I just caught up on two seasons of The Imposters. Loved the show, but I hated the ending.
Hoping some of you have watched it and might want to talk about the show. Who was the star of the show? For me it was not who I would have expected it to be. What did you think about the evolution of the characters? I don’t want to say too much right out of the gate, but season one was very different from season two, I thought. Almost like two different shows, but with the same characters.
Do you have any shows where you loved the show but hated the ending? For me the worst was LOST. That was so bad that I truly decided to pretend that the last 20 minutes never happened, and I wrote my own ending. This ending wasn’t that bad, but it was still disappointing.
UncleEbeneezer
Loved Show, Hated Ending (or at least, really disliked), off top of my head…
1.) Game of Thrones
2.) Mad Men
3.) The Wire
4.) Boardwalk Empir
AND FIRST, MOTHERF*CKERS!!!
Matt McIrvin
The finale of Babylon 5 wasn’t bad per se, but after all the hype the show creator had given it, it was kind of a letdown. That was in part the product of the strange distortions that cast changes and a cancellation threat had made to the show’s extremely ambitious five-season arc (though the finale had actually been shot before most of season 5).
The show’s season-4 ender, made as a hasty replacement for the series finale once they found out they’d actually have a fifth season, was a cool, clever episode that I thought worked better as a series finale than the actual finale.
Poe Larity
Maybe I’ll check it out. Pretty much every show goes downhill after the first two seasons as the original writers jump for more money.
I was upset at the ending of Cowboy Bebop.
West of the Rockies
Well, I’m annoyed that The Irregulars didn’t get renewed. I have no idea how Heroes ended, but it sure went downhill after a couple of seasons.
Thanks for an interesting topic, WG. ?
Leto
Dexter. Ending to that was absolute hot fucking garbage (although if you wanted to argue that it should’ve ended maybe two seasons earlier, we’ll probably be in agreement). Luckily the next week Breaking Bad pulled off an amazing ending and we moved on with our lives.
Matt McIrvin
The series finale of Star Trek: Enterprise was pretty infamous–after a final season in which the show seemed to have found its voice at long last, the last episode was… a quasi-episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation focusing on Will Riker, who learns about the fate of Enterprise‘s characters in the holodeck. It was a strange choice, assuming that faithful viewers of Enterprise had cared more about a completely different show than about the show that was supposed to be having its final bow.
Uncle Cosmo
FRINGE – another Abrams fuckup. On the fansites I saw at least half a dozen concepts for finishing off the series that were better than the horseshit he came up with.
WaterGirl
@West of the Rockies: I didn’t finish Heroes, either.
(you’re welcome!)
Bruuuuce
Loved show, hated ending:
Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Creating two inherent classes of women on Earth (Slayers and not-Slayers) kind of sucked. Plus, the show would have had more impact had it ended at the Season 5 finale, Buffy’s dive off the tower.
Battlestar Galactica. The ending made no sense in the context of the rest of the series, and felt like what it was: a hasty improvisation by a writing staff that had been successfully winging it without a plan to that point
WaterGirl
@Matt McIrvin:
Just from that description, I would call that bizarre.
The Thin Black Duke
Westworld. The conclusion of season 1 was gawd awful, and it was painfully obvious the showrunners had no idea where they were going, so I wasn’t even interested in starting the 2nd season.
WaterGirl
Some of these are shows I have thought of watching, but I’m not sure I like the idea of going into a show where I already have reason to think the ending might suck.
I am catching up on The Flash. I had just caught up on two or three seasons and now I see an episode titled “Goodbye Vibe” or “Goodbye Cisco” and I don’t want to watch it. He is my favorite character. Sad.
WaterGirl
@The Thin Black Duke: So it was your own private series finale. :-)
MisterForkbeard
Dexter was a really terrible ending. Though evidently they’re picking it back up again? Completely agree that it needed to end at least a couple of seasons earlier.
As noted by others, Star Trek: Enterprise‘s final episode was terrible in many ways. I don’t think any of the actors wanted to do it at all.
Battlestar Galactica is another one where the final season or two were enjoyable but went off the rails… and the final episode was just unenjoyable.
I’m going to add a couple of things that aren’t TV shows now. The Rise of Skywalker was just hideous from start to end, though sort of entertaining to watch. But just generally a dumpster fire. Second, the literal last 3 hours of Mass Effect 3 made we swear off that series for a long time, as they ended a huge RPG series with a trite ending that ignored the themes of the series, contradicted things that literally happened a couple hours earlier, didn’t make any sense and the ‘good’ ending involved forcibly changing the biology of every living thing in the galaxy against their will. It was so bad that they partially remade the ending after fan outcry, and it was still a shitshow.
Matt McIrvin
@WaterGirl: In the case of Babylon 5, the entire fifth season is actually kind of superfluous because they hadn’t been sure there would be one–the series arc got insanely compressed so that the big bang-up climax happened at the end of season 4, then they found out they’d gotten a fifth season after all.
So there were all these writing gymnastics to deal with that fact, and though they do play out a couple of loose ends, much of the fifth season feels like appendices and filler, after a show that had spent much of seasons 2-3-4 telling a really tight story of grand space-operatic conflicts (the first season had been a little slow).
Steeplejack
* DVR Alert *
TCM is running Jacques Tati’s masterpiece Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday (1953) at 11:30 EDT tonight. A classic of visual comedy from a master. Trailer here.
Frankensteinbeck
Fushigi Yuugi
cope
“Third Rock From The Sun” had a very lame finale. Of course, the show was plagued by being moved into different time slots multiple times. We didn’t even realize it was the last episode until I looked it up in IMDB.
WaterGirl
@Matt McIrvin: Something similar happened, I think, with Grey’s Anatomy. It was supposed to be their last season, but then COVID happened. Then because of COVID they decided there were more stories to tell, so either hey couldn’t film the final couple of episodes because of COVID, or they filmed them but decided not to air them because they decided on another season. (I am fuzzy on the details, but it was something like that.)
