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.
Game of Thrones went from a worldwide cultural phenomenon to barely a footnote pretty much overnight. That says a ton on how disappointingly the show ended.
My partner was a GOT fan. He was so utterly disappointed by the ending that still nowadays he would randomly stop doing whatever he was doing to look at me and say “I am still mad”. He is such a peaceful person this is honestly the only thing he has ever been genuinely mad about… so I always know what he is referring to.
The best way I’ve seen it put; the GOT ending was so bad, it made you feel ashamed for liking the show in the first place.
I’m a weird case. I didn’t like the show too much, but when I saw the final series was so shitty, I binged the whole thing just so I could understand the memes.
Worth it.
I sailed the high seas when watching it and i felt ripped off…
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.
I’m actually convinced that this is Martin’s ending and everything to get us there was made up by HBO. Seeing the absolute backlash has scared the shit out of him and that’s why it won’t be finished.
100% same. As if he saw all the hate, didn’t want to put forth the effort to explain the discrepancy, and shelved the last book until it all dies down. Maybe even a posthumous publishing just to avoid the haters.
People are trash. What is wrong with us? It’s like anyone that does anything cool and can’t keep up perfection forever has no other option but to be a total pariah is they slip.
He’s already admitted as much, there are minor changes to what he’d planned but the show’s ultimate ending is very similar to what he’d written in his notes. Bran becomes the king in the South for some reason, Samsa queen in the North, Aria goes off on an adventure and John Snow goes back to the night watch, having grown exactly 0% after they fucking murdered him, which consequently is where the books leave off.
So if you take that ending as canon, that John Snow dies and so Westeros falls, I gotta say it’s a brave ending.
Jon doesn’t go back to the Watch in the finale. He gets exiled to the Watch again, but immediately goes AWOL to join the free folk.
That’s right, well that at least makes more sense.
Oh, I wasn’t aware he had talked that in detail about his ideas.
And it’s weird that he goes from “No one is safe” dispatching Ned Stark early on, to some Breakfast Club ending. I always figured HBO rounded down to their lowest common denominator level and that’s why we got what we got. Oh well…
I see a lot of hate for the HIMYM finale and… I truly do not get it. I will not praise it as a cinematic masterpiece, because it isn’t. But it is an ending that they have been building up since the very beginning, and it makes perfect sense given the characters and what they went through. There are a lot of show endings that cannot claim that at all, with random last-minute additional arcs or forgetting things from earlier seasons. I haven’t seen any of that in HIMYM. So yeah, I think it’s a decent ending overall, and I truly do not understand the hate it gets.
As for GoT; yeah that went into shitshow territory from season 7 for me personally.
Let’s be honest cracks started showing in season 2 its just the source material covered it up for a while.
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.
I heard they were being cancelled after 7, and thus were on target to wrap it up by then, but then got the cash to do the last season and found themselves short on material but needing to end it properly.
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˘) ♬♪♫
🍃
Which actually had a kinda nice ending in Justice League Unlimited.
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.
I thought there was a season 4 in development
I’ve heard there was a season in the works, but that was a while back. I hope it’s still on.
Santa Clarita Diet was the last straw for our Netflix subscription.
Ahh yes, Firefly… Actually, pretty much every Joss Wedon project except Buffy. I guess SMG was able to rebuff his shit better than a lot of other actresses.
I was considering replying with something like this. We will never really know book.
The 2400?
Outer Range, I’m so pissed that show got canceled.
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.
wild
He did?!?
yeah, the show thought it had another season, but it didn’t
Oof. What in ignominious end for our old pal. :(
Even worse, he got a shitty movie after that.
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.
But reruns have always been a thing
Not like this
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 Tommy Westphall Universe. If you take the spin-off characters from St Elsewhere, and the spin-offs from the spin-offs, and character crossovers to other shows, it means that hundreds (at least 419, so far) of shows all took place in the mind of an autistic boy named Tommy Westphall.
The Seinfeld one always gets a lot of shit
I loved Curb Your Enthusiasm recognizing that.
Larry’s self awareness is incredible. The references in curb to it had me in tears
“Huh, mistrial? Why didn’t we think of that before…”, yeah, I chuckled when I saw that.
