What is the most controversial TV finale?

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.

Game of Thrones went from a worldwide cultural phenomenon to barely a footnote pretty much overnight. That says a ton on how disappointingly the show ended.
My partner was a GOT fan. He was so utterly disappointed by the ending that still nowadays he would randomly stop doing whatever he was doing to look at me and say “I am still mad”. He is such a peaceful person this is honestly the only thing he has ever been genuinely mad about… so I always know what he is referring to.
Totally agree on both.
I read the GOT books, and I'm convinced that HBO is the reason why Martin messed this all up. There was a whole other Targeryen, Aegon VI, that was running around being some charismatic cool dude and also making a claim to the Iron Throne. HBO just cut him out, and I'm convinced that what was supposed to happen was everything was him vs. Danerys at the end, and he took the iron throne, and would have been sitting on it when the dragon fried it, which would have killed him and the throne and left Danerys as the obvious true ruler because she has that fire magic.
But we'll never know because Martin cashed his checks and peaced out.
Let's be honest cracks started showing in season 2 its just the source material covered it up for a while.
- I was never super into it, i only watched it sonetimes when my girlfriend was watching it.
  Aside from not finding it very funny to begin with, i never really got the premise. The whole show was the guy telling his children how he met their mother. Whenever he dated someone it was like: is it gonna be her?? Is it her?? And there was an on and off thing with the other main character. Omg is it her? But the children have to know the name of their own mother. So they know and he's just telling them who he banged before he met their mother?
I see a lot of hate for the HIMYM finale and... I truly do not get it. I will not praise it as a cinematic masterpiece, because it isn't. But it is an ending that they have been building up since the very beginning, and it makes perfect sense given the characters and what they went through. There are a lot of show endings that cannot claim that at all, with random last-minute additional arcs or forgetting things from earlier seasons. I haven't seen any of that in HIMYM. So yeah, I think it's a decent ending overall, and I truly do not understand the hate it gets.
As for GoT; yeah that went into shitshow territory from season 7 for me personally.

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.

"You can't take the sky from me..."
( ˘ ɜ˘) ♬♪♫
- 🍃
- Which actually had a kinda nice ending in Justice League Unlimited.
Don’t speak that way of The Orville
- Oh no, they cancelled it? I was still hoping for a season 😢
Santa Clarita Diet was the last straw for our Netflix subscription.
Ahh yes, Firefly..... Actually, pretty much every Joss Wedon project except Buffy. I guess SMG was able to rebuff his shit better than a lot of other actresses.
“You know the kind of guy who does nothing but bad things and then wonders why his life sucks? Well, that was me.”
Who was Earl jr.’ dad?
Outer Range, I’m so pissed that show got canceled.
The 2400?

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

Never apologize for being old
Get mad at them for having the audacity to be so young
I'm one of the weirdos who liked the finale!
- What chaotic god has corrupted you for finding pleasure in something that tormented me? ;)
I think that even the best writer in the world cannot find a satisfying reveal of 10 years worth of secrets build-up.
I think the final was the perfect balance between tying all the loose ends and not fully explaining what the island is. (Or rather, they did in some way, they just left some bits to the imagination).
And to everyone thinking that the finale makes it so the entire previous seasons did not happen, sorry but you just didn't get it.
- The only thing to "get" is that the show was written solely to drive engagement: constant cliffhangers at the cost of a coherent or consistent plot.
But reruns have always been a thing
- Not like this

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.)

With Lost they repeatedly said that nobody, not a single person, had guessed what the ending was, not realizing that this was one of the first shows to go massive for fan theories on the Internet so everything even remotely plausable had been guessed.
So yeah, they painted themselves into that corner fair and square as it was clear they had no fucking clue what the ending was when they started that show.
If it was me, I would have admitted someone guessed it and just picked whichever fan theory seemed the most sensible to me.
- And it was the most obvious ending that everyone had guessed sitting int their couch with friends or family that didn't even need internet theories. They made it sound like they had such a clever ending and it wasn't even close.
  I think it's incredibly likely they had no idea how to end it until they had to do a last season and they went with the most obvious ending that was deeply unsatisfying.
How is the Game of Thrones ending controversial? It's pretty unanimously hated.
- The controversy is not amongst us, the audience, it is the vitriol directed at the show runners by the fanbase.