But at least they didn’t show the series finale and then have more episodes. That would be kind of odd.
Quiltingfool
@Matt McIrvin: I loved Babylon 5! Season 5 was not my favorite. Did you watch the spin-off Crusade?
Steeplejack
@Poe Larity:
Having a hard time remembering the exact ending. I don’t remember it as bad, just “upsetting” in an artistic/emotional way. The episode that really got me was the one a couple before the end where Edward and Ein leave.
Great series.
WaterGirl
@cope: Yeah, for shows i care about, I
sometimesoftenusuallyalways wait to watch the final episode of a season until I know whether it has been renewed or not.Matt McIrvin
@Quiltingfool: I watched one or two episodes of Crusade, but it didn’t grab me. (It was about a pandemic! Might play better today.)
The TV movies weren’t great either, except for the prequel one, which was surprisingly very good.
Quiltingfool
Sons of Anarchy – the last season was just, I don’t know, insane. Although, throughout the whole series I kept thinking that these guys are really bad at crime. They should’ve just stuck to fixing cars and motorcycles.
I also thought that for a bunch of “anarchists” they sure had a lot rules.
Keith P.
@Matt McIrvin: This. B5 was about Shadows and Vorlons fighting over us, not the Psi-Corps doing whatever
Mary G
No. 1-100: Game of Thrones
SiubhanDuinne
@Steeplejack:
i remember seeing it in the movie theatre when it was first released. Same with Mon Oncle. Loved Tati.
Quiltingfool
@Matt McIrvin: I agree wrt Crusade. I liked some of the characters in Crusade, though. I also agree the first B5 movie was the best. Which B5 character or characters did you like? Me, I really liked the interactions between Londo and G’Kar.
rm
Penny Dreadful
One of those endings where they betray everything that went before because they have to wrap things up due to cancellation.
Matt McIrvin
For that matter, the last episode of the original Star Trek (“Turnabout Intruder”) was a terrible one, but it wasn’t really intended as a series finale, just as a regular series episode, since the show was very episodic by today’s standards.
(Its original broadcast was apparently preempted by reports on the death of Eisenhower and it was aired later in a time slot intended for repeats.)
Matt McIrvin
@Quiltingfool: Londo and G’Kar were the best.
Matt McIrvin
Also: The last serial of the original (1963-1989) run of Doctor Who, “Survival”, was kind of a stinker. Again, it wasn’t really intended as a wrap-up for the entire show–though, in that case, they did put in a brief coda that tried to put a bow on it once they realized it would be the last.
NotMax
Absolutely sure I sat through The Imposters at some point, however it left no impression whatsoever.
As for far from stellar endings not already mentioned: Quantum Leap, Seinfeld, Roseanne, among scores of others.
@Quiltingfool
Crusade was, as the British put it, a dog’s breakfast. One that a starving dog would turn up its nose at.
piratedan
With Cowboy BeBop, Spike was never destined for a happy ending imho… The original Evangelion was… unsatisfying
Firefly was bittersweet as was X-Files, which felt rushed. Naturally ymmv
NotMax
@rm
With the unfolding of the vomitous last season, Penny deserved to be dropped from the title.
Matt McIrvin
The ending of The Prisoner alienated many viewers by being a densely symbolic pageant that declined to give concrete and literal answers to most of the show’s dangling questions, but I think posterity has mostly judged that as being artistically appropriate.
Juju
@The Thin Black Duke: Thank you. I had a difficult time sitting through a whole episode from beginning to end of that show. When it came to the last episode of the first season, it all felt like a huge waste of time. I had friends say I had to give it time. To me it was bad from start to finish, so my comment doesn’t really fit with the theme of the thread. Oh well. For me opening credits to “Westworld” were better than the actual show.
emrys
Twin Peaks and Quantum Leap. A lot of QL fanfic is dedicated to correcting the ending.
guachi
I guess I’ve been lucky in not following many hit shows that have poor endings. Though I’ll echo the ending of Quantum Leap was lackluster. Not bad, just unsatisfying.
The Dangerman
St. Elsewhere
Worst ending ever. I’m calling it.
Brachiator
Sorry to say that I did not see this series. Was it a Netflix show? This is a streaming service that I do not have.
With a show that some others have listed, I was disappointed with the ending of Game of Thrones. Doubly so because the show’s creators failed to set up the ending that they came up with. So it just felt as though it came out of nowhere. Even though I did not like the ending, I would have accepted it had it been better established.
I doubt that G Martin will ever finish the novels, but if he does, he has an interesting opportunity to come up with a better resolution.
Not a TV show, but I will throw in that I really disliked the second film in the latest Star Wars trilogy, The Last Jedi, but not for the idiotic reasons of some of the most noxious haters. However, The Rise of Skywalker was such a steaming turd that it made me wish that Rian Johnson, director of Jedi, had been allowed to do both The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker.
Soprano2
@Matt McIrvin: The S4 ender was good, but I’ll admit I cried at the end of Sleeping in Light. It was the finale the series needed. I still want to know if Marcus is alive or dead, and dammit JMS make a movie about the Telepath War! I loved that show so much I watched it through twice. The second time through was interesting, because I caught so much I missed the first time.
NotMax
@Matt McIrvin
Would rather posit it as having been artistically ambitious but in the end its reach exceeded its grasp by several furlongs. Nothing wrong with not providing pat answers or resolving questions on a positive note, it was rubbing the technique in the audience’s face that was so offputting.
Soprano2
The end of the show Medium really pissed me off – why did they think killing her husband was a good idea!?
beth
It’s been a while since I watched The Imposters but I remember thinking they ended Season 2 with a definite eye towards Season 3, which would have been very different from the first two seasons. I guess it didn’t get renewed but I loved the show and would have enjoyed seeing the main guy (can’t remember names) become a con man which is where I feel they were heading.