But I loved how it was incorporated into Dharma & Greg. They wanted to use it to have sex in public because everyone in the US would be busy watching the Seinfeld finale. Every so often they’d glance at a TV screen, chuckle, and say “That Kramer!”
That’s actually all I remember about it. Don’t know if I ever even saw the actual finale.
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.
it’s both ironic and cruel that throrough SG-1 and early Atlantis they made the season endings so ambigious so often just in case there would be no next season, and then they do a left-field ending like this that would have been fine enough if the next season had them flying back to pegasus episode 1, so naturally this finale ends up being the finale finale. of course!
i’d love to see an animated movie pick up from there and wrap everything up- that way some of the original cast can come back but not all of them are needed and they can continue the story without needing to explain why atlantis was on earth for 20 years
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.
a movie to return them to Pegasus, which never happened
It happened in comic books instead.
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)
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.
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.
deleted by creator
I loved it. It made me think about how life just stops. I love all the foreshadowing.
Someone posted an explanation to the last episode, and it all made sense. As the writer said, “It’s all on the screen.”
Bottom line: Tony got whacked in a diner booth with his entire family present.
My then roommate worked on the series. He said, “You don’t watch it so I can tell you. Nothing happens. Nothing. People are gonna be fucking pissed.” Lol
Lost
Battlestar Galactica.
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 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.
Which one?
The new one. As for the old one, if you count Galactica '80 as its “finale”, most people would agree it’s terrible.
You wash your mouth out this instant
Original or the new one? I actually loved the new one. Haven’t watched all of the original yet.
The new one. As for the old one, if you count Galactica '80 as its “finale”, most people would agree it’s terrible.
The only thing I hated about the new one was that the whole “they have a plan” thing was bullshit. Really stupid of them to write that into the series without even having a vague idea about that plan.
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.
Fun fact: In one episode, they talk about how a leap has to be completed in a certain amount of time in order to guarantee the ability to leap home. They say that the amount of time that each leap must be completed within falls by a certain percentage each time. I did the calculation once. Sam was still within the threshold even after all the many seasons. He should have leaped home.
And it would have been to the alt-timeline where Al and Ziggy were replaced by St.John and Alpha, the one which showed up when Sam previously leapt into Al and temporarily changed history.
All the pieces were there.
(If this feels familiar, I have posted this online before.)
I mean, the rules kept changing, because the big idea behind it all was that it was being consciously controlled by God. And a little by Sam.
But, really, the biggest point is that the finale wasn’t intended to be the finale. They thought they had another series, but then got cancelled.
One interesting thing about the Quantum Leap finale is that God is played by Bruce McGill (who shows up in a number of Bellisario’s shows, but ignore that for now). Which doesn’t seem particularly interesting until you realize that Bruce McGill also appeared in the Quantum Leap pilot, implying that God has been involved in the whole “Leap that went wrong” thing from the very beginning. I’ve never been entirely sure how I felt about that, but it was an interesting bit of casting, regardless.
The dude is intrinsically linked - in my mind at least - to time travel plots too. He’s in Timecop as the boss of the time agency, Quantum Leap as “Bartender Al/God(?)” and Voyager as Braxton, the rogue time-travelling captain who repeatedly breaks the temporal prime directive to get back at Janeway.
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.
Moonves later had to resign from CBS due to sexual assault allegations
people hated him for how he ended trek, it made sense, just taking his anger out on franchise, likely due to him being accused of SA(as a vendetta against cbs)
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!
Don’t worry! They just faked his death so he could go work for section 31.
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.”
Everyone was very shocked back in the day at the ending of Seinfeld.
i think people are seeing “seinfeld” alot differently these days. cant watch it without thinking what a shill jerry has become for AIPAC/israel, plus he dated a minor.
Some of us thought they were just taking a year break (which they explicitly said in the last episode)
Controversial as in it ruined an otherwise great show? Dexter.
Yes, that ending was so bad… I still watched the continuation, Cold Blood. It was OKish…
Something that I don’t see mentioned a lot outside of fandom, even though apparently the show was quite big after Netflix picked it up. Lucifer arguably started going downhill in S3, mostly because Fox execs wanted to turn it into a soap opera. Which of course failed, so they dropped the show altogether, only for Netflix to “save” it.