ALF got captured by the FBI

Not exactly a bad ending to the show but Dinosaurs killed off EVERYONE in the show's finale. It was more than a little depressing.
- I don't remember that lol
He did?!?
- Even worse, he got a shitty movie after that.
- yeah, the show thought it had another season, but it didn't

The Seinfeld one always gets a lot of shit

I loved Curb Your Enthusiasm recognizing that.
- Larry’s self awareness is incredible. The references in curb to it had me in tears
- "Huh, mistrial? Why didn't we think of that before..", yeah, I chuckled when I saw that.
But I loved how it was incorporated into Dharma & Greg. They wanted to use it to have sex in public because everyone in the US would be busy watching the Seinfeld finale. Every so often they'd glance at a TV screen, chuckle, and say "That Kramer!"
That's actually all I remember about it. Don't know if I ever even saw the actual finale.

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.

But it did lead to the fanon that, because of crossover episodes, basically all media takes place in that kid's mind.
Including reality - "Cops" is in the crossover chain even if you don't count celebrity appearances as themselves.
- The Tommy Westphall Universe. If you take the spin-off characters from St Elsewhere, and the spin-offs from the spin-offs, and character crossovers to other shows, it means that hundreds (at least 419, so far) of shows all took place in the mind of an autistic boy named Tommy Westphall.
  The Tommy Westphall Universe Master List

The Sopranos final episode immediately springs to mind

My then roommate worked on the series. He said, "You don't watch it so I can tell you. Nothing happens. Nothing. People are gonna be fucking pissed." Lol
This one stands out to me as it was a "love it or hate it" ending, not just terrible or a giant let down.
- Yeah. I would put this one as actually controversial because it fit the series and even gave you some of the paranoia that Tony dealt with from day to day.
I like it since I learned that it ends so abruptly because the last POV is Tony's as he dies.
That said, it whooshed nearly everyone who watched it and therefore pissed people off.
- I watched it long after the fact, so I already knew about the controversy. I knew that it meant his death.
  His death was also a great way to end the series, and the story arc they were in.
  I even recognize the artistic merit of showing his death from his own POV.
  And yet, somehow it all came together in a way that was very unfulfilling. Maybe it's just that it's not the way we've ever seen, but it felt very off.
Sopranos and Game of Thrones are the ones I recall having the most uproar. To this day, new videos on YouTube about how awful they were.
- It's hard to know if GoT counts as "controversial" because it seems like everyone unanimously hated it.
I loved it. It made me think about how life just stops. I love all the foreshadowing.
Someone posted an explanation to the last episode, and it all made sense. As the writer said, "It's all on the screen."
Bottom line: Tony got whacked in a diner booth with his entire family present.

Battlestar Galactica.

I found that show really interesting to watch. I think a lot of the series holds up, in terms of acting and storytelling, to the point where I'll rewatch the series despite knowing the awful ending—but the ending was fucking awful.
the reigiminaged series was all wierd from start to finish, apparently it was because of the showrunners christian views, that he wanted a bsg, to have christian like ending.
You wash your mouth out this instant
If you're talking about the more recent, serious show, I understand where you're coming from, but I binged through the series a few years ago during the lockdowns and I feel like they were signposting the weird religious sort of ending the whole way.
Gaius and blondie being angels was weird as fuck, but the whole show had a pretty heavy religious undercurrent. Maybe I'm too used to time travel shenanigan stories, but the whole "it's all kind of a loop" concept didn't feel like an out of nowhere ass pull to me like it seemed to for a lot of people.
- I don't think the problem with the ending was that it wasn't signposted, more that it was an almost literal deus ex machina.
- I had a problem with it, but not the ones that you’re highlighting. I was delighted by the religious stuff, and the angels in particular. Not because I’m religious myself - I’m not - but because it’s directly taken from the original series. I never thought they’d go there.
  My problem with the finale - the last few episodes, in fact - are twofold, but both stemming from the same thing: the writers had the ending and weren’t afraid to contort things to fit.
  The first isn’t a big deal, but why did they send the Galactica into the sun in order to live like cave people? Not for any reason that makes any kind of sense. They just needed the cast to be the ancestors of humanity, so they couldn’t have any technology.
  But the second? They made people act completely out of character. Zarek is the worst offender. Throughout the series the whole thing of his character has been that he’s not evil, he’s just standing up for his people, even though that brings him into conflict with the people who are nominally our heroes. And then…he starts murdering everybody while twirling his moustache. He was completely unrecognisable as a character.
  If you build your series on your character work, then you should make sure that you don’t then completely change their personalities for the sake of the plot.
Which one?
- The new one. As for the old one, if you count Galactica '80 as its "finale", most people would agree it's terrible.
Original or the new one? I actually loved the new one. Haven't watched all of the original yet.
- The new one. As for the old one, if you count Galactica '80 as its "finale", most people would agree it's terrible.

