The Worst TV Show Finales

I almost threw my phone across the room when I saw Scrubs on this list, but then I saw that they used season 9 as their basis for the "ending," which, of course, is preposterous.

I was committed on seeing the whole scrubs series but when season 8 ended it had such a great closure I just couldn't make myself to keep watching.
- Season 8 is the last season, you watched all of scrubs and you had the beautiful finale (as even the data shows, it’s amazing and my eyes always wet when I rewatch it).
  There is no season 9. There is a spinoff show, called “scrubs med”, which takes place in a med school and has some of the scrubs characters as teachers but they are there just as supporting characters. Somebody in charge of the show decided that for scrubs med to be successful it had to be branded as scrubs “proper”, so the show was released as scrubs, season 9.
  Obviously it tanked. Too bad, because I think it was a nice show after all.
- there is no season 9 in ba sing se
Any idea what the huge season 6 single episode dip was? The musical?
- Looks like it's "My Night to Remember", which is a clip show. Which tend to have poor ratings as a concept.
- I actually thought the musical episode was quite well done as far as musical episodes go.
They absolutely should have just done it as a spin off series instead of tacking it on the end of the actual series.

Wait, no lost? Ah kids these days.

Speaking of kids no Quantum Leap either. It's ending was also terrible.
- At least "Poochie died on the way back to his home planet" was spelled correctly.
- To be fair they didn't expect it to be the end. They had been cancelled and only had time to change the final message to say he never came home.
When I saw what the list was about, Lost was the first series that came to mind.
Probably excluded if it missed the minimum 7.0 average rating for the series, which it would have if we take the numbers on Lostpedia. I have no idea if those are accurate though, since it shows the final episode having better rating than all other episodes in the final season.
People were too confused by the ending to rate it correctly.
- It was a little trippy
Probably because the ending is good. Re-watch the show, but focus on the characters other than the mysteries.
Exactly what I came to say!

What happened to myth busters?

They changed the format in the last season and did a bunch of smaller myths and the build-team was less involved. They basically knew they weren't going to do any more, so none of the cast were invested.
- If you're referring to Kari, Grant, and Tori they got rid of them completely as I recall.
The 15th season didn't include any of the original cast. Not even Adam and Jamie.
I think the other reply to you may be talking about previous seasons, after the build team left, but that's not the season that's being marked as last in the image. I'm a bit iffy on how the seasons are numbered, but I believe the build team was gone for seasons 13 and 14 with just Adam and Jamie hosting, then season 15, the final one, was the one with two completely new hosts.
and the very last episode was just an interview reviewing the best moments, not a bad episode per se, but not worth it of a series finale

This is nice, but I'd like more to see the opposite, where the series went out on a perfect note. Like Breaking Bad or MASH (imho).

It was pure fan service but both Parks and Recreation as well as Schitt's Creek can go on that list.
Or a show that got better just before it was canceled. Entreprise is a good example of a show that was just finding its voice just before the end. Even on this graph, the last season has some lows, including the finale of course, but it's more consistent than the first seasons.
The most recent Futurama series ending was 10/10.
They brought it back again but whatever that show is goated
- Futurama has nailed two out of its four finales. "The Devil's Hands Are Idle Playthings" seemed impossible to beat, but holy shit, "Meanwhile" pulled it off.
  "What do you say? Wanna go around again?"
House M.D.
The Black Adder
Fawlty Towers
- The thing about House is that it had been bad for 3 seasons (and that's being generous) before the finale. Does it really count as a bad finale if the series was already falling apart?
- Star Trek TNG

And Dexter completely fucked it TWICE!

More on the way! Apparently they've renewed two more shows. And supposedly even Michael Hall is in one of them!
- What?? They better not make his douchy kid the star... I swear to God
  They just need to make the reboot a dream sequence and restart.
- I look forward to seeing what the wigs department has in store for us.

