14 of the Worst TV Series Finales of All Time

These Are Some of the Worst TV Series Finales of All Time

I never understood the commitment some people have to TV series that phone it in after a few seasons. You can always tell whenever the writers just decided to throw stuff at the wall to see what would stick.

While some series hit their stride again and have a massive payoff (take Hunter X Hunter 's chimera arc for instance ) others just stumble their way towards unsatisfying, unearned, messy, bizarre, or just lame finales.

Here are some of the worst TV series finales of all time, mostly according to folks on the web. But I've got a bone to pick with one in particular I just had to share.

WARNING: Massive spoilers ahead.

'Death Note'

I might get a lot of hate for this, but the shift in Light's personality from being the smartest, most calculating man in the room, to a bumbling bag of errors in the last episode and a half was a huge fumble on the anime production team's part. Watching him get bested by one of L's proteges at the end of the series wasn't satisfying as he acted entirely out of character.

Plus, Light's death at the end of the series unfortunately ruled out a lot of loose ends that could've been tied up nicely. Like when Ryuk laughs, knowing Light's final death date. Then there's the fact that those who use the death note ledger barring themselves from either going to heaven or hell.

A way better ending would've been Light triumphing over L's protege in a tense game of mental cat and mouse. Years go by, no one stands in Light's way and he's effectively ruling the world as a God among men. As he writes another name into the ledger, we see a drop of blood fall on the pages. It comes from Light's nose.

What happens next is a montage of him trying everything in his power to fight the cancer he's been afflicted with. He dies alone, with no one to share his secrets with.

In the afterlife, he sees on one line all of the bad people he condemned to death headed to hell. On the other line, all of the innocent people he murdered just to ensure he wasn't caught headed to heaven. And there Light is, unable to head to either destination. Stuck in purgatory. He slowly morphs into a Shinagami as hundreds and hundreds of years go by. An emotionally stunted Icarus who is no longer human. A bored, soulless creature. And he did it to himself.

'Spider-Man: The Animated Series'

So the Fox Spider-Man cartoon wasn't going to win any awards for excellence in animation . But it did have one of the greatest TV Show intro songs of all time , and you'd be hard-pressed to find a Saturday morning cartoon that got people more pumped (Well, maybe X-Men , but we're comparing apples to apples here).

The show went pretty deep in the comic's lore and in the final season, Peter Parker learns that the Mary Jane he's been talking to was actually a clone made by Hydro Man.

Mary Jane then disappears right in Peter's arms, forcing him to cry out in anguish. Then, Madame Web appears and tells Peter that she's going to take him on a multiverse journey to save the real MJ.

'Killing Eve'

The Sandra Oh and Jodie Comer-led series left fans with a "bad taste" in their mouths. This included the author of the original book that the show's subject matter was based upon. Apparently, Luke Jennings hated the ending so much that he promised fans a beloved character who died in the show would live on in the books.

Another Redditor penned how the death of this character seemed unearned and that "multiple characters' storylines were left unfinished" by the show's end.

'Weeds'

If you've ever watched the Showtime series starring Mary-Louise Parker, then you know just how wacky it got if you saw it through to the end. When the show first began, however, Nancy's trajectory from becoming a housewife dealing with the death of her husband to a local pot dealer was fascinating to watch.

However, each new season started taking her and her family to entirely different locations. Then, it seemed like entire season arcs were packed into single episodes, making it difficult to gain a handle on what her character was trying to accomplish. It didn't help that the motivations just seemed like cheap plot devices to get the Botwins to encounter as many weirdos on a road trip across the USA as possible.

Ultimately, the series ends some years in the future and features a terribly aged-up Shane Botwin living as an alcoholic cop. The rest of his family were on the ground floor of marijuana getting legalized and are all super rich as a result.

'The Lyon's Den'Al

In September of 2003, Robe Lowe starred in the NBC legal drama The Lyon's Den as a lawyer who ends up working with a respected firm that ends up having a lot of dark secrets.

NBC ended up canceling the series halfway through its run, but still wanted the production company to finish filming the full 13 episodes.

The writers were basically finishing a show that no one would ever watch, so they decided to have fun with the situation. They ended up writing the most absurd twist ending ever, where Rob Lowe's character is revealed to be a serial killer. The last image folks see of Rob is him stabbing Kyle Chandler in the stomach, killing him. He then walks out on a balcony and makes a phone call.