JoyceH
I’d never heard of Imposters till this thread. Is the ending bad enough to give the show a pass?
As for lousy endings, Beauty and the Beast (the 1980s TV show). I just pretend the last season never happened. When Linda Hamilton left they should have pulled the plug.
Matt McIrvin
@Brachiator: The Last Jedi, love it or hate it, was pretty clearly trying to set up a finale that would have been extremely different from The Rise of Skywalker and that I suspect would have improved the reputation of The Last Jedi in hindsight, much as we now see The Empire Strikes Back as a keystone episode in the saga.
What we got instead seemed like creative cowardice–The Rise of Skywalker was trying to give the angriest fans exactly what they wanted, pretending the previous film had not happened and instead doing a largely unrelated story that made the sequel trilogy up to that point seem completely pointless. It was a fine example of how Internet fandom can ruin your storytelling.
Brachiator
@WaterGirl:
The series began so well. It was fun. But then it just hit a wall where it became dull and pointless.
chopper
wasn’t a big fan of the end of HIMYM.
NotMax
@JoyceH
Possibly the only show which richly deserved to have its credits include Candle Wrangler. (Disappointingly, they did not.)
;)
Martin
Unrelated to bad endings, one thing I recently watched which was VERY good was Bo Burnham’s ‘Inside’ on Netflix. Bo is probably not familiar to most here. He got his break on Youtube as a 16 year old and broke out into a musical comedy career. He’s pretty well known to zoomers. He’s immensely talented, and his humor is very introspective and self-referential.
‘Inside’ is far and away his best work. He films it alone, in one room, over the course of a year. He tackles various challenges of living in a pandemic, along with his own anxieties and the struggle of retaining his sanity. It’s both dark and funny and thought provoking. I thought it did a great job of expressing a lot of what I struggled with.
Soprano2
S4 of Babylon 5 is one of the most amazing feats of TV I’ve ever watched. It was the first arc story I saw from start to finish. And yes, the majority of S5 can DIAF, but the Londo/G’Kar stuff was wonderful.
Mary G
The Sopranos going to black annoyed the fuck out of me.
Soprano2
oatler.
“Dead Like Me” was supposedly cancelled but the ending as it stands is perfect. What became of Ellen Muth anyway?
Soprano2
@Quiltingfool: I loved them all (except that insipid blonde telepath in the last season), but I especially loved Ivonava and Delenn. Wonderful, fierce women characters are often my faves. I also loved seeing Walter Koenig in a completely different role.
Brachiator
@Matt McIrvin:
One of the many problems of The Last Jedi was that it was largely about the director doing his meditation on a film series that had taken on a legendary status, and putting his on mark on film history. This is not the same thing as just making a good goddam movie.
Also, the producers and studio executives didn’t understand the expectation that they had created once they signed all the original casts to the sequels. And note that this was not a super big deal for me, but clearly, clearly, clearly a lot of fans wanted to see what happened to Luke once he had fully mastered his powers. Didn’t matter what other story they built around this.
But instead, Rian Johnson was allowed to piss on this, with was an interesting and valid artistic choice, but doomed to failure. And the old, semi-broke down Jedi who appeared to renounce everything that the Jedi represented was just stupid. It also seemed to lamely recapitulate the partially broke down Obi Wan that we meet in the first Star Wars film.
And in addition to all this, Johnson clearly did not give a shit about the characters that he had inherited from the first movie, The Force Awakens, and essentially dumped some (the lady from Game of Thrones) and failed to develop most of the others.
The fun thing about the original Star Wars is that if you saw it when it was first released (as I did) for a while you are not quite sure who the main protagonist might be. It could easily have been Han’s movie, with Luke as a sidekick. Or Obi Wan. Or the princess. Empire focuses on Luke and of course Vader. It is not just about a plucky band fighting the Empire. But the film’s creators take some time to develop the other characters. Rian Johnson is stuck with emo Baby Wannabe Vader, and fails to give any of the other characters anything interesting to do, or have them interact with each other in any meaningful way.
Yep. He gave some of the fans what they claimed they wanted, but his plot came out of nowhere, and satisfied no one. There was no point in having the Emperor pop up again. And making Rey his descendant was profoundly stupid. And some of the film was frankly racist. It’s as though they had no idea what to do with John Boyega and just threw a couple of other black characters to be around him. But to be fair, they also shit on Oscar Isaac. I can’t recall a single thing that he did in the final movie.
Anyway, I’ve gone on to long about this mess. Excuse me. Part of it may be because I have been watching some YouTube reactions of people who claim that they never saw or barely remember the original film series. So some of the saga and the failures of the sequels are fresh in my mind.
mrmoshpotato
Foster’s Home For Imaginary Friends
GREAT show, even BETTER ending. I cheered. It was perfect.
Matt McIrvin
…And Star Trek: The Next Generation itself is an interesting case in that the show was clearly running out of steam and the final season had had many downright embarrassing episodes, so we would have had every right to expect a terrible series finale, but “All Good Things…” was actually wonderful, a home run.
This list so far makes me think that the finales of long-running, beloved TV shows with a devoted fandom are disappointing more often than not–there’s just too heavy a burden of expectation and conclusion to bear. Often they end up trying to subvert the show in bizarre ways that are contrary to the spirit of it, just to top everything that had come before, or to give the story a catastrophic reason for ending, or to tack on some kind of profundity that isn’t earned.
The TNG finale doesn’t do that. It shamelessly uses the device, which had become something of a cliché by that point, of destroying the ship in a story about time paradoxes where the destruction can be undone–and it does it several times over! But this isn’t the real end of the Enterprise-D, and even its storyline about what happened to everyone in the decades afterward ultimately gets dismissed as a mere possible/alternate future; the very end is open, showing the crew in a quiet moment of comradeship before flying off for more adventures. Yet it works as an ending, maybe because it’s got so many grand statements about what this show is about and who these characters are, and they’re so clearly steeped in love for everything that had gone before.
