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Viewers demand so much of television series finales. A great finale has to be exciting. A great finale has to tie up all of the plot's loose ends. A great finale has to give us emotional closure. When a show nails it, fans glow with reverence for years to come. When a show fails to stick the landing, no one cares very much about the degree of difficulty. The audience is so deeply disappointed, that no excuses, from rumors of network tampering to a revolving door of writers, can hold back the tide of Twitter rage.
More often than not, the viewing world is disappointed by television finales. Rarely are these disappointments spectacuarly bad. Ill-timed explosions and unforeseen hookups aren't the stuff bad finales are made of. More often than not, the last episode tries to do too much and ends up doing nothing much at all. It's rare that a finale leaves you shaking your fist in rage. As evidenced by these recent underwhelming TV series finales, it's more often the case that you stare at the screening and ask yourself, "Is that it?"
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The World of David the Gnome (Nickelodeon)
Air date: 6/27/1988
The generally uplifting Nicktoon (and European import) The World of David the Gnometook a dark turn at the end of the show's short run. In the finale, viewers learned that even though they'd only known David for two seasons, the character was approaching his 400th birthday. How do gnomes celebrate their quadricentennial? They die. They turn into trees and die, leaving their trusty forest friends to roam the world cold and alone. No wonder Nick Jr. reran this heartwarming tale for 20 years straight.
ALF (NBC)
Air date: 3/24/1990
What better ending can you give a lovable alien puppet than to have him murdered in the name of science? The Tanner family spent four years protecting ALF from the prying forceps of the Alien Task Force, a group that wanted nothing more than to dissect ALF and run experiments on his rubber corpse.
It looked like ALF was going to return to his people, the Melmacians, in the final episode, but ALF missed his flight. We leave ALF as he is being surrounded on all sides by Task Force Agents. This was supposed to be a cliffhanger, but the show never got to air its true final episode. As a result, the series ended with one of the darker puppet fates the world has ever seen. Man, everbody was looking forward to that dissection.
Quantum Leap (NBC)
Air date: 5/5/1993
Until they catch the finale, viewers of Quantum Leap assume they're watching a sci-fi spin on the story of purgatory. If you paid attention to the protagonist's name, Sam Becket (Scott Bakula), then you might have gotten a clue as to the true nature of the story being told, and it's far from an uplifting tale. This wasn't a one hundred episode long tale of redemption, but a snippet of a man's infinite Sisyphisian labors.
Just how the characters in Waiting for Godot never stop marking time before Godot's arrival, Becket never gets to go home. It's not that a sentimental ending would have been welcome, but watching your protagonist compare his life to that of a priest only to conclude, "At least a priest can quit" is pretty much the opposite of a feel-good ending. Just in case you had any hope left after that, the producers offered one last title card. It read: "Dr. Sam Becket never returned home."
Cheers (NBC)
Air date: 5/20/1993
As the lights go out on Cheers for the last time, you realize that the finale of the show about the bar is great because it's underwhelming. The three-part finale sets the stage for a grand, romantic reunion between Diane (Shelley Long) and Sam (Ted Danson). After seeing that plot out almost to the strangely bitter end, the final episode of the three-parter calls a mulligan and brings Sam back to Cheers.
It's fitting that the last two people in the bar are Norm (George Wendt) and Sam. As Norm makes his last exit back to the wife he's always hiding from, he reminds Sam that he "can never be unfaithful to your one true love." As Sam tells one final customer that the bar is closed and straightens that picture of Geronimo, he realizes the meaning behind Norm's words, and you leave Cheers underwhelmed and totally satisfied.
Roseanne (ABC)
Air date: 5/20/1997
Conventional wisdom dictates that the worst way to end a series is with the revelation that the entire thing was a dream (shouts out to St. Elsewhere). Roseanne's finale somehow found an even worse way to call it quits. The final ten minutes of Roseanne reveal, via voice-over narration, that Roseanne "wrote" an alternate reality for herself and then played it out in the psychically damaged television show of her mind.
After years of bawdy, rough-around-the-edges banter, you're left with Roseanne sitting in front of a typewriter, reflecting sadly on feminism and family. Though this last minute narrative shift negated the ridiculous plot point that was the Connor's winning the lottery and all the subsequent shenanigans that marked a rough final season, it's hard to think of a worse ending to a sitcom than melancholy monologuing in a dark basement.
Seinfeld (NBC)
Air date: 5/14/1998
Episodes like "The Puffy Shirt" and "The Soup Nazi" will forever remain among the most beloved stories in sitcom history, but the series finale of Seinfeld has a far more dubious legacy. The elegantly awkward rhythms of the greatest Seinfeld episodes are nowhere to be found here; instead, you're treated to plotting the leads into an hour-long clip show.
