Ask Lemmy

One that made me feel like I had wasted time watching the show was How I Met Your Mother. It was a fun show and really picked up in quality in seasons three - five. They could have ended the show in season 7, really, if they had planned for it. Season 8 was kind of a bore, and season 9 was bad, as all of the season took place over a weekend. And when we got the finale of the show... I was so tired of holding on to what might come that it really hit me negatively how they ended it.

That being said, Game of Thrones ended so poorly that I was baffled as to how haphazard and dull the writing and storytelling was that I, just like a lot of others, held on to hope that the last few episodes might bring things all around. (Morgan Freeman as Narrator - It didn't.) While cracks were showing since late season 6, the finale of that show was horrible. The payoffs didn't come, and everything just felt so rushed, watered down, and a tremendous feeling that content was missing from the season, if they were to help make sense of the finale.

It's the one where the show was cancelled by the idiot studio and we never had any closure to the show so many of us really loved.

ALF got captured by the FBI

Genuinely controversial or just bad?

The Lost finale is probably both

Unrelated, just realized how the advent of streaming has changed the way we talk about past TV series.

Before streaming we would say the Lost finale was

past tense, because it had finished airing

Nowadays, no show really finishes airing so it's discussed in a present tense

Sorry, I'm old

It's Game of Thrones, by far.

And they can't use the excuse that they ran out of material and had to write their own ending. Tokyo Ghoul Root A did it to moderate effect, and Fullmetal Alchemist (the first one from 2003) did it extremely well. They just couldn't write worth a damn so they said Fuck It and flipped the table. They'd already made their money from it. They had good options and they walked right past them. I guess they just wanted it to be a surprise?

LOST gets an honourable mention for being so weird. But I feel like they painted themselves into a corner, though that's no excuse. Again looking to anime as the standard bearer for storytelling others should be measured by, Assassination Classroom painted itself into a tighter corner. (Long story short, alien blows up the moon and threatens to blow up Earth if humans can't kill him in a year... but only some students are really allowed to try and he can only be harmed by rubber bullets and knives that wouldn't harm a real person — traditional weapons, whatever you can think of, have no effect. Oh, and he can also move at, like, the speed of light, squared, or something dumb like that. And holy crap what a stupid ending, but... they made it work. It's still stupid, but it worked better than the LOST ending, and the LOST writers had a lot more space to work in.)

Can't talk about controversial TV endings without mentioning St. Elsewhere. For a long time this show had the most infamous. The big reveal that the entire run of the show took place in the mind of an autistic boy with a snow globe was not a hit with fans and remains an object lesson in how to rug-pull your fan base.

The Seinfeld one always gets a lot of shit

The Sopranos final episode immediately springs to mind

Stargate: Atlantis

I hated how a show about exploring and pioneering ended with them turning tail and running back home.

Also, I know it is an American show, but sometimes I would just love to see the spacecraft landing someplace other than by a national landmark in the US.

What if they had landed in say Norway, or the Gulf of Finland? The diplomacy would have been very interesting.

Battlestar Galactica.

The Prisoner probably. Nothing is resolved. #6 escapes... or does he? The Individual was #1 the whole time.

Lost

These Are The Voyages is definitely unpopular

Something that I don't see mentioned a lot outside of fandom, even though apparently the show was quite big after Netflix picked it up. Lucifer arguably started going downhill in S3, mostly because Fox execs wanted to turn it into a soap opera. Which of course failed, so they dropped the show altogether, only for Netflix to "save" it.

I put that in quotation marks because I kind of wish they just let the show die at the cliffhanger instead of letting the narcs in charge run it into ground. Narcs being the two lapsed Catholic showrunners. The show was still salvageable by the end of S5, but S6 retroactively destroyed everything, making it unwatchable for half of the fandom, while the other half was vaping copium.

I'm not going to write the synopsis, because fuck that burning cesspit, but these are some of the issues with it:

• abuse apologia and perpetuation of generational trauma "for the greater good" in a universe with an omni-potent god
• uncontested sentiment that bio children are worth more than adopted/step-children
• sex shaming
• rampant misogyny
• glorification of suffering
• hamfisted tragic ending clumsily masked with a "bittersweet" wrapping
• plus many more very Christian sentiments that nobody asked for (except for the part of the fandom that can't separate their religion from a TV show).

I have never watched GoT, so I'm not a good judge on this, but not a negligible part of the fandom claimed the Lucifer season/finale was worse. So there's that.

The "Attack On Titan" finale was a bunch of nonsense.

Everything just whipped back and forth at the whims of being artsy. None of it aligned with what the show had been known for in writing or foreshadowing. Characters constantly acting unreasonable for the sake of conflict. Shit just stopped making sense and everything felt like it was being made up on the spot.

All of the Ymir lore felt forced. Why tf was it a worm?

Controversial as in it ruined an otherwise great show? Dexter.

Everyone was very shocked back in the day at the ending of Seinfeld.

The Bob Newhart Show famously ended the series by saying the whole show was nothing but a dream.