Leto
@Matt McIrvin: If you watch some of the interviews John Boyega did, he straight up says that the writers didn’t know wtf was going on. As far as 1) having a coherent 3 movie story that they wanted to tell and 2) knowing wtf they were going to do with the characters. Basically by the time they got to Rise, it was just a shitshow.
@Brachiator: a lot of this; if you watch the interviews Mark Hamill did, he was absolutely pissed at how the OG characters were handled. He didn’t believe that Luke was simply give up. He hated that Luke and Han didn’t have an onscreen goodbye, and the scene where Luke knows Han died was cut. I’m sure Harrison Ford was happy that Han finally died as he’d been advocating for that since Empire. The entire thing was just a fucking mess.
If they wanted to do an Emperor reborn series, there were a few stories to choose from that would’ve worked from the old deleted Extended Universe. As it is, if you want good storytelling and interesting characters then you either watch The Mandolorian or any of the animated Clone War series.
Keith P.
@emrys: The ending of Twin Peaks: The Return, or Twin Peaks S2? The Return was f’n transcendent. I actually wept tears of literal joy a few times* during those 18 hours.
* – The Mauve Zone, Cooper returns for real, the origin of the convenience store(!), Coop saving Laura.
Leto
@Matt McIrvin: Star Trek is one of those franchises where they don’t give a shit about certain cannon, and will just do whatever they want with their characters. To a certain degree that’s good (the future is always in flux) but it also makes it too easy to just retcon/change literally everything to where prior impactful decisions are meaningless.
Citizen Alan
@Matt McIrvin:
I respectfully disagree. Aside from being yet another amazing character episode for Sophie Aldred as Ace, it was also one of the best Master episodes of the Classic era (and the best episode for Anthony Ainley’s Master).
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@NotMax:
The last season of Roseanne was so bad I couldn’t look away
no comment
@chopper:
Yeah, I hated the ending of How I Met Your Mother, too. (Trying not to spoil, because I think the show is still worth watching if someone hasn’t seen it.) They spent so much time with Ted, and so many almost meetings/six degrees of Kevin Bacon, that I felt his future wife got the short shrift. Her story & the story of the couple together was rushed. We spent so many seasons getting to know Ted, and then it feels like we just get a few short glimpses of the mother & the two of them as a couple. I can see why they ended it the way they did, but the lack of time given to the mother’s story was disappointing. A few more episodes with her in the center of the story would have worked wonders.
Mary G
On the other hand, my vote for best ending is Six Feet Under.
Citizen Alan
@Brachiator:
Heroes had a lot of flaws that only got worse as the series progressed. Ironically, I think things really started to go bad with the casting of Zachery Quinto as Syler. Not because ZQ was bad, but weirdly because he was too good. He brought so much charisma and sex appeal to the role of what was basically a superpowered serial killer that the show spent the next 4 seasons vaccillating between rehabilitating him into a hero or having him go evil again.
Anotherlurker
I can’t comment on Dexter, however, it was one of the worst shows that I have ever tried to watch. I had zero sympathy for any of the characters and I thought the writing sucked.
But what really bugged me was the fact that they had this supposedly brilliant serial killer killer wrap his victims bodies in plastic and dump them in 60′ of water off Miami, to be found by SCUBA Divers. They also equipped this genius with a kick assed, fully tricked out center console sport fisher, capable of 40+ kts. They built him up as a nautically knowledgeable. He could have run that that rig 20 miles east of Miami and dumped the dismembered bodies in 1000’+ of abyssal water . This move would have allowed him dispose of plot devises in a way that would assure that they would be consumed by the local fish and crustaceans. He would have back at the dock in an hour and a half.
Bad bad bad writing and production and direction.
OK. I’ll get off my high horse.
Brachiator
@Matt McIrvin:
Totally agree that “All Good Things” was a great conclusion to the series. But for my money, they could just as easily have shown the Enterprise returning home and the crew getting assigned to other ships or responsibilities.
I liked the conclusions of DS9 and Voyager. DS9 was crafted more around story arcs than standalone episodes, so you wanted some resolution.
Obviously people wanted to know if the Voyager crew would get home. If they were doing the series today, they probably would build in pre and post Voyager life into the series from the beginning.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Mary G: the show meandered to get there– they actually managed to make Rachel Griffith’s character boring by the last few episodes– but the actual finale was great
Keith P.
@Mary G: Yep, that’s been the champ IMO from the evening it premiered. Almost too emotional to even watch again (I got through half the ending sequence last night before I had to stop, and I hadn’t seen the show in 10+ years)
Quiltingfool
@Soprano2: I liked Ivanova and Delynn too! How about Vir? I liked how his character evolved through the seasons.
All this talk about B5, I’m going to have to watch it again (I have the dvd set). I watch, er, listen to a lot of shows while I’m sewing. Right now I’m watching Numbers.
Matt McIrvin
@Brachiator: See, I saw Star Wars on its original run and heavily identified with young Luke then, and when I saw old, broken, beardy Luke in The Last Jedi, wondering if everything he’d fought for was a mistake and if this shit was all his fault somehow… I heavily identified with him again because that was exactly how I fucking felt about me and the world in 2017. (For “The Force” maybe substitute “The Internet.”)
But clearly a lot of people did not come to see that.
Quiltingfool
@Brachiator: Did you watch Star Trek: Picard? I liked it.
Keith P.
@Keith P.: It doesn’t really count, but Deadwood had a pretty flawless ending with the movie. I still maintain that Deadwood is the best show HBO has ever done.
Brachiator
@Citizen Alan:
Very intriguing observation. TV is a funny medium. People want to be comfortable with characters they watch every week. So there is, I think, a tendency to soften villains and antagonists if they are series regulars. People got tired of seeing Major Frank Burns as hostile in MASH, so they made him more bumbling than bigoted and evil. And of course they made Hot Lips more appealing.
