Mar 18, 2024

The 9 Worst TV Series Finales in History

If you watch every episode of a 100-episode sitcom, you've spend 2300 minutes or nearly 40 hours, not including reruns.  That's the equivalent of 19 feature-length movies or 11 novels. A suzeable chunk of your life.

If it was a 60-minute dramatic series, make that 38 feature length movies and 22 novels.  

Then comes the series finale.  There will be no more episodes.

You know the characters better than many of your real-life friends.  Saying goodbye is going to be painful.

For years you've set aside a special part of your week for the program.  You rarely missed it, and when you did, you taped it to watch later.  You watched all of the summer reruns.There will be a hole in your life for quite some time.

So you sit down for the series finale, hoping for a warm, funny, memorable sendoff.  But instead, you get garbage.  Mind-destroying, depressing, confusing, WTF garbage.

May 10, 1983: Laverne and Shirley (1976-1983).  A sitcom about two bromantic "girlfriends" sharing an apartment in 1950s Milwaukee, right?  Except by 1983, there was just Laverne, it was Los Angeles, and the heart of the 1960s (Laverne's boyfriend is a Star Trek fan).  Way to destroy your premise.

But the series finale isn't even about that; it's about Laverne's singer/dancer/male prostitute friend Carmine going to New York to audition for Hair.  

We don't find out if he got the role or not. And we don't see his nude scene.


May 21, 1990: Newhart (1982-1990): For eight years, Bob Newhart played the owner of a bed and breakfast in a small New England town full of quirky residents, whom you grew fond of over the years.  Who can forget "I'm Larry, and this is my brother Darryl, and this is my other brother Darryl?"

But on May 21st, 1990, Bob wakes up in bed as Dr. Bob Hartley, the psychologist in his old series, and tells his old wife, Emily, "What a dream I had!"  Way to destroy beloved characters, Bob!

July 20, 1994: Dinosaurs (1991-1994).  A nuclear family spoof starring cute, cuddly dinosaurs in ABC's kid-friendly Friday night lineup.  Remember "I'm the baby, gotta love me"?

How best to end the hearwarming series:  how about with a eco-catastrophe that kills every dinosaur on the planet?  Including the entire Sinclair family?  Including the baby?


May 20, 1997: Roseanne (1988-1997).  The queen of lower-middle class urban blight and her ragtag family spent eight seasons being the anti-Cosbys, not affluent, or educated, or elegant.  It featured Johnny Galecki as a teenager with a terrible hairdo.  Then Roseanne wins the lottery, and spends the last season hob-nobbing with the rich and famous.

That's not the worst of it, though -- in the last episode, we are told that this has all been a story that Roseanne has written.  The real people are all different.  Dan is dead.  Jackie is a lesbian, so her husband and child don't exist.  But Mom isn't a lesbian.  The daughters switch husbands.  Everything we thought we knew about the show is wrong.

More terrible finales after the break


May 14, 1998: Seinfeld (1989-1998). In this execrable finale for what critics termed the best series in the history of television, the Fab Four are facing jail time for violating a "good Samaritan" law that, if it existed, would get them a fine, at most.

And everyone they've interacted with comes rushing to town to complain.  Their honest attempts to help are recast as diabolical plots.  Mistakes and accidents are recast as deliberate malice.  Everything we thought we knew about the show is wrong. Oh, and they go to prison.

August 9, 1999: Mystery Science Theater 3000 (1985-1999).  For 12 years, Dr. Forrester and TV's Frank tortured the hapless heroes on the Satellite of Love, Joel/Mike and the bots, with "cheesy movies, the worst that we can find."  The only way they could keep their sanity was to riff on the cheesy plots.  In the series finale, Mike and the bots finally escape.

Do they change the world? Reveal the diabolical plot in a tell-all book?  At least find a life far removed from their 12-year imprisonment?  No -- they are shown living in a small apartment, eating pizza and riffing on bad movies.

At least they don't meet girls.



September 8, 2004: The Drew Carey Show (1995-2004).  This program was all about setting: the sprawling Winfred-Lauder Department Store in downtown Cleveland, where Drew worked as a middle-management drudge, Mr. Wick as head of personnel, and Mimi as his secretary.

So how to handle the last season: end the department store, drop some of the characters, and give the others nonsensical new jobs at a new store. Oh, and have Drew and Mimi live together, raising a 10-year old boy who was a baby last season.

May 18, 2006: Will and Grace (1998-2006).  After endless seasons of proclaiming that gay men are really women, that gay men all have sex with women,  that gay people simply do not exist, Will and Grace went out with a bang: Will and his cop beau adopt a daughter, Grace and her husband gave birth to a son, and twenty years later, the son and daughter marry.

Whatever momentary glitch being gay caused in the cosmic order, it has been resolved with a man and a woman gazing into each other's eyes forever.

May 20, 2010: Lost (2004-2010).  For five seasons, we were told that the crash survivors facing paranormal peril on a crazy island weren't in Purgatory.  Well, guess what -- they are.  Well, actually, in an alternate world where they forget that they were ever on the island, until they are reminded.  Then they get back together and go into the light.

And Vincent the Dog dies.


Gemstones Season 2 Finale: The Godfather, Butch and Sundance, nude dudes, and "My love for you will never die."  Not the series finale, but an example of a season finale that's well done.