Where is the HIMYM hate? I never had an ending piss on the viewer more than how that train wreck ended. Made essentially 48 hours play over an entire season that meant nothing, and as an extra shocker even the twist meant nothing and only served as a reminder that the whole season meant nothing.

I wish I still had my writeup on that last season, and especially the episode How Your Mother Met Me, which I think was a genuinely terrible episode that removed all depth from the Mother, and the only reason I think it got any praise was because of the ukalele rendition of La Vie En Rose at the end.
But yes, that entire season undid 8 years of character development for most of the characters, spent the entire season building up to the Barney & Robins wedding, which it then immediately undid, spent an entire season overdeveloping Barney to being a genuinely good person whose whole persona was a simple act of benevolent revenge...only to undo it and have him revert back to being a POS womanizer (until he knocks up some lady), gives us this big buildup for Tracy only to mention in passing that she died...like seriously it was about 7 seconds, and show Ted literally and figuratively letting go of Robin once and for all...only for him be like "oh yeah if was you i loved all along at the end.
- The problem is they wrote the ending to the series in season 1 so they could film it with the kids. Then the show's popularity resulted in extra seasons with more character growth that they had to erase for the ending they had already written.
  Although I don't think there was ever a chance I wouldn't have been annoyed by the ending. I was annoyed through all of season 2 when Ted and Robin were dating because we were told episode 1 that she was Aunt Robin.
- I liked it because that's kind of how real life actually ends up
#12
I rewatched recently, and while I love seeing the mother, that last season is quite bad.
But, GoT is worse and I refuse to watch "Season 9" of Scrubs, so HIMYM is not my priority for hate on this list.
(Also, complaints that annectdotally confirm the data don't seem to be the most useful comments.)
Try the alternate ending: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5toL5HmQl8I
- This is the proper ending HIMYM should have had. It doesn't shit on the characters, and is satisfying. My head canon is this ending.

I think they included Scrubs "9th season" which was actually a prank that didn't happen, the real finale looks pretty highly rated

The biggest mistake they made was calling it Season 9.
Had they made a spin off style show with a slightly different name and called it season 1, I bet the viewers would have lowered their expectations and had more time to accumulate to the new cast.
It was meant to be a spin-off called "Scrubs: Med School" and would have been better received in that light.
There was a massive change in cast, new set and setting, a move to academia, etc. It wasn't Scrubs, but a spinoff featuring Turk and Cox.
Yeah and I don't like the inconsistency. If they include the continuation of Scrubs, they should have done the same with Dexter.
You mean you haven't seen the Scrubs webseries?
That is the ninth season.

Supernatural, blacklist, and castle were really rollercoasters of good and bad episodes and seasons lol

By the end of Supernatural even the hardcore fans were like "stop the beatings, it's already dead"

Honestly both surprised but not at all surprised that Promised Neverland is #2

Surprised because it's an anime in the #2 spot. Not surprised because it is SUCH A BAD ENDING

Does it match the manga?
- I know people weren't exactly happy with the manga ending but... S2 is truly something to behold.
  It is hard to convey to somebody who doesn't know the story just how badly they messed this up.
  What they removed:
  Fan favourite arc and characters.
  Guns, lots of guns.
  Literally god.
  An entire civil war.
  What they replaced it with:
  "Martha? My mom is also called Martha let's end racism"
  A PowerPoint presentation (half the last episode is a slideshow)

Game of thrones was not mentioned in a single comment (at the time of writing this comment).

I guess it wasn’t soo bad on an objective scale but just fully killed the relevance of the show.