When they brought in the Charles Winchester character, he was less of a full on antagonist from the jump.
Syler was more charismatic than the shows other main leads. This creates an almost unsolvable problem.
Quiltingfool
We started watching Marvel’s Loki. I think it will be interesting. Anyone watched it?
Heidi Mom
@Mary G: I loved it from start to finish, Season 8 Ep. 6 included. The so-called Stark Montage at the end is probably my favorite sequence of the show.
eddie blake
@Quiltingfool: yeah, i’m really enjoying it.
babylon 5 is on hbo max, remastered. it looks amazing.
emrys
@Keith P.: Oldie here. I watched it when it first was on back in ancient history.
Steeplejack
@Steeplejack:
Damn. Just finished watching Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday on TCM. Pristine restored print from Janus Films/Criterion Collection. Aside from the comedy, the movie is visually stunning. Every scene—every shot, practically—is a picture postcard. I can’t remember the last t ime I saw it. Really holds up.
Brachiator
@Quiltingfool:
I really enjoyed much of Picard. One of my favorite episodes was the one in which Picard visits Troi and Riker, because their daughter is so cool. The episode was more than a nostalgia fest.
But it really bothered me that all of the main characters had a sad back story. And if I recall correctly, the Agnes Jurati character had never been off Earth. This little character detail seemed unrealistic. I would think that in the future, especially for scientists, going off world would be as common as contemporary college students visiting Europe or Asia. This is a very small thing, but sometimes I think that there are writers who don’t really know or like SF, so they make a “regular” TV show with sci fi elements sprinkled on.
Oddly enough I really like the animated Trek show, “Lower Decks.” The show won me over. As with “Picard,” the main thing is that I like the characters and want to see what happens to them.
Steeplejack
@Matt McIrvin:
I think the problem is with the standard structure of American serial television: get a hit and then keeping cranking it out until it drops dead from exhaustion (or bad ratings). So you get a good original idea that gets carried a long way, and then to extend the life all sorts of gimmicks and gewgaws get added on. The whole thing gets more and more unwieldy and the internal structure starts to break down.
The British seem to have better success with “limited” series—only a couple of seasons are planned going in. Can you image how an American studio would have handled Fawlty Towers? Rhetorical question. Ugh.
Brachiator
@Matt McIrvin:
Makes sense. Would have made even more sense had the sequel been about him and if we had actually seen what he had fought for, as opposed to have him talk about it. And whine about it. And reject it.
Would also have been interesting had the movie been about Leia and a rebuilt Republic, and whether she thought that everything she had fought for had been a mistake.
Matt McIrvin
@Steeplejack: It was tried, repeatedly and unsuccessfully. Once with John Laroquette, once with Whoopi Goldberg I think, and there may have been others.
Steeplejack
@Matt McIrvin:
What I meant was what if some American studio originally developed the show and got a surprise hit on their hands? They would have ridden that horse into the ground, way beyond the “best by” date.
Geoduck
I’ll invert the question, and note that one show I never enjoyed much was the sitcom Newhart, because as the ending brilliantly revealed, you were watching a poor guy suffer through years of an ever-more-surreal nightmare.
Brachiator
@Steeplejack:
I love, love, love “Foyle’s War.” But they kept it going on too long. Same is true of “Luther.”
But I agree that many of their “limited” series seem to end just right.
Steeplejack
@Brachiator:
They broke their own “rule” with those two series (among others).
Steeplejack
Reading this thread is belatedly reminding me that I loved Person of Interest and thought the ending was awful. Not just the final episode, the whole descending arc of the last season. I can’t watch it in reruns, whereas I like to watch reruns of Elementary (although I didn’t think the ending of that series was so great either).
One series-ending episode that I thought was perfect was “To the Boy in the Blue Knit Cap,” from Law and Order: Criminal Intent. There’s nothing particularly great or series-ending about the episode per se, except that the last scene is perfect. Goren achieves a sort of closure with his department-ordered psych sessions, and then Eames picks him up in an SUV on the street outside to go to another case. Just a few lines of dialogue between them, some small silences, then they drive off down the street. Perfect.
Ryan
B5 and Enterprise for sure. I’d add Battlestar Galactica.
Leto
@Quiltingfool: we’re watching it and really enjoying it; it’s really similar to FX’s Legion, which was another Marvel show. Thought that was really good.
NotMax
@Steeplejack
The pilot for a U.S. version of Red Dwarf is findable online.
If a disaster had legs it would be a gigapede.
Steeplejack
@NotMax:
Thanks for the warning.
As I said, I wasn’t talking about American remakes of British series. I was talking about how awful an open-ended American version of a British concept like Fawlty Towers would be. One of the things that makes Fawlty Towers great is its finiteness: it’s 12 great little episodes, and it leaves you wanting more. It’s not an “all you can eat” Sizzler buffet where you’re can’t seem to get out of your chair and leave.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
My girlfriend and I, both Star Wars fans, agreed on two major problems with the sequel trilogy:
Instead, they rushed things, didn’t edit their storylines enough resulting in too many dangling characters given short shrift, and ended up with an opening chapter setting up a lot of plot lines, a middle chapter whose director and writers took a sharp turn away from the opening, and a closing chapter that was essentially a lot of moments that were awesome in isolation, but were duct-taped together into an incoherent mess.
Now if Rian Johnson had been brought into the process earlier, his subversive ideas could have been integrated into the story instead of turning The Last Jedi into a movie that would have worked better as a stand-alone story – and maybe with his input, the plot threads from The Force Awakens could have been threaded into that subversive story, leading more smoothly into The Rise of Skywalker.
Babylon 5 did suffer from its five-year plan being twisted out of shape by contract issues, with the cancellation/un-cancellation of the fifth and final year messing with the pacing. And Quantum Leap … I still haven’t quite come to terms with the abruptness and confusion of that final episode, and the final title card still hurts.