Looking back on it, it's amazing that audiences expected a great send-off from a show that reveled in the banal and exceled at the small moments. Trying to apply a grand scale to Seinfeld was a fool's errand, and it shows in an episode that labors and strains more than all of the other episodes of Seinfeld combined and still comes up short.
Mad About You (NBC)
Air date: 5/24/1999
"One of the more complicated end-of-the-television-season rituals is saying goodbye to one-time hit series that have overstayed their welcome." Apparently, these words, courtesy of the Baltimore Sun's David Zurawik, were the kindest thing you could say about the finale of Mad About You. Industry insiders nicknamed the show "NBC's Titanic" during its final years, as millions of dollars were tied up in Helen Hunt and Paul Reiser's salaries even though the show wasn't even winning its time slot.
The sitcom ended in about as strange a way as could be, with the protagonists' child, Mabel (Janeane Garofalo), all grown up and narrating the sendoff. A fractured combination of a clip show and choppy glimpses into the family's future punctuated a show that spent its final two seasons unraveling as it isolated itself from the audience that once made it a hit. That's some sad shit.
The X-Files (FOX)
Air date: 5/19/2002
Another legendary series, another clip show: The X-Files came to a close in much the same way that Seinfeld called it quits, with a trial set up to motivate a greatest hits reel. With Seinfeld's conclusion and the prison sentence, at least it felt like Larry David was trying to make a statement. The only statement that the X-Files finale seems intent on making is that there is more story left to tell. Not only does the finale raise several new questions that could (and would) be explored in subsequent spinoffs and films, but the final scene shows you Mulder and Scully ready to continue the good fight, just in case you had any doubts. This isn't to say that every finale needs to provide closure, but it would have been nice to wrap up a decade of storytelling before worrying about the future viabilty of a franchise.
Felicity (The WB)
Air date: 5/22/2002
If you are among the legions of viewers dissatisfied with the Felicity finale, try to take some solace in the fact that this ending was not what the writers intended. It turns out that the original 17 episode order for the final season was extended to 22 after the failure of a new show. This led to a strange arc involving time travel to an alternate timeline, effectively resetting the season—not standard for teen dramas. Many of the show's faithful prefer to view the season's seventeenth episode, "The Graduate," as the series finale and write off the magic spells and time travel as a bad dream.
Sex and the City (HBO)
Air date: 2/22/2004
How could you write a fulfilling ending to Sex and the City? The joy of the series was always about the dating misadventures of independent women. The traditional ending for shows about singles is for the protagonists to ride off into the sunset of a family brownstone in Park Slope. How could such an ending be satisfying to fans who have relished half a decade of brunching and fucking? Thankfully, Samantha gets to have an ending that doesn't involve being coupled off, but the other three waltz off into (semi-)wedded bliss.
That Carrie ended up with Big has to be the least satisfying of these women's fates. Though it was long assumed that Carrie would end up with Big, it's hard to view their coupling as anything but a blow against the independence these women had asserted throughout the show's run. To the bitter end, Big is nothing more than a rich jerk, treating Carrie with the most condescending of kid gloves. If this is the happy ending of the Manhattanite fairy tale, then everyone should be glad that we've been priced out of the borough.
Friends (NBC)
Air date: 5/6/2004
Some sitcoms, like Cheers, stand the test of time. If you approach that series now, you can cut through the laugh track and cheesy one-liners and find the show's heart. Friends, which premiered a year after Cheers ended, doesn't have that same ageless quality.
The latter years of Friends in particular, with their increasingly dramatic tone, do not hold up well today. The main plot of the finale involved Ross (David Schwimmer) confessing his love for Rachel (Jennifer Aniston). For today's serialization heavy television, it's jokes to think that they were still wrestling with that issue after ten years. Friends captured a cultural moment, no question, but the most interesting thing about reviewing the series finale now is how exactly so many fans hung with Friends for a decade.
The West Wing (NBC)
Air date: 5/14/2006
A logical conclusion isn't always the most interesting choice. After two terms of Josiah Bartlett's (Martin Sheen) presidency, it was time to pass the torch to Matt Santos (Jimmy Smits). Though this made sense as a cap to the show's seven season run, the finale lacks momentum as a result of the transfer-of-power plot. The swearing in of one president and the exodus of another lacks dramatic tension, especially when they come from the same party. The West Wing team clearly understands this, and attempts to compensate with a swelling score and lingering on important items in hopes creating an elegiac tone. Instead, the finalé comes off as stale and plodding, with the grace of a "best of" clip show without the reward of "best of" clips.
Chappelle's Show (Comedy Central)
Air date: 7/23/2006
Few shows in their prime have ended with as much disappointment as Chappelle's Show. Just as athletes rarely hang up their cleats in their prime, hit TV shows don't often make a voluntary exit, especially not after two short seasons. Dave Chappelle's reasons for stepping away from his show are well-documented and pretty hard to argue with, but that doesn't mean that anyone is ready to look back at what could have been and not hurt at least a little bit.