Legit I've never had a desire to rewatch any of it since the ending.
I remember seeing leaks being posted on freefolk and thinking no fucking way these are real, realising they were, and then shitting on the rest of the last season with my partner, only way we got through it.
I use Game of Thrones as a textbook example of how to write a show with a diverse set of characters, locations, and motivations (in the early seasons all those moving pieces fit together remarkably well), and also how not to do that, with all the plots going to pieces and the characters and their motivations falling apart in the last couple seasons.
It's pretty amazing how strong the show starts and how hard it screws the pooch by the end.
- As long as they had source material to follow, the showrunners did okay. When they passed the end of the latest book, it all went to hell.
I'm not sure how you could capture the cultural significance of the show in this type of graph.
I don't know what y'all are talking about about. GoT ended after season 5. It's a shame they never finished it.
I find it weird how a lot of people always talk about the ending of game of thrones was bad, bit season 7 was just as bad or worse. Season 6 was pretty bad as well, all it had going was basically: man i wonder what the next season is like. I don't even think the ending is too bad, it's just implemented horribly. They just needed to end it as quickly as possible. Season 7 was pretty much the low point for me. It became like a twitter show. Oh people like that character, he's not gonna fie and gets more screen time. Or i don't remember what season it was, but i remember watching it and thinking: why are they focusing the camera so much on this random ginger soldier. I only figured out way later that he's a singer who had a cameo in the show. The show had so many flaws that people (me too) just overlooked because i was just interested in where it's going and i haven't read the books at this point. But when season 8 came around people just realised that it's in fact not going anywhere.
- One of the things that Game of Thrones did well early was always ensure the payoff was worth it. If you didn't like an episode here or there, it was fine because it advanced the plot enough that you still followed the breadcrumbs and another episode down the line made it worth it.
  Season 8 was so bad because many people tolerated elements of seasons 5, 6, and 7 because they were hoping for payoff. When that payoff was underwhelming at best and utterly nonsensical at worst, people tuned out fast. People spent hundreds of hours over a decade watching the show and discussing it with their friends, and in the end, it wasn't worth it. I don't think I've ever seen something disappear so completely and quickly from the cultural zeitgeist.
- I was going to argue that while season 7 was bad, it wasn't as bad as season 8. But then, I remembered how shit the Beyond the Wall episode was.
  They come up with the stupidest fucking idea of catching a wight. Jon Snow saw them at Hardhome. It was an insane number of dead people. How the fuck do they think they are going to trap something that is dead?
  Why the fuck are wights doing squad patrols throughout north of the wall? They're fucking dead. They don't need rest, food, or water. Just scatter wights throughout the area as lookouts.
  Why in the ever loving fuck are they sending the most important characters to go on a suicide mission?? I'm not even going to elaborate on that.
  We saw the entire party leave the Wall and walk around searching for wights. When they get to that little island and start fighting them, all of a sudden, there are all these unnamed characters showing up just to die. Where the fuck did they come from‽
  They send a kid that grew up entirely in King's Landing on an unarmed marathon to get help. The kid, malnourished, dehydrated af, and alone, covers a distance that took them days to travel. Once there, they send a raven to cover half the distance of the entire island to get Danerys to fly to find them. Except Danerys has never been north of the Wall. How the fuck does she know where she is going??
  I gotta stop. This is just too stupid.

What the hell happened to Myth busters?

I think it's just that Discovery didn't want to let it end. After Adam and Jamie left, they had like 2 more seasons with new hosts. I actually don't know if the quality of the show dropped, I never really gave it a chance.
I thought the same thing till I remembered they booted Kari, tory, and grant for having the gall to ask for fair pay. Iirc they tried to make finding a new crew a whole "thing" on the show and the fans absolutely hated it. Adam likes to spin it as "production costs going up" which yeah, having 3 Unpaid inters asking for fair compensation is a cost you should've budgeted for after 7 or 8 years. Couple that with Adam's reputation for being a drama queen and an absolute nightmare to work with, and they show was pretty cooked by the end.