These Are The Voyages is definitely unpopular

I can't get over how Scott Bakula starred in two shows involving time travel and both had infamously bad finales.
- One interesting thing about the Quantum Leap finale is that God is played by Bruce McGill (who shows up in a number of Bellisario's shows, but ignore that for now). Which doesn't seem particularly interesting until you realize that Bruce McGill also appeared in the Quantum Leap pilot, implying that God has been involved in the whole "Leap that went wrong" thing from the very beginning. I've never been entirely sure how I felt about that, but it was an interesting bit of casting, regardless.
- Fun fact: In one episode, they talk about how a leap has to be completed in a certain amount of time in order to guarantee the ability to leap home. They say that the amount of time that each leap must be completed within falls by a certain percentage each time. I did the calculation once. Sam was still within the threshold even after all the many seasons. He should have leaped home.
  And it would have been to the alt-timeline where Al and Ziggy were replaced by St.John and Alpha, the one which showed up when Sam previously leapt into Al and temporarily changed history.
  All the pieces were there.
  (If this feels familiar, I have posted this online before.)
les moonves pretty much ruined the franchise, he did the last episode that way because he wanted a "fuck you statement" to the viewers, i believe frakes did not like the episode as well.
- Moonves later had to resign from CBS due to sexual assault allegations
I was advised to skip it and I still have not seen it. Don’t plan to change it. I like to pretend nothing bad ever happened to Tripp!
- Don't worry! They just faked his death so he could go work for section 31.

Lost

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?

Attack on Titan and The Promised Neverland are both examples of stories that had an awesome premise but went off the rails after their big moment.
For Attack on Titan, I only ever watched the anime. I don't know if the manga was any better. But I feel like once we got past the big reveal at the end of the third season, it was just like "okay what now?". And then it was like Final Season, Final Season Part 1, Final Season For Realsies This Time... like they had no sense of direction.
With The Promised Neverland, I'm only talking about the manga. They screwed up the anime, the less said about that, the better. So the manga had this awesome premise of the kids having to escape the orphanage. But after that? It just got weird. Some of it was good (Goldy Pond, and Lewis/Luvis/whatever... the main demon singer from KPop Demon Hunters (of the Saja Boys, I mean) reminds me of him) but some of it was just weird.
- I believe the multiple AoT final seasons was a product of covid, and that probably messed up the final product alot.
it took to long to finish the series, by then people moved on.
I reasonably liked it, but I agree. For me, the series had built enough suspension of disbelief that I was able to accept the explanations, but it did feel overly complicated, with flashbacks and flashforwards and what not… not on par with the rest
Oof, I was already having trouble with the MC's last fucking minute heel turn that didn't seem to be built up quite enough. Guess I'll just skip that ending.
- I disagree with OP that it’s a bad ending. I think it ties it up well, and explains why the characters acted the way they did. There’s a lot going on and it’s easy to miss details that might make things seem like they come out of nowhere, but I think it was well done personally
- If you don't mind saying, where in the show are you currently? Because depending on that, "MC last Minute heel turn" can mean drastically different things
I disagree. I don’t think it whipped back and forth at all, I think it was pretty solidly foreshadowed, even from episode one. Who was acting unreasonable? Eren? That’s very clearly and explicitly stated to be him doing so on purpose. The rest of the cast seemed to act in accordance with their history from my view.
I also don’t feel like the Ymir lore was forced. I mean obviously there’s going to be some fantastical element to the lore of a show with titans and magic and such, so that part aside, I thought her story was really heartbreaking and encapsulated the themes the show was hammering home the whole time.
I think the time travel stuff was a bit fucky, which is one of my biggest criticisms of the show, and I also felt like Mikassa’s character should have had a better arc. I didn’t like the deus ex machina of Falco coming in to save the day with the people who didn’t want to be there, but the rest of it felt like a pretty satisfying conclusion to an incredible show.
To each their own of course, no shade or anything.

