The Worst TV Show Finales
By BoMcCready on Reddit's DataIsBeautiful
By BoMcCready on Reddit's DataIsBeautiful
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.
Ye, I would have loved a spinoff as well. They underestimated the emotional closure the S8 finale had. That's the MBA brainrot
My wife and I say the same thing, in fact I've never seen season 9 she won't let me haha
Looks like it's "My Night to Remember", which is a clip show. Which tend to have poor ratings as a concept.
I'd have to agree. Remembering the days when you'd wait a week or two for the new episode on TV just for it to be a compilation of scenes from older episodes...
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.
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.
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.
Three guesses:
Edit: /s lol, obviously “they” = we
Probably because the ending is good. Re-watch the show, but focus on the characters other than the mysteries.
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.
Kari, Tori, and Grant left when they asked for more money and discovery said no. Fuck discovery for running a good thing. Same mother fuckers ruining HBO and warner brothers.
Fuck Discovery for ruining a good thing
A few years ago I was rewatching the Smyths edit of the show and I was wondering if it was ruined or if the show just was a product of its time and couldn’t exist in <modern year>
I think the internet has turned urban legends on their head. What constitutes a plausible myth has changed. We can just search for a lot of these now (and back then too, but it was less common and there was less stuff online). A lot of new urban legends are floating around now, but I don’t know, a lot of these early episodes tackled timeless schoolyard myths.
But the point wasn’t always to test the myth, the myth was just a premise to see them build things and blow them up. Even when I remembered the outcome from when I was a kid, I loved rewatching some of these episodes. It was really interesting to see how they set their experiments up as well. Very practical, very “workshop-brained” in the very best way.
But more than that, I think there’s just no way any network is bankrolling anything like that anymore. My understanding of TV show finance is very limited but I can’t see a modern Mythbusters being profitable, between the insurance and the networks’ unfailing appetite for canceling shows and writing them off, especially expensive shows. Didn’t Netflix make a spiritual successor with the B team only to cancel it, back when Netflix was just blowing up in popularity?
I firmly believe Mythbusters was made in the best possible era for it. Right when the internet was becoming a part of everyone’s lives but not to an intrusive level. Right when there was enough public interest in educational (well, educational-adjacent) TV and right when it was feasible to make the show.
Of course I’d like Mythbusters to exist in some form today. Maybe a tiny self-funded operation with its own in-house streaming site. But are there enough 25-40 year old vaguely nerdy types willing to pay for it? Adam Savage’s YouTube just isn’t the same. I appreciate it, but it’s a shadow of the real deal.
I do really miss seeing the world through the eyes of a kid flipping channels and landing on Jamie Hyneman creating a frozen poultry cannon.
Didn’t Netflix make a spiritual successor with the B team only to cancel it, back when Netflix was just blowing up in popularity?
Yeah, White Rabbit. I watched it an even then it was very appealing iirc
To this day, losing Grant is still a kick in the head. I always root for Grogu in any context because that was one of his very last projects.
Oh shit, I thought he died after it ended. Still the worst celebrity death for me, and one of the few that I could care about.
What a great guy.
I do love his youtube channel. It's like they're specifically creating content to appeal to my personality. I don't have a Youtube account but he's the only one I actually check to see if there's new videos on.
There was a guy on YouTube who built a rig to see if it was possible to cook a turkey by slapping it, and I got emotionally invested in his process!
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 M*A*S*H (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.
I like TNG a lot but I think the last season was the second worst season after only the first season. Peak TNG was season 4-5 IMO.
I have to say "All Good Things" (the TNG finale) was pretty decent. Though the rest of season 7 just felt like they had run out of ideas and were raiding the reject pile from previous seasons.
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?
Perhaps I'm the exception for loving every episode; haven't noticed any degradation in quality whatsoever.
Oh, I thought it was going downhill once he went to rehab. I stopped watching after he went to prison.
I absolutely loved that season. It was something fresh, a new way to see how Gregory handles the outside world without losing his wits when the chips are down.
The most recent Futurama series ending was 10/10.
They brought it back again but whatever that show is goated
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.
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 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.)
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.
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
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)
“Martha? My mom is also called Martha let’s end racism”
Is that literally what happened or is this a reference to Batman Vs. Superman. If it's not a reference that's weird that it happened twice.
Not only a PowerPoint presentation but a PowerPoint presentation is that spoils nearly a lot of shit if someone actually wanted to read the manga (I never read the manga but seeing the characters and the ::: spoiler Spoiler [fact they make it out to the real world is pretty much a spoiler)] spoiler :::
Supernatural, blacklist, and castle were really rollercoasters of good and bad episodes and seasons lol
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.
It was also like a whole season, maybe 2, where it dropped off. The final episode wasn't that bad given the surrounding context
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 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.
As someone who completely missed out on it when it first aired, watching it for the first time last year I don’t think the last season was that bad either. Certainly not as good as the highs of the first two seasons, but still decent.
Didn't the huge group of humans that could never agree on anything all decide to go live without technology with cave men at the end? It's been a very long time since I watched it but I remember hating that. iirc there were some unresolved plot lines too, but I don't remember enough to list them. I was a huge fan of the early seasons.
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.
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?
Actually the opposite, My Musical was S6E6, which if you count the dots is one of the highest rated of the season. Looks like the low in season 6 was the Night to Remember, which was literally a clip show of the previous six seasons, which tend to be panned by viewers since it's just rehashing older episodes.
Edit: Other fun fact, the other high point of the season seems to be my long goodbye, where a supporting character goes into a coma and ultimately dies.
Thanks. Added Scrubs to my watch list because of this post and how well its true ending seems to have been received.
It's a ride, definitely would say worth a watch it even if it's dated. Mostly a comedy but as stated above it does do some serious moments, though flanderization of characters does happen over time. Obviously it's not for everyone so if it's not your cup of tea, no offense taken.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Mass effect style? Where the last 10 minutes are so bad they reach across space and time and make the experience retroactively worse?
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.
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 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.