I put that in quotation marks because I kind of wish they just let the show die at the cliffhanger instead of letting the narcs in charge run it into ground. Narcs being the two lapsed Catholic showrunners. The show was still salvageable by the end of S5, but S6 retroactively destroyed everything, making it unwatchable for half of the fandom, while the other half was vaping copium.
I’m not going to write the synopsis, because fuck that burning cesspit, but these are some of the issues with it:
- abuse apologia and perpetuation of generational trauma “for the greater good” in a universe with an omni-potent god
- uncontested sentiment that bio children are worth more than adopted/step-children
- sex shaming
- rampant misogyny
- glorification of suffering
- hamfisted tragic ending clumsily masked with a “bittersweet” wrapping
- plus many more very Christian sentiments that nobody asked for (except for the part of the fandom that can’t separate their religion from a TV show).
I have never watched GoT, so I’m not a good judge on this, but not a negligible part of the fandom claimed the Lucifer season/finale was worse. So there’s that.
Hard agree, I remenver thinking netflix had fixed the show making it more of a comic book show, then it went downhill It was screwed by it’s early popularity, they write to the lcd, the loud ppl on social media, like felicity becoming the main character of arrow
i thought it was wierd, since the shoe-horned rory intoa show, which is a nephilim of an archangel and a human, which is much more powerful than the angel parent. i think they took some elements from supernatural show because there are some eerily similar scenes, or things that are uncanny between some of the episodes. (both shows had a nephilim, of you guess it lucifer and a human and it was the endgame of the series)
Your mistake is assuming these showrunners had any clue what they were doing and weren’t malicious. As someone who knows way too much about the show, I can tell you that those two showrunners were the death of the show.
If you take a step back, you can see that the highly acclaimed S4 is just a rehash of S3. We have a love triangle—again—that serves to artificially keep the lead couple apart and cause forced drama. S5a is somewhat decent, has its moments, but then S5b crashes hard. Why they had to introduce actual god as a character is anyone’s guess. And then try to absolve him of his terrible behavior, because “he just meant well when he was incflicting trauma on his children. Uwu, look how cute he is”. Not to mention all the episodes they waste on side characters while giving their lead female character nothing.
Come S5b finale and things might be actually going well? Lol, just kidding. Lucifer suddenly isn’t god, he’s just this immature clown who has forgotten all about his monologue about unnecessary human suffering. S6 was just constantly shitting on his character. Like, you can almost physically touch the hatred showrunners felt for him.
Plus, the whole Rory plot? Straight up plot of Flash, except in Flash the daughter didn’t turn into a selfish psycho bitch who chased away her dad to Hell forever (and we could definitely go into the tragedy Rory’s character truly is and how much manipulation and abuse has to go into shaping her to grow up so angry that she travels back in time).
With that said, if we go a little bit back to S4, you can see the big shift in Lucifer as a character. Remember how he blames his dad for manipulating him and making his life miserable in S1-3? S4-S6 Lucifer didn’t put the blame on God one single time. In S4 he blames himself (“There’s something rotten inside of me”), even though he has every right to believe Dad is manipulating him by sending Eve back to the living (which lol, was never explained, just like most of the lore… don’t
overthink!). He also has every right to believe his omnipotent Dad doomed his daughter to a closed time loop, since it’s a paradox.And yet, Lucifer keeps blaming himself, and in the end accepts that going back to Hell is “all part of Dad’s plan, cheeky bastard”. So we go from Lucifer fighting tooth and nail to never go back to Hell (his prison), one of his siblings is literally eradicated from existence in the war for throne in S5, just for him decide he doesn’t really want to be god and instead go back to Hell to “help souls” by… giving them therapy? I.e. doing a sisyphus task because the system remains broken. The stupidity of that alone is mind-boggling (this is another Chloe erasure, btw).
In the end, instead of S6 celebrating how far Lucifer has come despite his awful upbringing and letting Chloe and he enjoy themselves, the showrunners twist these characters into a pretzel to create even more tragedy and drama. S6 makes way more sense when you know that the showrunners worked backwards, i.e. they had a fixed ending for S6 and then had to fit the characters into this inorganic narrative.
As you can see, I could write a 100 page essay on what went wrong with the show and how it’s the showrunners’ fault. Sorry for offloading all this, but there hasn’t been a single show that has made me this salty to date, lol.