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.

Hard agree, I remenver thinking netflix had fixed the show making it more of a comic book show, then it went downhill It was screwed by it's early popularity, they write to the lcd, the loud ppl on social media, like felicity becoming the main character of arrow
i thought it was wierd, since the shoe-horned rory intoa show, which is a nephilim of an archangel and a human, which is much more powerful than the angel parent. i think they took some elements from supernatural show because there are some eerily similar scenes, or things that are uncanny between some of the episodes. (both shows had a nephilim, of you guess it lucifer and a human and it was the endgame of the series)
- Your mistake is assuming these showrunners had any clue what they were doing and weren't malicious. As someone who knows way too much about the show, I can tell you that those two showrunners were the death of the show.
  If you take a step back, you can see that the highly acclaimed S4 is just a rehash of S3. We have a love triangle—again—that serves to artificially keep the lead couple apart and cause forced drama. S5a is somewhat decent, has its moments, but then S5b crashes hard. Why they had to introduce actual god as a character is anyone's guess. And then try to absolve him of his terrible behavior, because "he just meant well when he was incflicting trauma on his children. Uwu, look how cute he is". Not to mention all the episodes they waste on side characters while giving their lead female character nothing.
  Come S5b finale and things might be actually going well? Lol, just kidding. Lucifer suddenly isn't god, he's just this immature clown who has forgotten all about his monologue about unnecessary human suffering. S6 was just constantly shitting on his character. Like, you can almost physically touch the hatred showrunners felt for him.
  Plus, the whole Rory plot? Straight up plot of Flash, except in Flash the daughter didn't turn into a selfish psycho bitch who chased away her dad to Hell forever (and we could definitely go into the tragedy Rory's character truly is and how much manipulation and abuse has to go into shaping her to grow up so angry that she travels back in time).
  With that said, if we go a little bit back to S4, you can see the big shift in Lucifer as a character. Remember how he blames his dad for manipulating him and making his life miserable in S1-3? S4-S6 Lucifer didn't put the blame on God one single time. In S4 he blames himself ("There's something rotten inside of me"), even though he has every right to believe Dad is manipulating him by sending Eve back to the living (which lol, was never explained, just like most of the lore... don't ~~over~~think!). He also has every right to believe his omnipotent Dad doomed his daughter to a closed time loop, since it's a paradox.
  And yet, Lucifer keeps blaming himself, and in the end accepts that going back to Hell is "all part of Dad's plan, cheeky bastard". So we go from Lucifer fighting tooth and nail to never go back to Hell (his prison), one of his siblings is literally eradicated from existence in the war for throne in S5, just for him decide he doesn't really want to be god and instead go back to Hell to "help souls" by... giving them therapy? I.e. doing a sisyphus task because the system remains broken. The stupidity of that alone is mind-boggling (this is another Chloe erasure, btw).
  In the end, instead of S6 celebrating how far Lucifer has come despite his awful upbringing and letting Chloe and he enjoy themselves, the showrunners twist these characters into a pretzel to create even more tragedy and drama. S6 makes way more sense when you know that the showrunners worked backwards, i.e. they had a fixed ending for S6 and then had to fit the characters into this inorganic narrative.
  As you can see, I could write a 100 page essay on what went wrong with the show and how it's the showrunners' fault. Sorry for offloading all this, but there hasn't been a single show that has made me this salty to date, lol.

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

i think people are seeing "seinfeld" alot differently these days. cant watch it without thinking what a shill jerry has become, plus he dated a minor.
Some of us thought they were just taking a year break (which they explicitly said in the last episode)

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

Yes, that ending was so bad... I still watched the continuation, Cold Blood. It was OKish...

Supernatural, yes we know should've ended as long time ago. But the last episode was strange, the prior episode should've been the end. It's a glorified run of the mill episode

Dark.