Tony Jay
Angel. Makes me want to replay the episode one question asked of the smarmy big-city vampire, only directed towards the prick executive who cancelled the show.
Penny Dreadful. Yeah, loved the show, loved the characters, hated the final season story arc and the weak, weak villain.
OTOH, Loki is bubbling along quite nicely and setting up some major changes to the MCU that should feed into the movies and open things up for the future. And I could listen to Hiddleston just talk all day.
Erik
@Bruuuuce:
Absolutely Battlestar Galactica. Still angry about that one. Lazy end writing that felt like it was just thrown together the same morning.. Argh.
Booger
@Matt McIrvin: IIRC, the series end of ST:TNG had the briefly redeeming battle scene where for ONCE, ships moved in all three planes; the Enterprise-D with its four warp nacelles come up from the bottom of the frame to save the day. It was so mind blowing and unexpected in the moment.
Of course, I might be remembering it wrong.
syphonblue
Lost’s ending was great though, and I will take that to my grave. It’s my favorite show ever and I just finished a rewatch of it with my SIL, who also lived the ending (this was her first time).
The worst endings in TV history have to be Battlestar and Have of Thrones. Both completely failed to answer or live up to everything they’d spent years setting up, or even just be entertaining.
For movies, I *loved* The Last Jedi as a standalone movie, but after Rise of Skywalker, it’s clear Disney had absolutely ZERO plan for the trilogy whatsofuckingever, which is ***crazy*** coming from the studio that had just spent over a decade setting up Endgame. Rise of Skywalker took everything TLJ set up and just shit all over everything, then ate that shit, and puked it up again. It was a total mess with almost no redeeming qualities to it. When it tried to do its “Avengers Assemble” scene, I just laughed out loud in the theater. It was terrible. It made the Game of Thrones ending look like Shakespeare.
Uncle Cosmo
@Matt McIrvin: FTR, Joe Straczynski (the heart, soul & brains of B5) was flat-out told at the end of season 3 that he would NOT be getting a season 5, and had to compress the final 2 seasons of a “very tight” story arc into one – and only AFTER that was done (remarkably well) was he told Nemmind, you get season 5 after all, now figure out how to fill it up.
I’d love to see a Bablyon 5 reboot that restored the 5-year arc (I figure JS has scripts for most of the last 2 seasons as originally conceived) but the show was so well done (& IMO really hasn’t aged that badly at all for SF over 25 years old) that no one’s dared to even suggest doing one.
syphonblue
Lost’s ending was great though, and I will take that to my grave. It’s my favorite show ever and I just finished a rewatch of it with my SIL, who also lived the ending (this was her first time).
The worst endings in TV history have to be Battlestar and Game of Thrones. Both completely failed to answer or live up to everything they’d spent years setting up, or even just be entertaining.
For movies, I *loved* The Last Jedi as a standalone movie, but after Rise of Skywalker, it’s clear Disney had absolutely ZERO plan for the trilogy whatsofuckingever, which is ***crazy*** coming from the studio that had just spent over a decade setting up Endgame. Rise of Skywalker took everything TLJ set up and just shit all over everything, then ate that shit, and puked it up again. It was a total mess with almost no redeeming qualities to it. When it tried to do its “Avengers Assemble” scene, I just laughed out loud in the theater. It was terrible. It made the Game of Thrones ending look like Shakespeare.
debbie
@Leto:
I’m the only person I know who didn’t have a problem with Dexter’s ending. I didn’t see how it could be any other way. He knew he had a problem, realized he would never be able to overcome it, and self-exiled. IMHO
Breaking Bad’s ending, I think, is the best ending ever. I jumped up out of my seat at that first guitar chord!
cope
It just hit me like a falling piano…the ending of “Two And A Half Men” was terrible. Of course, the show itself became pretty terrible after the first couple of seasons.
JML
BSG had a bad ending that was pretty non-sensical, but they had problems the last two seasons too, especially once the creators decided they liked the Cylons more than the humans (and began writing the characters that way) and showed they had absolutely no idea how to do a redemption arc and tried to just hand-wave Baltar’s life and actions away because they liked the character and actor.
GoT: wow, what a mess that was. Bad ending to a bad season.
Lost was a rough one. Definitely helped prove that the creators had no idea where they were taking the show throughout and just flung shit at the walls. That’s…bad. Not a satisfying ending to what was appointment tv for a long time, and when people actively leave the show angry, it can only be a failure of conclusion.
Can’t decide on Heroes: everything after season 2 was a mess (and even season 2 had problems), so is it truly just a bad ending or just a total mess?
Hard to do it well, to be sure. (West Wing got it right, IMHO. La Femme Nikita did pretty well, as I recall. M*A*S*H.)
Searcher
@syphonblue: Which episode do you end on?
Taking a similar “I loved it” opinion contrary to the point of the thread…
When Farscape was cancelled, they took the last few episodes to wrap up the outstanding plot lines and get all the characters into a safe place, where everyone was happy and at peace.
Then in the last 30 seconds a never before seen antagonist appears and murderate the two main characters. “To Be Continued” flashes on the screen and the series ends forever.
Like wiping your ass with silk.
Soprano2
@Quiltingfool: If you want to really blow your mind, watch Babylon Squared from S1 and then watch War Without End from S3. Those are the two different viewpoints of what they did with Babylon 4. Poor Garabaldi, trying to tell himself to watch his back…..
I honestly can’t pick a favorite character or two character interaction. They were all good, in different ways. I almost gave up on it after S1, but when Boxleitner joined the cast it seemed like the whole show “brightened up” somehow. I think the series holds up pretty well because it tells a timeless story and has characters who all have flaws – no one is one-dimensional. Every time I started to really hate Bester, JMS gave him a story line that made him more sympathetic. Sheridan and Delenn were not perfect heroes by any means. Did you read any of the books? There’s one about Garabaldi trying to get revenge on Bester, for which I don’t blame him one bit – that was a particularly nasty little plot line. When I rewatched it the whole way through, I literally gasped when I saw the Shadow in the Centauri “seer’s” vision in S1, because now I knew what it was and what it meant. I think B5 is one show where you get a lot more from it the second time through, because you pick up on so many things that you didn’t understand the first time.