Chappelle's Show ended with three awkward "Lost Episodes" that aired almost two full years after the conclusion of the second season. Though Chappelle is physically in the sketches that end the series, his spirit isn't anywhere to be found. The interludes are awkward, the sketches rough, uncurated. In his thoughtful, melancholy analysis of the Lost Episodes over at the the A.V. Club, Ryan McGee describes the beginning of the "Lost Episodes" with a sentence that sums up the entire ill-fated third season: "Neither [Charlie Murphy nor Donnell Rawlings] seems quite sure what to do, so they simply throw things over to one of the few sketches completed before Dave's departure." Sad, man.
Deadwood (HBO)
Air date: 8/27/2006
Like the titular boomtown, the world of Deadwood couldn't help but expand. If the show had ended after season two, viewers could have swallowed the unanswered questions, provided they had enough whiskey to wash them down. Though we wouldn't have seen Hearst's (Gerald McRaney) machinations, his arrival foretold that civilization would win out, that the West was shortly be tamed.
The end of season three leaves viewers in a far more complicated place. As the dust settles, civilization has already crept into Deadwood, political machinations have slowly overtaken gunplay, and several mysteries remain unsolved. In season three, we watch Hearst begin the crusade of cruel, civilized capitalism, but we never really get to see the full extent of the collateral damage this his bid to absorb Deadwood into civilization would exact on both sides. It's a damn shame.
Gilmore Girls (The WB)
Air date: 5/13/2007
It's almost hard to call the Gilmore Girls finale underwhelming because no one was expecting to be whelmed by an Amy Sherman-Palladino-less season. Despite a valiant effort from substitute showrunner David S. Rosenthal, the finale, like the rest of the final season, was a disappointment. From the ill-advised, awkwardly executed Christiane Amanpour cameo at the top of the episode, the series finale is a strange, unfulfilling exit from Star's Hollow. Before the finale ends, we see Rory (Alexis Bledel) head out on the campaign trail with Barack Obama, a final tidy reconciliation between Lorelai (Lauren Graham) and Luke (Scott Gordon-Patterson), and a spa renovation peace offering from Emily (Kelly Bishop). Though all of it is sufficiently quirky, none of it is sufficiently earned. We do have to give credit where credit's due, however: ending the series at Luke's before dawn was the right move.
The Sopranos (HBO)
Air date: 6/10/2007
"Underwhelming" doesn't necessarily mean "wrong." The series finale of The Sopranos caused an uproar when the screen famously cut to black, but there's a beauty to the show's finale that's been rarely matched.
Chase recently reflected on the finale while making the rounds with his film Not Fade Away. He said, "Tony was dealing in mortality every day. He was dishing out life and death. And he was not happy. He was getting everything he wanted, that guy, but he wasn't happy. All I wanted to do was present the idea of how short life is and how precious it is. The only way I felt I could do that was to rip it away."
If Tony (James Gandolfini) had gone out in a blaze of glory, or at least a blaze of some kind, it would have provided an ending that was antithetical to Chase's purposes. Maybe Tony died that day. Maybe he died months later. Maybe he died years later. But, eventually he will die, unhappy, always looking over his shoulder, wondering when the demons of his past will catch up with him. That's what makes it brilliant.
Battlestar Galactica (Sci-Fi Channel)
Air date: 3/20/2009
Few shows can sustain the dramatic tension that Battlestar Galactica managed throughout its four season run. Though the final season was given to strange mysticism that softened the show's usually lean action, through three quarters of the three part finale, it looked like Battlestar might have an ending for the ages. So much is resolved in the final episodes, culminating in the final assault on the Cylons.
Unfortunately, the execution falls off in the final minutes of the series, when the prophetic undertones of the rest of the season come home to roost. What had been a non-stop, pulse-pounding series ends on a contemplative, ponderous note. Religious, philosophical, and scientific moralizing overtake story in one of the stranger finales in recent memory. As "All Along the Watchtower" plays and cartoonish robots fill our screen, you just wish that the series had ended fifteen minutes earlier and that the creators had trusted the thematic strength of their earlier work.
Prison Break (FOX)
Air date: 5/15/2009
On the Mount Rushmore of shows that started out brilliantly and quickly fizzled, Homeland and Heroes are guaranteed busts, but Prison Break deserves the George Washington spot. You see, at the end of seasons one, the prison breakers broke out of prison. Needless to say, this presented a creative challenge to a writing staff who had created a hit show about a prison break. After four years, several more prison breaks and no clear direction, the show was given a mercy shanking. We're not going to bother getting into the convoluted season four plot, but suffice it to say that it doesn't involve a prison break, and does involve stealing a computer chip and the UN. OK, sure.