I was super invested in the show, the concept of time travel and how everything (or anything) is connected (or not) if time is not linear. The end just ruined the whole flow. In my head, I actually have a different ending, which I can elaborate if anyone cares.

Las Vegas. It's a show with James Caan and Josh Duhamel that ran from 2003-2008. The finale was supposed to be a 2 parter but fell victim to the writers strike so the second part never got finished and then it got cancelled before they could wrap it up. It ended on a cliffhanger of course.

I thought the ending of Friends was pretty good.

In this thread, mostly: "Yeah, I know the show was poorly written through several seasons, but I thought the ending would at least be satisfactory."

I personally think it’s a great ending, even though it was intended to be a cliffhanger for the next series before cancellation, but a lot of fans didn’t like the ending of Quantum Leap where it was said that Sam never made it home.

Can we mention Farscape? Without the movie it was a massive let down, with the movie it became an impossible mess. Either way, an incredible let down.

I introduced my wife to Farscape in 2008 and she absolutely fell in love with the series, as had I when I first watched it. We binged watched the entire series inside of two weeks.
We got to the final episode of season 4... And...she... was...piiiiiiiiissssssed. She absolutely abhors cliffhangers. I cannot count the number of times we've had to stay up late to finish on an episode that didn't end on a cliff hanger.
I might have forgotten to mention "The Peacekeeper War" mini-series... evil laugh.
She stomped off and made herself a cup of tea, as I was "getting Season 1 of Battlestar Galactica 2004 ready to watch". wink wink
She came back sat down on the couch and I hit play... "WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS!" She only uses the word "fuck" when she's truly angry BTW.
We then stayed up late to finish "The Peacekeeper War".
As to it being a mess... Yeah, I can see your point. An entire season was rammed into the equivalent of 4 episodes. I think it was done about as well as it could of been. With that said, it would have been great to get that 5th season.
It still remains as my all time favorite Sci Fi series. There was just too much creativity and uniqueness through out to just throw it out at the end as a fan.
- bsg is one of the ones people were upset at about, made it too christiany-messianic messaging. plus the showrunner largely forgot about the show, and instead wanted to write caprica which was a failed show too.
i only watched it because they went to sg1 shortly after it ended(claudia and ben browder) Claudia at least found some work later on, "originals" i dont know what ben has been doing.

sgu, sga, sg1 was past its prime and needed a ending as the people working on the show felt it.

both sgu and sga were cliffhanger endings that unfortunate problems like mgm losing money and bankrupting to lower vierership and cancellation. according to the showrunners, and writers they were going to be more arcs being revealed if they continued the next season for both shows.

Oh, yeah defo, that ending is terrible. Great series, but I wasn't given it's chance to die.
- after the series ended, the showrunners/writers went in an interview, and reddit. saying that season 6 of atlantis was going to have those aliens from deadalus variations show up and reveal themselves to main universe atlantis, im guessing thats why they foreshadowed those aliens in "deadalus variations" by pointing to the insignia of the aliens, plus Replicator wier also was foreshadowing in ghost in the machine episode "advanced species in the milky way that kept themselves hidden from the wraith", they definitely were setting up season 6 to have more interesting plots.
  for sgu they said/writers were alluding the creators of the berzerker drones/carriers being created by one of the novus colony humans centuries ago in season 3. Plus the OP planet builder aliens plot. they did a AMA on reddit, stargate sub.

BEST finale ever is Six Feet Under.

Dexter. I noped out after the Season 3 finale where they (John Lithgow's psycho killer character) killed his wife. My gf kept watching, and was predictably pissed when they killed the sister in the series finale. I laughed like hell. I will not be watching the reboot.

I'm still amazed at the Two and a half men finale

Warehouse 13 for me, only good part is the meta speech at the end by one of the actors angry about the end being here so suddenly

Babylon 5 (whole last season actually); just ran out of gas.

Didn't they famously get cancelled in season 4, then greenlit for the final year?
- Yes, so they used all their best ideas.
  However, we got a bunch of Bester episodes, so if kinda has a place in my heart. It's just not as good as Season 4, which was spectacular.

Dr Who. It was going great, the 4th doctor was the best ever, and then they ended the entire thing with him regenerating into Tristan Farnon. Don't think they made any after that.