I’ve gotta go, I could talk about this show all day. I’d say it’s my favorite series of all time, because it had a plan for a beginning, middle and end from the start, and I loved all of the characters; unlike so many shows (Battlestar Galactica or Lost, anyone?) it never felt like JMS was making it up as he went.
WaterGirl
@JoyceH:
No, it was not, it was just unsatisfying. I agree with the person who said they expected a Season 3.
It’s really a great show – I can’t recommend it enough. It’s on Netflix.
WaterGirl
@Mary G: I never watched Sopranos. Is it worth watching, even now?
Falling Diphthong
I feel ya on Lost: At the end of the penultimate season and start of the last, it seemed like they were going for a tale of two godlings who argued about the nature of humans. The white godling kept crashing hapless vehicles full of test subjects (some chosen, some packing peanuts sitting next to the chosen) into the island so they could play elaborate games, and the black godling tried to kill them off within the rules. And our Losties would be the first set to successfully say “Screw you” to both manipulative godlings, and find a way to stop them.
I interpreted the flash sideways as the way their lives would have unfolded without the island messing with them. Most were happier; some still messed up in the same ways–that resonated.
What an awesome story! I figured on rewatch I would be able to assign motive to the actors behind mysterious thing, like “Ah, this thing in Season two is Esau, and he used this method because of this rule that only became clear in the final season.”
Instead, the writers had put little thought into connecting it all, and it was about the importance of blind faith to a dude who wears white. And the message that when you die, you go to purgatory and stay there until Jack gets a clue–that is effing dark.
Falling Diphthong
How I Met Your Mother: I liked half of it (what happened with the mother–I thought that was well set up and poignant). I hated the other half–the last we saw this character was completely estranged from the rest, but just assume an unseen decade where that completely changed?
Will note that I dislike “They could, but will they?” story telling. Ted and Penny were not dating throughout the series because they hadn’t met each other: That is an excellent reason to not date someone! And any large city is going to lend itself to a wealth of “Wait, you used to go to Barbary? Me too!” where you could have met but didn’t.
Soprano2
@Falling Diphthong: Your first paragraph is the story behind one plot line in “Babylon 5”. LOL I always thought there was a 10 ft high, 100 ft long wall in the writer’s room for “Lost” showing how everything was connected, because I couldn’t think of any other way to explain how they could keep things straight (I couldn’t keep all that crap straight!). I didn’t start watching “Lost” until after S1, because when I heard the premise I thought “That’s the dumbest idea ever, that show won’t last for one season”. When I started watching I understood it’s popularity – it was like crack, I couldn’t quit watching it! I had to ration the shows, though, because if I watched too many back to back it gave me bad dreams.
Falling Diphthong
Related to my feelings on HIMYM, Castle started strong with fun mysteries, and then drowned itself in will-they-won’t-they and the required emotional dumbnesses.
I still fondly recall S2’s Hallowe’en episode: Castle has to be the grown-up-consequences parent rather than the fun cool guy, and he doesn’t blink at taking that on–it’s clear that’s been a consistent side to him that didn’t need to be seen often. Beckett made a little bed for Egbert while she eggsat–a nice caring friend moment. I loved the show then. And I agreed with Lanie, who pointed out that they had had plenty of opportunity to date and didn’t–clearly they just weren’t into each other that way.
Also, in the set-up Beckett became a cop because of her mother’s unsolved murder, bringing other people closure she didn’t get. Castle hadn’t sought information about his father because the blank slate for stories was more satisfying. I thought both of those were unique twists that really added to the characters–but the writers thought they were unresolved baggage that would need to be resolved as slowly and turgidly as possible.
Falling Diphthong
Good endings*–shows that stuck the landing.
The Good Place
Parks and Rec (and I include the pandemic special episode as the rare one-off that perfectly fit the show and the times)
Orphan Black
Avatar: The Last Airbender
Fargo S1 and 2 (These are really self-contained stories within a season, so each season finale is a series finale.)
Mad Men
Leverage
Chuck–some wobbliness in the middle, but that last episode…
Continuum–poignant, happy in the way of quiet relief rather than deep joy
*I think endings are important. If I’m really enjoying a book and can’t wait to see how it ends, I don’t want the writer to sprint out and stick in another 1000 pages.
Matt McIrvin
…I just looked it up, and, my God, there were TWO other attempts to Americanize “Fawlty Towers” before the Laroquette one–one with Harvey Korman and Betty White, one starring Bea Arthur. So, four of them, I guess. The Wikipedia article doesn’t even bother to mention the one with Whoopi, which may have been a little further off model.
syphonblue
@Searcher: which episode of what? Lost? The finale. There are only three episodes of the show that I think are really *bad* and actively skip on my rewatches: season 2’s Fire + Water, season 3’s Exposé, and season 6’s Across the Sea
Miss Bianca
@Keith P.: I’ll still feel pissed forever that Deadwood didn’t get a fourth season, however. The movie was better than nothing, but da-yum…the best TV series ever needed better than “better than nothing.” We needed to see Deadwood in flames, dammit!
One of these days I’ll have to watch John from Cincinnati, the series that Milch opted to go for instead of Deadwood Season 4. Just to see what the hell was so compelling about the concept that he gave up on his absolute masterpiece.
(Why yes, I am a Deadwood fanatic, can you tell?)
Woodrow/asim
@Falling Diphthong: I feel SO HARD for CASTLE — I was a fan of BONES, but dumped it completly after that circus episode that just underlined how much of a hack the show was becoming. CASTLE was in the same vein but felt stronger on many levels — tight stories and character development .