Heroes (NBC)
Air date: 2/8/2010
After a promising start, Heroes limped through the rest of its run. The writers' strike, staffing changes, and ratings issues assured that the show that faltered after starting off strong would never regain its footing. Of course, the ridiculous plots didn't help either. Sadly, the end of Heroes fits right in with the latter years of the series.
The uneven finale suffers from rhythm issues out the gate and builds to a climax that isn't close to satisfying as a season finale, let alone a series finale. To be fair, the writers didn't know this would be the end of the road during production, though you have to wonder if it would have made much of a difference if they did know for sure that the end was near.
Lost (ABC)
Air date: 5/23/2010
Apparently, the wounds that the Lost finale visited upon some fans are still fresh. The occasion of the Breaking Bad finale was enough to prompt fans to go after Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse one more time for not giving them the finale they wanted.
In his thorough review of the finale, Alan Sepinwall gave a nice breakdown of the notoriously mixed reception of the Lost's last episode. He said, "If you were on board with Darlton's thesis that this was a show about character first and foremost...then I suspect you loved 'The End.' If, on the other hand, you cared more about the mysteries than the people in it...then I image you found 'The End' to be quite maddening."
Whatever end of the spectrum you fall on, you have to admit that Lost's writers had an unenviable task with the finale. Some shows have trouble giving fans closure on one central question. Lost was a show that introduced more questions than any other show, and as a result was doomed to disappoint no matter how the finale was built.
Big Love (HBO)
Air date: 3/20/2011
Suprise endings can sometimes feel like more of a cop-out than rote and predictable conclusions. The culmination of Big Love was one of those times. Bill Henrikson (Bill Paxton), he of the condescending smugness and crazy extended family, didn't exactly have good odds of making it out of the the Big Love finale alive. Unfortunately, the choice the writers made in dispatching Bill was a total surprise and wholly unsatisfying. Though watching the wives continue their lives without Bill was fulfilling, the circumstances of Bill's "martyrdom" were anything but.
Entourage (HBO)
Air date: 9/11/2011
Entourage died as it lived: never terribly funny, never terribly dramatic, and never terribly interesting. No matter how much money or how many bedpost notches the boys collected, the stakes were never very high; there was never any doubt that the crew would triumph. If you asked someone who had only seen the pilot of Entourage how the series ended, they would likely guess that everyone gets exactly what they want. That person would be right.
Vince (Adrien Grenier), E (Kevin Connolly), and Ari (Jeremy Piven) get the girls, everyone looks poised to get more money, and we get to watch our "heroes" fly away on private jets. We don't have any official spoilers for the upcoming film as of yet, but it's likely a safe bet that you're going to see more of the same.
Weeds (Showtime)
Air Date: 9/16/2012
"When did you stop watching?"
This questions is a part of virtually every conversation you'll ever have about Weeds. Despite ratings that were good enough for Showtime to keep the series on life support for eight seasons, you rarely run into someone who will admit to watching for the entire run of the show. The first three seasons of Weeds were a tightly plotted exploration of a woman's transition from suburban mom to drug kingpin. At the end of the third season, audiences were left fulfilled and surpised. Then, the show continued.
Five seasons of winding around the country and grasping for story motive followed, after the central question, "How far will this mother go for her family?" was left for dead in the flames of Agrestic. The Weeds series finale is a perfect encapsulation of what the final seasons of the show were: shoehorned characters and poorly tied loose ends working to drive a show that had long ago run out of gas.
The Secret Life of the American Teenager (ABC Family)
Air date: 6/3/2013
It's probably fair to say that The Secret Life of the American Teenager will not be receiving an Emmy retrospective years down the road. Even so, this epically disappointing series finale is underwhelming even by the show's already low standards. This universally reviled series send-off is half clip show, half disappointment. A wedding the audiences had long been expecting didn't happen. One of the show's more sexually liberated characters delivers an uncomfortable monologue that includes the lines, "So what if I'm alone? I'm happy. It's OK to be alone," and a girl dances by herself after she decides to be "just friends" with her longtime crush. On second thought, it sounds like underwhelming might be the kindest thing you could say about this finale.
Dexter (Showtime)
Air date: 9/22/2013
The Internet felt waves of relief when Dexter finished its labored march from critical darling to premium cable pariah after eight long seasons. Bloggers celebrated the show's finale by taking a couple more gut punches at a series that hasn't won much cricial praise since the Bush administration. Every possible negative angle has been taken, every criticism leveled at this laughable ending to a problematic series.
The only question that remains is where will Dexter's finale rank among the all time worst? Right now, it appears that Dexter's eleventh hour turn as a lumberjack is a first ballot worst finale hall of famer. Sure, airing opposite Breaking Bad's coda didn't do the episode any favors, but it seems a sure bet that Dexter will be remembered for having one of the worst finales of all time.
R.I.P. Brawny Man Dex.