Lost
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.)
With Lost they repeatedly said that nobody, not a single person, had guessed what the ending was, not realizing that this was one of the first shows to go massive for fan theories on the Internet so everything even remotely plausable had been guessed.
So yeah, they painted themselves into that corner fair and square as it was clear they had no fucking clue what the ending was when they started that show.
If it was me, I would have admitted someone guessed it and just picked whichever fan theory seemed the most sensible to me.
And it was the most obvious ending that everyone had guessed sitting int their couch with friends or family that didn’t even need internet theories. They made it sound like they had such a clever ending and it wasn’t even close.
I think it’s incredibly likely they had no idea how to end it until they had to do a last season and they went with the most obvious ending that was deeply unsatisfying.
sgu, sga, sg1 was past its prime and needed a ending as the people working on the show felt it.
both sgu and sga were cliffhanger endings that unfortunate problems like mgm losing money and bankrupting to lower vierership and cancellation. according to the showrunners, and writers they were going to be more arcs being revealed if they continued the next season for both shows.
Oh, yeah defo, that ending is terrible. Great series, but I wasn’t given it’s chance to die.
The Sopranos final episode immediately springs to mind
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.
Everyone was very shocked back in the day at the ending of Seinfeld.
Some of us thought they were just taking a year break (which they explicitly said in the last episode)
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.
imma go with sopranos.
BEST finale ever is Six Feet Under.
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.
I was considering replying with something like this. We will never really know book.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Controversial as in it ruined an otherwise great show? Dexter.
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
I think that even the best writer in the world cannot find a satisfying reveal of 10 years worth of secrets build-up.
I think the final was the perfect balance between tying all the loose ends and not fully explaining what the island is. (Or rather, they did in some way, they just left some bits to the imagination).
And to everyone thinking that the finale makes it so the entire previous seasons did not happen, sorry but you just didn’t get it.
The only thing to “get” is that the show was written solely to drive engagement: constant cliffhangers at the cost of a coherent or consistent plot.
I agree on the cliffhangers, sometimes unnecessary ones, but I find its plot to be one of the most consistent I watched (especially over 200+ episodes in 10 years), both compared to its contemporary shows and to modern ones.
Sure, many aspects are conveniently hidden behind unrevealed misteries and mistic rules, but it was done in a way that is still enjoyable and that didn’t feel overly forced.