After…whatever the hell happened towards the end with Kanic and the lady who played Lanie getting fired (?!?) just before it was cancelled, on top of the persistent rumors that the leads really didn’t like each other much, I just skipped the whole last season. From what I heard, I did not miss much.
In other news: I adored what, to me, was a heart-rending endrun for PERSON OF INTEREST. It’s easily my favorite show of the 21st century, and the fact that it went out on the terms it did is part of why.
Falling Diphthong
@Woodrow/asim:
Oh, I really liked the end of Person of Interest. It made sense for each character.
It’s weird–when I think back on the show I remember the overarching plot about AIs and Root vs Harry at the start and Root + Harry at the end, which was gripping. The person-of-the-week stuff that framed that plot feels superfluous on rewatch.
Falling Diphthong
@Soprano2: Babylon 5 is one of those things that keeps getting recommended; this inspires me to try to check it out.
NotMax
@Falling Diphthong
The TV series worth the investment of time. The movies, not so much.
New Deal democrat
@Matt McIrvin:
Hoping this thread isn’t completely dead . . . I am glad there is a discussion of Babylon 5. I called season 5 “the year of shuffling papers,” because that seemed to be mainly what they did.
“Whatever you do, John, do not go to Zha’hadoom!” After Sheridan ignored that advice in the pivotal episode of season 3, I thought the rest of the series would pivot on whether that was the right decision or not – whether “the terrible price” Dilenn mentioned would come to pass.
When the “keepers” first appeared in season 5, I thought we were finally going to get the answer. And then it just fizzled out.
I was on a Compuserve message board at the time, and wrote of my disappointment with the ending. So I did what someone else above described as to another series: I wrote my own alternative ending, including the reappearance of B4, Sinclair, and his lost girlfriend, which would reveal that Sinclair was “John,” the son of Sheridan and Dilenn, and had been hidden in time with foster parents.
Straczynski himself appeared in the comment thread, and he was pissed!
But obviously I wasn’t alone, because the spinoffs never got traction.
OT, but recent I heard a Straczynski interview in which he revealed that the real reason for the departure of Michael O’Hare after season 1: the actor was having a severe psychotic break. Sad.
Steeplejack
Huh. Glad to see the thread still going this morning.
@Falling Diphthong:
Castle! It wasn’t really the series end, but I quit watching after the ridiculous wedding/explosion/kidnapping/amnesia(?) cliffhanger fiasco. Yeesh.
IMDB tells me that was the end of Season 6, and it staggered on for two more. Maybe I did dip into an episode or two. I remember the stories getting more labored and outlandish and the supporting characters having less to do. And then when I read somewhere that Nathan Fillion was a dick to Stana Katic that was the final straw. Another series where I don’t watch reruns now.
Poe Larity
Steeplejack: Like Person of Interest, but did you know Caviezel went Full Metal Qanon?
https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-hollywoods-jesus-jim-caviezel-went-full-qanon
Steeplejack
@Falling Diphthong:
My memory is that was in the early days of “story arc” TV and Person of Interest (like other shows) was growing into it. Also, it’s easy to forget that in those days you couldn’t just binge a series to get caught up, and even DVRs were not so widespread. So if you missed an episode or two you might be really in the dark. Hence the (no doubt network-influenced) focus on stand-alone episodes.
I might have to go back and watch the last season of Person of Interest, based on your and Woodward’s comments. As I said last night, I had a negative reaction to it. It felt nihilistic and depressing—and not in a good way!—and going out with guns blazing didn’t fit all of the characters. But I think I may have suffered a little of that discontinuity I mentioned. I missed an episode or two at one point, and I held off on watching until I could get caught up in chronological order. Maybe I still missed one somewhere.
Steeplejack
@Poe Larity:
Yes! But I try to put it out of my mind. Ugh.
Searcher
@syphonblue: Mostly a joke in reference to BSG fans who prefer to believe the last season or two never happened.
Soprano2
But it did!! He died, and was resurrected with the price that in 20 years he would just “stop”. I always understood that to be the “terrible price”. Can you imagine this – it was the VCR days, and my husband programmed the VCR to record that episode. He screwed up and we only got the first 30 minutes! I had to wait for the whole season to repeat to see that episode! Aaarrgghhhh……
I always thought it was cool that JMS interacted with the fans as much as he did. I heard him interviewed on fan podcasts a couple of times.
Soprano2
That is sad, I always wondered what happened because I would have thought JMS would have written it better if his departure had been planned.
Soprano2
Wanted to say, I loved “Person of Interest” too, but it’s been so long I don’t remember how it ended. The big bad being so powerful got tiresome, though. My husband thought the idea of an all-seeing surveillance computer was too “out there”, but I swear that show was prescient if you look at how there are cameras everywhere now! I had a hard time getting used to MIchael Emerson in that show after watching “Lost”.
tam1MI
Dead thread, but the ending g of SUPERNATURAL absolutely sucked ass.
WaterGirl
@tam1MI: BJ threads are seldom truly dead.
Ang
Another dead thread, but someone elsewhere noted that many bad endings lately seem to come from the idea that the ending should _surprise_ the viewers, but the writers haven’t earned the surprise by laying the subtle groundwork for it. A surprise ending that works is when the audience looks back at what came before and goes “Oh, I see! That makes total sense!”. These days with widespread fandom sites on the internet, so much speculation has already taken place long before the series end arrives, that the only way for the writers to surprise the audience is to basically break the world and get really weird, Battlestar Galactica style, or break the characters by having them act totally _out of character_, as many fans felt happened in Avengers: Endgame when Steve Rogers chose to stay in the past despite his character arc throughout the movies being about finding how he finds a place for himself in the modern world, with a vocation and close friends. Abandoning his long-lost, traumatized, best friend from childhood – after he had just found him – was the icing on the cake of bad writing.
WaterGirl
@Ang: Really interesting comment!