A beloved TV show ending is nearly always a bummer, and it's rarely easy to say goodbye to characters that you've spent years watching. But a show that ends on a strong note can mitigate that, while a show that ends on a weak one...well, fans find that hard to forgive.
Because of that, there was an abundance of passionate responses when Reddit user u/Get_Verminated asked, "What is the worst TV show finale?" Here are 23 of the top contenders for the (unenviable) crown.
Responses have been edited for length and/or clarity. Also, since this post is all about finales, there are spoilers ahead.
1. "My Name is Earl. It had a planned ending. The show was still pretty popular. The season ended early due to a writers' strike on expectations it would return, and it's left at a cliffhanger."
2. "Spider-Man: The Animated Series. It ends after the revelation that Mary Jane had been replaced by a clone made of Hydro-Man's water some time ago. Unfortunately, it's unstable, and she dissolves in Peter's arms as he screams out. Madame Web shows up and tells Peter that they're going to explore the multiverse to save the real Mary Jane. And then the show got cancelled."
3. "Killing Eve. Having seen many of the shows being mentioned here, nothing can top how badly KE ruined things."
4. "The Man in the High Castle. I loved this show right up until the end of the last episode, where they ruined the whole damn thing."
5. "I feel so bad for the cast and people who put so much work into that final season of Game of Thrones. They got screwed by lazy writing, plain and simple. In earlier seasons, it didn't always need to be epic because we enjoyed the dialogue and moving of the chess pieces, the literal game. Season 7 started turning into a blockbuster and then in Season 8, all plot coherence was thrown out the window."
6. "Alf. They thought they were getting another season, but they were canceled instead, so it ends with Alf being captured by the government."
7. "Scrubs Season 9 is like a fever dream. Real shame, because the real series finale (Season 8) was phenomenal."
8. "Weeds. So fucking disappointing. Dexter, too. To be fair, they both went downhill probably mid-series, but damn it, I'm still upset I spent so much time invested to get a craptastic ending. Twice! Breaking Bad, on the other hand, is how ya end a fucking show."
9. "I can probably live with the ending of How I Met Your Mother, but I will forever hate how they wrote the progression leading towards it."
10. "The final season, but specifically the last episode, of the BBC Sherlock is so fucking terrible. It doesn’t even feel like the same show."
11. "Surprised no one's brought up The Mick. On account of being cancelled, it ends after a child main character gets struck by lightning and the other characters are left wondering if she'll die."
12. "Younger. The entire last season changed it from a show about strong bonds between women to one where that got shifted to the back burner so she could be with a guy. Few laughs and some mystifying character changes."
13. "Of the shows I've watched (which admittedly isn't many), I resent the way they ended 2 Broke Girls the most, mostly because they didn't. They just cancelled it after setting up this whole tension between Max and Caroline's love interests in the last episode of Season 6, and that's all she wrote. I'm still a little pissed, because even though the show felt like it got a bit too big for its britches in the last few seasons, it was still a fun and charming show with some great characters. And they cancelled it just like that."
14. "American Horror Story: Apocalypse. It was like a cartoon of unbelievability with no stakes at all, only to then kill the literal Anti-Christ by running him over with a car."
15. "For me, it would have to be Supernatural. I loved the show and, for the most part, the last season was going great. The second-to-last episode felt right, and I think maybe they should have found a way to wrap it up there. But that finale? OOF, it was so bad."
16. "The 100. I was yelling at the TV the last few episodes and would rather the series never even ended, because the finale they gave us was terrible. Madi was the last straw for me."
17. "GLOW. It was supposed to have at least one more season. The last couple of episodes set up some interesting storylines."
18. "Seinfeld. They all end up in jail and the camera pulls away from the cell as they argue. So disappointing."
19. "Lost. Dunno how it's not one of the top answers. It was a cultural phenomenon for years, with everyone guessing and analyzing stuff week to week. All that mystery led to the most disappointing ending ever, to the point that it ruined the series. One cliché bad ending made all those Lost DVDs utterly worthless and unwatched, evermore."
20. "The entire last season of House didn't need to happen, and the ending was borne of the horrible mistake to keep going with a bad tangent to its extreme, ruining the main character and kind of just turning the final round of antics into a petulant essay on misery."
21. "Ozark is by far the absolute worst ending I've ever seen. It took a really great show and killed the replay ability. Can't rewatch it, ever."
22. "I haven’t seen anyone say this yet, but for me, it’s Castle. It’s a (very well done even as someone who doesn’t like murder mysteries) buddy cop show between Castle and Beckett which turns romantic. But there was lots of offstage drama and the actress for Beckett (Stana Katic) was fired for Season 9. So they filmed the ending of Season 8 as a cliffhanger where Beckett was supposed to die. Fans hated it so badly, they changed it at the last minute. When Castle and Beckett were shot, they put a random montage of them living happily ever after for the last 2 minutes over the top of them laying on the floor. Not only was the last season bad in general, but whose idea was it to kill off half of a buddy cop show? If there’s ever a sign that it’s time to end a show, that’s a pretty good one. There’s no way that would’ve worked and the writers were delusional to think they would’ve been successful. And that delusion robbed viewers of a decent conclusion."
23. And finally: "Firefly. Only because of the injustice of only getting one season."