I was shocked to see that scrubs made the list because the finale (that I remember) was a heater! But then I counted and saw that it was for season 9, so no surprises there (not that I even gave it a fair chance tbf, I’ve just heard it’s mid)

Season 9?
Hmm.
Don't seem to ever recall a season 9.
However, season 8 finished the series off with a banger, and introduced me to a fantastic song in the process.
Personally I'm glad nobody ever did something dumb like try to shoehorn in a spinoff at the end, that would have been a disaster.
Different network, fired/didn't pick up two main actors cause they tried to negotiate more money, basically was just mid plot about growing old and learning to live without a friend. And sprinkle in all the B-list actors they tried to force in for gags that didn't fit the tone. Which is saying something for a series that perfectly slotted in a musical episode without skipping a beat.
- Having not seen Scrubs at all, kinda curious - is the musical episode the one from Season 6 on the chart that's sharply more disliked than every other episode in the entire series?
Dude! The jump from season 8 to season 9 was so bad, they couldn't even connect the line!
- If we're being entirely honest it was a different show entirely, on a different network, that just happened to have a few of the same actors playing mostly the same character. They certainly tried but there wasn't enough there to make anything and they specifically only wanted a single extra season as an experiment to see if the audience would migrate networks. They didn't.

Surprised Battlestar Galactica isn't on there.

I know I am in the minority, but I loved the last season and its ending.
- I hated it when it aired, mostly because I saw one episode a week and was confused about everything going on in the last season.
  Then I binge-rewatched the whole thing last year and it wasn’t confusing at all. It was beautiful and well-thought out. The ending was perfect and did the whole series justice, while leaving a tasteful few things open to interpretation. I loved it.
  The biggest hard-to-swallow about the series was when they abandoned the whole cylon detector thing too easily just so it would fit the story progression.
You are a Cylon, you are a Cylon, and YOU are a Cylon!
While jarring and ad hoc, I didn't think BSG's finale was catastrophic. I honestly disliked the transition from S2 to S3 more than I disliked the ending.

this is not the worst finales, it's the finales that had the worst ratings vs series average. if anything this is about series that fell off near the end. there are many shows that were popular near the end, so people tuned in to the finale (which would mean a high rating) and hated the finale anyway. Seinfeld is the most popular example, even though i don't really agree with the consensus myself.

Also, doesn't a show that was consistently bad have a bad finale? The finale could even be a high point of the otherwise bad show and still be worse than any of the ones on the list.
- exactly... definitely an interesting list; i just think it doesn't reflect what the title says.

How is Mythbusters on there? It’s not like there was some kind of plot to follow, loose ends in the storyline, or some kind of contrived plot device to finish everything off.

A couple of years after the show originally came to an end, Discovery tried to revive it but with a completely different crew running everything. It was terrible and Discovery ended the revived show after a handful of episodes. That's why the last few dots on the plot are all way down there, not just the final episode. As the revived show went, the finale wasn't really any worse (or better) than the others.
- Yep, I remember that. I watched one episode and never watched it again. I guess I had it in my head that “That’s not Mythbusters…” and let it go.
Also they Moved mythbusters from Discovery (basic cable) to a higher tier that included The Learning Channel and lots of other stuff I wasn't interested in fucking with the plan for - iirc this was the last two years. Discovery ran the new eps in re-runs later.
- I do recall they kept moving the time slot around. Frustrating as heck if you wanted to watch the show.

The last season of Ozark was great imo. My only gripe was the last scene with their son. Why the complete 180?

The Man in the high castle was really just the last minute that's so absurd. Aside from that it was not bad. Which is telling how bad that last minute was.

I don't recall thr ending of misfits to be bad though, have to look that up.

Mass effect style? Where the last 10 minutes are so bad they reach across space and time and make the experience retroactively worse?
They had a choice; end the show on a hasty summary or end it on an unresolved cliffhanger. I’m honestly impressed that they shoved the entire last planned season into one episode. It felt cheap, I wanted to see Smith become the monster at a better pace that showed us all the details of his fall, but I don’t envy the showrumners’ position.
Unlike Enterprise, where they halfway invalidated the entire series by making it Riker’s off-hours book report.
- Yeah, why isn't Enterprise on this list!?
People wanted to see a redemption ark for the main bad guy from Man in the High Castle (forget his name it's been a while). But I loved the fact that I grew to hate him and lost faith in him as they showed how much of a hyprocrit he was. Although the finale was crazy and rushed, I thought his story was satisfying.