'Game of Thrones'

This probably won't come as a shock to many, but the HBO adaptation of George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire seriously fumbled the bag. Game of Thrones was a bona fide worldwide phenomenon. As a fan of the books, I even felt that the show's structure highlights some of the narrative problems with Daenerys's character and I felt the show made her narrative more interesting to watch than read.

There are so many good things going for Game of Thrones in its first seven seasons. But Season 8? We don't talk about it.

You know it's bad when the show's actors are grimacing in pain and acknowledging how terrible it is at the last script table read.

So what happened? It's not like HBO wouldn't have funded at least three more seasons of the show to have everything pan out in a more measured fashion. Apparently, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss were nailed down to direct a Star Wars trilogy of films. The pair purportedly wanted to finish GoT so they could go and work on that high-profile dream project.

However, that dream didn't pan out. Weiss and Benioff] were reported to have walked away from the deal.

'Alf'

Since the series was supposed to have a fifth season, Alf showrunners ended Season 4 on a cliffhanger: Alf finally gets captured by the government. What's even more brutal is that this happens right as he's about to return to his native alien species which embarked on a rescue mission to beam him up from Earth. When government agents show up, the spaceship freaks out and flies away. Alf's captured in pincers and then cracks a joke to the agent ... and that's the end of the show.

The fifth season was never aired and the last thing Alf fans saw was him being captured by the government to presumably be subjected to a litany of horrifying experiments and dissections to learn more about his race.

'Scrubs'

Fans of the medical comedy will probably ignore the existence of the show's ninth season and say that Season 8 was truly the way to end the show. The Season 8 ending had fans wondering the whole time whether or not it was truly over. And when you found out it was, because the writers handled it with such care and aplomb, it left a bittersweet smile on your face.

However, some believe that "studio greed" ended up ruining this perfectly good conclusion by introducing a new premise (the hospital becomes a University) and nonsensical scripts that made the whole thing feel like a cash grab.

'Dallas'

The prime-time soap opera ran for 14 seasons from April 1978 to May 1991. There are some who claim that the aesthetic in Dallas is what defines Texas, or at least people's perception of the state, today. And the show was an absolute ratings monster getting tons of reach into hundreds of millions of American households.

Now, killing off a popular character in a TV show can be very tricky. You risk alienating your audience if their favorite actor is gone. But at the same time, if it serves the narrative well, it could pay off.

Well, Dallas seems to have regretted killing off one of its characters, and the showrunners decided they wanted to bring him back. So they introduced "dream" season between 1985-1986. It was revealed that the character's death had only occurred in the dreamscape, and he was back in the show. The series would go on for several more seasons after that, but many would say that it officially ended when it exposed viewers to such a lame gimmick.

'How I Met Your Mother'

Numerous Reddit users in this thread believe that the sitcom may have had a more satisfying ending if the writers didn't "cram" so much into the final episode. One user said that there were so many developments in the finale that several episodes were needed to adequately address everything that was going on.

'Merlin' on BBC One

The story of the wizard who helped Arthur become king has been done multiple times, but folks were really into BBC One's dramatization of the legend. From the aesthetic, to the tone — throngs of people loved Merlin . What many didn't like, however, was the abrupt nature of the show's finale. As one Reddit user puts it: "Oh, Arthur died and cut to modern-day England. Wat."

'The 4400'

The science fiction series started off with a bang but then ended up getting ridiculous and outright boring. Many seemed to be frustrated by the "abrupt cliffhanger" to end the series, but it's not like the writers were put in the best of positions.

The show's writer and co-creator Scott Peters attributed its cancellation "to the ongoing Writers Guild of America strike, budgetary problems, and lower-than-anticipated ratings."

'True Blood'

You don't need to search too long and hard on the internet in order to find someone who is ranting about how much they disliked the series finale of True Blood . Entertainment Weekly wasn't kind in its assessment of the finale either. In fact, the writer opens the piece up with this absolutely fierce dig: "Maybe it's fitting that a show about immortality just couldn't find the right way to die."

They went on to say that the show's conclusion felt so haphazardly put together, that it even tainted their experience of previous episodes, making the audience feel as if watching the show was ultimately all for nothing.

'Roseanne'

Before comedian Roseanne Barr was canceled after tweeting a slur, resulting in her being killed off in The Conners , she filmed a 1997 finale of the original series that launched her career and helped turn John Goodman into a household name.

In that finale, viewers were exposed to yet another "dream season," where Roseanne reveals everything that happened in a recent chunk of episodes was all made up for a book she was writing.

Understandably, this felt like a massive departure from the working-class humor and snark that was the trademark of the series and earned it so many fans. It's no wonder so many viewers disliked "Into the Good Night."