FromOzarktoGame of ThronestoHow I Met Your Mother, some of the greatest TV shows ever made deserved a much better ending than they got. Endings are tough to pull off in any medium, but they’re especially tricky in television, because they have to live up to years of anticipation, and they can’t be planned in advance.
Due to the fickle nature of the TV industry, it’s a sadly common occurrence that shows get canceled before they have a chance to end organically on their own terms. This can leave a great story unfinished, or even end it ona cliffhanger that’s doomed to never be resolved.
In other cases, the creators have the chance to end the story on their own terms with a dedicated final season, but they still manage to botch it.Some TV shows have gotten a perfect ending, but it’s extremely rare. These shows deserved a lot better.
For five seasons ofQuantum Leap, Dr. Sam Beckett leaped all over his timeline, going in and out of the bodies of random people. Throughout the whole series, he hoped that the next leap would be the leap home.
There was just a bleak title card announcing that he never returned home — and it didn’t even spell his name right.
But when the series ended, there was no leap home. There was just a bleak title card announcing that he never returned home — and it didn’t even spell his name right.Quantum Leapdeserved an ending where Sam made the leap homeand got back to his own life.
Netflix’s horror comedySanta Clarita Dietmanaged a totally unique balance of satirizing the cultural quirks of California and shocking audiences with a realtor’s transformation into a zombie. The show’s three seasons were full of unexpected twists and turns that expanded on the lore.
Season 3 ended with the biggest twist yet:a zombie spider crawled into Joel’s brain and Sheila bit him in a last-ditch effort to save him. Fans deserved to see where this twist would go, and the characters deserved a more conclusive ending to their story.
Hannibalwas one of the greatest horror shows ever made — it pushed the boundaries of gore, violence, and dark subject matter on network TV — but because of that, it struggled to find an audience and got canceled after season 3. In the season 3 finale, the show ends on a cliffhanger just as it’s getting started.
There’s been talk of aHannibalrevival in the years since the show was canceled.
In Will and Hannibal’s climactic showdown with Dolarhyde, Dolarhyde’s horrific actions push Will to the brink. AsWill embraces the brutality that Hannibal always wanted for him, the two seem to finally understand each other. But then, the series ended with their fate left ambiguous.
Ozarkwas one of the bestBreaking Badclones to come along in the wake of the AMC show’s success, but it had a much more underwhelming ending. InOzark’s series finale, Ruth walks into a trap and, as Mel threatens the Byrdes, Jonah comes out with a shotgun and the screen cuts to black as a shot is heard.
Ruth is too smart to go out the way she did — she was always one step ahead of her enemies — and the cut-to-black on the sound of a gunshot is one of the most clichéd, cop-out endings in the book. This ending is so bad thatit hurtsOzark’s rewatch value.
How I Met Your Mother’s ending was ruined by its concept. Since Ted Mosby is telling the entire story to his son and daughter, and those child actors were aging beyond how long it would take to tell an anecdote,parts ofHow I Met Your Mother’s ending had to be shot in season 2.
Thiswrote the series finale into a corner way too early. It determined that the mother was dead and that Ted would end up with Robin. But by the time the show ended, seven seasons later, it had spent a whole season turning the mother into a beloved character, andTed and Robin’s romancehad reached a perfect stopping point.
In late 2019,Netflix renewedGLOWfor a fourth and final seasonthat would resolve all the storylines and character arcs. But as the COVID pandemic took hold, the streamer reversed that decision, called off the fourth season, and left the series unfinished.
This delightful dramedy was one of Netflix’s best original shows. It had a lovable cast, a flashy ‘80s setting, and a fascinating real-life story about a syndicated women’s professional wrestling circuit.Surely Netflix could’ve weathered the costs of finishing the final seasonto close the book on one of its flagship shows.
Throughout its run,Dextertold the riveting, darkly hilarious story of a serial killer who targets other serial killers. Dexter Morgan had the irrepressible urge to kill, so he used it for good and rid Miami of his fellow serial killers as a sort of vigilante. He spent the whole series trying to lead a normal life.
Dexter killed his sister, abandoned his son, grew a mountain-man beard, and became a lumberjack.
By the end of the series, he’d almost achieved that. He had a family who he loved, and he was finally doing positive things. But then, in the finale,the show abandoned all that progress and character development. Dexter killed his sister, abandoned his son, grew a mountain-man beard, and became a lumberjack.
My Name is Earlcouldn’t have ended with less closure. The season 4 finale revealed that Earl was Dodge’s real father, evicted him from the motel, and had his bank account frozen by Little Chubby. A caption said, “To be continued,” but the story would not be continued. NBC would cut the series short, with no chance of resolution.
Not only wasMy Name is Earla great show; it was a really inspiring exploration of the concept of karma. It was all about a petty crook righting the wrongs of his past by making up for all the misdeeds he included on his list. The show deserved an ending where Earl finally finished working through that list.
In the first fewseasons ofGame of Thrones, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss proved themselves to be some of the best adapters in the business. They turned George R.R. Martin’s sprawling fantasy saga into compulsive television. But when they ran out of source material to adapt, the show took a nosedive.
When they ran out of source material to adapt, the show took a nosedive.
In the last couple of seasons, Benioff and Weiss only had Martin’s rough plot outlines to work from.They adapted the bullet points of Martin’s narrative plans without taking the time to flesh them out or connect the dots, so a lot of the show’s latter-day plot turns are jarring and nonsensical.
The endings ofDexterandGame of ThronesandHow I Met Your Motherwere all frustrating, but at least the writers made a concerted effort to definitively conclude the story at hand. The ending ofTwo and a Half Menis especially egregious because it doesn’t even attempt that. Instead, itdredges up Chuck Lorre’s feud with Charlie Sheen.
Two and a Half Menaired four seasons with Ashton Kutcher before finally ending its run.
Two and a Half Men’s series finaleopenly insults the audience. Ashton Kutcher says directly to the camera that he can’t wait for it to be over, and in the final moments, Lorre demolishes the fourth wall to get one last jab at Sheen. Fans spent 12 years endeared to the Harpers; they deserved so much better than this.