Scrubs ended in May of 2009 with My Finale: Part 2, tied for first as the highest-rated episode. “Season 9” aka “Med School”was a cash grab continuation merging the silly web series spinoff “Scrubs: Interns” that ABC absolutely fucked. There’s no reason to continue watching past My Finale: Part 2, which is how that phenomenal show ended up anywhere near this list.

Hell yeah, Enterprise! Only #17! Lol

How is My name is Earl not on the list? 4 years and they don't even have the respect to give a damn finale.

This graph just highlights the problem with popular TV shows that had no real plan for where they would go.

You do a season, it's popular, people want more. Eventually your quality declines, people lose interest and they just end weakly, if they even get that rather than abruptly cancelled.

If we only had one season of Heroes, we'd still be talking about it in the same hushed tones as Firefly, but it didn't and so we don't. It's just another in a long line of shows that started interesting, and quickly became mediocre. For that reason I'm kind of glad Firefly only got one.

I really don't want a show that lasts for 10 seasons. That's a massive time commitment. I want a story in as few episodes as it takes to tell it well. At least have an outline of what's going to happen, even if you haven't written it all out in full.

I really don’t want a show that lasts for 10 seasons.
Same. I like it when shows do not overstay their welcome, and like it much worse when the writers pad the story for an extra season or three.
The IT Crowd is a fine example of this. Any more, or any less, and we might have been disappointed as an audience.
Meanwhile it is my hope that What we do in the Shadows knows when to call it quits.
- depending on the show, community for example you can kinda just wrap it up and end it whenever you feel like due to the show writing.
  I believe there's an entire episode written as the ending of the show, only to come back because actually get fucked, and the weird thing is that it kinda works.

Different crew. It was so badly reviewed, viewer count fell off a cliff, so Discovery pulled the show after season 15.
Edit: To be clear, season 14 was the final season with the original hosts. Discovery renewed it for season 15, two years later after casting new hosts

How the fuck is Star Vs. The Forces of Evil not on this list?

Star betrays her own established character and kills billions because of a forced ship.

Wait, what! I only saw until midway, but now I'm curious. What happens?
- Tl;dr
  Star gets mad at her mother, screams "It's not a phase mom! Toffee did nothing wrong."
  Decides that magic should be destroyed forever because Mewnie's Queen is too good at it and because Marco is dying from a magical poison. So it is destroyed in every universe because Glossaryck said "Star is the main character so what she wants is morally right."
  Then he dies because he is a magical creature.
  Star realizes that even though the poison no longer exists, there is no way to see Marco again because the fucking portal network is now gone for good...
  So she uses the last of magic to realize she's made a horrible mistake and goes back in time to stop herself from destroying magic..
  Naw I'm kidding she actually makes Mewnie crash into the Earth the planets begin to merge, causing cataclysms on both planets that kill many in the process....
  The show pretends this is a happy ending as we see Star's friends magically survived the merging of the planets thanks to Princess Horsehead (who should be dead as she is a magical creature but consistency is for losers)
  RIP: Spider with a top hat, everyone in the literal afterlife, and the millions of people who Star killed in the cataclysm of Mewnie and Earth merging.
  Funfact: People who would watch a show like what the first two seasons promised are fans of magic existing more than they are of genocide. So this ending was not well liked and I personally do not consider it canon.
  Especially since so many fanworks have Star hanging with Dipper and Luz from Gravity Falls and Owl House who being seekers of the supernatural would never be able to in canon forgive Star for this...
...huh
I kinda dropped off when I realized the show was going to have a plot and shipping and I was just looking for a gag cartoon. Don't think I could have predicted that.

