange from the intro was Number 2 literally telling him the answer was freaking brilliant.
“You are, Number 6.”
Battlestar Galactica.
You wash your mouth out this instant
the reigiminaged series was all wierd from start to finish, apparently it was because of the showrunners christian views, that he wanted a bsg, to have christian like ending.
I found that show really interesting to watch. I think a lot of the series holds up, in terms of acting and storytelling, to the point where I’ll rewatch the series despite knowing the awful ending—but the ending was fucking awful.
The “Attack On Titan” finale was a bunch of nonsense.
Everything just whipped back and forth at the whims of being artsy. None of it aligned with what the show had been known for in writing or foreshadowing. Characters constantly acting unreasonable for the sake of conflict. Shit just stopped making sense and everything felt like it was being made up on the spot.
All of the Ymir lore felt forced. Why tf was it a worm?
it took to long to finish the series, by then people moved on.
Lost
The Bob Newhart Show famously ended the series by saying the whole show was nothing but a dream.
It’s Game of Thrones, by far.
And they can’t use the excuse that they ran out of material and had to write their own ending. Tokyo Ghoul Root A did it to moderate effect, and Fullmetal Alchemist (the first one from 2003) did it extremely well. They just couldn’t write worth a damn so they said Fuck It and flipped the table. They’d already made their money from it. They had good options and they walked right past them. I guess they just wanted it to be a surprise?
LOST gets an honourable mention for being so weird. But I feel like they painted themselves into a corner, though that’s no excuse. Again looking to anime as the standard bearer for storytelling others should be measured by, Assassination Classroom painted itself into a tighter corner. (Long story short, alien blows up the moon and threatens to blow up Earth if humans can’t kill him in a year… but only some students are really allowed to try and he can only be harmed by rubber bullets and knives that wouldn’t harm a real person — traditional weapons, whatever you can think of, have no effect. Oh, and he can also move at, like, the speed of light, squared, or something dumb like that. And holy crap what a stupid ending, but… they made it work. It’s still stupid, but it worked better than the LOST ending, and the LOST writers had a lot more space to work in.)