14 comments:

  1. Dinosaurs was setup to be dramatic and deal with serious social issues. The cutesy puppets often fooled people into thinking it was just another silly kids show.

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  2. And now we know about Roseanne being a TERF and other unpleasantness. I mean, with actual working-class types, I can only blame centrists who are, well, the worst conspiracy theory they can come up with is that Trump isn't "really" rich; in reality there's a global Right with a lot of money that can only be defeated by understanding this isn't a 90s sitcom.

    But since she's a millionaire, she's just an entitled prick.

    Also, the first three seasons happened. But still, as retcons go, it's offensive. There's a reason the dream season from Dallas is unpopular.

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  3. Seinfeld was always about their lack of empathy. And Laverne and Shirley was one of the nigh-infinite Happy Days spinoffs: Mork and Mindy, Bob Newhart, Joanie Loves Chachi...

    Babylon 5 is interesting. So, they planned five seasons, and after season 3, they expected to be canceled, so they resolved every last arc (Shadow War. Earth Civil War, Narn War of Independence) in season 4. Then they got renewed for a final season on TNT and really had nothing. Some stories don't need to be told. In other news, JMS went on to say Spider-Man never dated Mary Jane and apparently fuck souls, the devil really wants to erase relationships from existence. Also, in another JMS joint, Gwen Stacy and Peter never had sex (ffs they saw I Am Curious (Yellow) together!) and moreover she was cheating on him with the Green Goblin and they even had a child together during that week Peter was off in Quebec chasing the Hulk which was the first appearance of Wolverine; Osborne would throw her off the George Washington Bridge shortly after this. Worst of all, we see the Green Goblin's O face.

    The Teen Titans cartoon ended with Beast Boy meeting Terra in school and they talk and she insists she isn't Terra and had no memories of him and...that's it. Still better than Marv Wolfman's run during and after Titans Hunt. To quote Linkara, at least they had a status quo to shake up.

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    1. Bob Newhart was not a spin-off of Happy Days. And being a fan of both of Bob Newhart's shows, the finale of "Newhart" was indeed brilliant. Bob Newharts's real wife Jenny actually came up with the idea for that finale. It was so kept under wraps, that even the camera crew didn't know what they were going to shoot until they removed the curtain right before the scene.

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  4. The problem with most long running shows is that they don't know when to quit-"Lost" went bad on season 2 when they changed most of what made it intriguing- never thought of Carmine as male prostitute- but yeah he could have made money hustling- now that would have been an interesting spin off

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  5. I enjoyed both Newhart shows, the old one and the new one, and I actually thought the ending was kind of funny, when Bob woke up in bed next to Suzanne Pleshette. I appreciated both shows, and the ending sort of connected them together. It was all in fun. I suppose, though, if you weren't familiar with the first show, the ending could seem weird.

    I also thought the final episode of "Six Feet Under" had a good, poignant ending, and was a good way way to say goodbye to the characters.

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  6. I always liked the final "St. Elsewhere". Probably because I had a crush on Chad Allen.

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  7. Only disagreement is Newhart which I, and I recall all of the rest of the world at the time, thought was brilliant. The ironic comparison of his first, wryly comic, and second, supremely farcical, series was the perfect fusion of their disparate elements.

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    1. I felt betrayed, since it negatived the entire second series and characters as "just a dream." Although actually First Series Bob was just referring to the events in the last episode, which were admittedly awful. Since they were not the same character, we could maintain that First Bob was dreaming of another person's reality. But that's a mental gymnastics to go through just to preserve the "reality" of the Second Series.

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  8. Dinosaurs: remember "We need another Timmy" (on a popular science tv-show, the boy who assists the presenter keeps getting killed)? It was not so cuddly after all. I liked the ending, skipping between the dinos and a present-day palaeontological dig with a very good spoof of sir David Attenborough. Newsflash on the dino-tv: "A giant meteor is about to hit the Earth!" - couple of seconds later: "No it isn't!" A different ending was impossible, the dinosaurs did die out, and everybody knows / knew that. Thankfully we did not see it happen.
    I missed many of the lame endings, because I stopped watching the series long before that.

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    1. I don't remember the modern dig, just the lights going out. Other endings were certainly possible. Everybody eventually dies, but tv show don't commonly end with "and then they died." The events of the tv series are only selections from the characters' lives, not their lives from beginning to end.

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    2. My brother and I had a knock-off doll of the Baby Dinosaur at the time. He didn't talk, and he had little purple horns all over, but the color scheme was close, and he was STILL cute AF.

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  9. The worst thing about the Laverne & Shirley ending is that Carmine makes a homophobic crack, kind of ruining the character for me. Plus, you're gonna be homophobic as you try to make a living in Broadway musicals? Good luck with that. PLUS, he was nervous about the possibility of his roommate dating guys instead of girls, but even if the roommate HAD been gay, there just would have been that much less competition for oh-so-straight Carmine, so he should have WELCOMED it. Plus, what was up with all the tap dancing in that show? Were they funded by big tap or something?

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  10. Context might help with your Newhart problem. It was an obvious reference to the much bemoaned Dallas dream season and I (at least) found it brilliant.

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