"The show was dead but they kept going" is visible in a lot of these. Two And A Half Men, you can see exactly where ol' tiger blood left the show. Mythbusters, you can tell which season tried being all B team... without the B team. I scrolled through and knew which one was Scrubs without even looking at the labels. House Of Cards-- no kidding.

Damn, Seinfeld didn't even make the cut. At the time, it was considered one of the worst of all time, especially for a show that was choosing to end while it was still going strong.

this is ratings not reviews. the Seinfeld finale has one of the highest ratings among finales, and i believe it was the highest at the time.
this is more about shows where people lost interest near the end. so less about finales and more about shows that jumped the shark or otherwise fell off near the end.
- Oh I see, that makes more sense.

Glad to see Ragnarok on here. Was a really good modern day telling of Thor based and filmed in Norway. Mosl the actors would dub over thier own voices in English since it was originally filmed in Norwegian.

Netflix pulled the plug so the show knew it had to wrap up all the story lines in season3. Glad they got it wrapped up but super ashamed of why they had to

On some level... how does anyone get a Netflix show and pretend they're getting four or five seasons? First season is a freebie, second season is a victory lap, and then you're fucking doomed. Yet serious industry professionals keep acting like it's network TV, and if the ratings keep up with their time-slot, they'll definitely get renewed. Cliffhangers for everyone!
Even fans act like it's a surprise. "I can't believe Netflix cancelled this after two seasons!" Really? Why can't you believe that? It's what they always do. It's what they keep doing, to any show smaller than Stranger Things.
Yeah I was so disappointed in session 3 and the ending.

That fucking supernatural ending, that shit sucked

All cars go to heaven
@Sanctus@lemmy.world
I didn't mind it..I did cry when Dean died. The stuff in heaven could've been better but hey.... It was covid...
- For me, it felt like "Oh, shit! Squeeze one more in there we forgot to kill Dean!" I literally walked out the room while it was playing
I thought the second to last episode was the ending and was happy. Then saw there was one more and wondered if they could top it.
Nope.

I expected to see The Sopranos on here.

Why? The ending was pe
- It’s mostly agreed upon as a good ending today, but when it aired it had very mixed reactions.

Wasn't Fear the Walking Dead shit from the beginning?

The whole premise was that they would show the outbreak and society’s downfall, as it was skipped over in The Walking Dead. That’s how the series started as well.
Then they skipped over big parts of it again, making the series just like The Walking Dead but with even worse characters.
Didn't deliver what it promised and season one was pretty rough. Season two was better. Season three was shockingly good, as in easily the best season of both shows. Then they gave the showrunner the boot so they could put Gimple on it and he ran it into the ground for season four, which was fucking awful. Don't know what happened after that because I don't think I finished the season.
- From what I remember:
  Season 5 was even worse, but at times it was "so bad it's good", so it was entertaining in an unintended way. Watch it to laugh at the mind-blowingly bad writing 😂 I wonder what drugs they had in that writer's room...
  Season 6 actually had some really good moments/episodes in the first half, but then it fell apart again.
  Season 7 was mostly nonsense, and I stopped watching after the second to last episode.
  Maybe one day I'll watch the rest (season 8 was the last)...
- How good is season three? Better than TWD season one? I really wanted to like FTWD but didn't make it past episode 3.

I liked the last episode of Enterprise because that entire series was trash and making it Rikers holodeck saves it from itself.

The last episode of Enterprise is the one before that. There is no Riker's holodeck!

I watched the ending to the promised Neverland season 2 on TV, it felt like a slap in the face and I didn't even read the manga. The entirety of season 2 felt like an insult and a disappointment.

Scrubs

Okay, but that last season? If we disregard that, the show is damn near perfect.

Supernatural

I get that this is weighing in at #30, but that graph is pretty consistent. They end on a low note, but it's not too far outside the normal range overall.