Audience Alienating Endings in Live-Action TV.
Examples:
- ALF ended the fourth and final season with a cliffhanger with ALF getting abducted by the government. While there eventually was a followup, a TV-movie made six years later, for starters it's hard to find due to not being widely available like the TV series, and second, the people who have seen it ended up disliking it especially due to having no mention of what happened to the Tanners, leading the same people to disavow its existence.
- Alias had two fascinating and complex seasons, but then a series of mistakes on the part of the writers, the producers, a dose of Executive Meddling, and a nasty feedback loop from shippers in the fan community derailed the series in Season 3. Throughout much of S3, the show circled in a holding pattern. Then, in S4 and S5, the ongoing, overarching storylines collapsed and the writers even began to lampshade their own failures.
- The Arrowverse's 2017 crossover, Crisis on Earth-X was mostly well-received, and was on track to being better than last year's own well-received crossover, Invasion!. Then the ending happened: the infamous double wedding, where Felicity Smoak interrupts Barry Allen and Iris West just as they're about to seal their wedding vows, so she can selfishly and haphazardly tack on her own wedding to Oliver Queen. And this is after spending almost the entire crossover whining about how she doesn't want to marry Oliver. This ending pleased absolutely no one except the writers and the hardest of hardcore Olicity shippers; everyone else hated it to the point that it killed whatever was left of Olicity's dwindling popularity and cemented Felicity as the biggest Scrappy in the entire Arrowverse. For many, it was the moment they gave up on Arrow for good.
- Babylon 5: Faced with uncertainty over the show's renewal, J. Michael Straczynski rewrote Season 4 to resolve the show's Myth Arc. Season 5 was greenlit during production, and JMS' attempts to rework unused story arcs from Season 4 led to Ending Fatigue until the actual finale. Fortunately, the Distant Finale (shot for Season 4 but held back after the show's renewal) is actually really good and satisfactorily wraps up all the remaining plot threads of the series. Many fans just skip straight from the end of the Shadow War (or the end of Season 4, which is after) to "Sleeping in Light." Some further downplay it by skipping the telepaths plot, which is the main source of Arc Fatigue in season 5.
- Battlestar Galactica: At the end of the series, the Galactica finally discovers Earth, which turns out to be prehistoric. To prevent another Robot War from occurring, the human refugees suddenly become Luddites and destroy all of their advanced technology so they can live out their days in poverty and as far away from each other as possible. It's noted in the Distant Finale that the little girl that Adama wasted numerous lives to rescue from the Cylons, Hera Agathon, died young and in childbirth, and that all the events of the series were caused by an inscrutable and omnipotent God who may orchestrate another Robot War anyway. This ending massively pissed off fans, since the entire show turned out to be All for Nothing.
- The end of The Brittas Empire revealed that the entirety of the series was All Just a Dream of Brittas as he slept on the train. This, plus the fact that it contradicts the earlier intended and much more satisfying Distant Finale, means that the ending isn’t well liked amongst the fanbase.
- Caprica: The writers were at least given time after the series' cancellation to write an epilogue to wrap the show up, but the entire thing is just one huge sequence of What Could Have Been.
- Crime Story was supposed to have a five-year run in a story spanning two decades. It was cancelled after two, ending on an unresolved cliffhanger.
- Dark Angel's Season 2 cliffhanger finale was planned to be resolved in the premier of Season 3, but Fox's cancellation of the show left it in limbo.
- Dexter, starting with the fifth season, was heavily criticized for its focus on more less well-received characters, lots of padding resulting in uneven pacing, and often underwhelming resolutions to its plotlines. When the eighth season concluded, a lot of people would recommend newbies to stop at season 4.
- Dexter: New Blood: The series was well-received by fans.... up until the last episode, which was widely lambasted. On IMDb, every episode has an average rating of over 8.0, except the last episode, which has an abysmal 4.7. Fans criticized the title character's murder by his own son, Batista's role being completely wasted, and characters suddenly acting illogically and the story having massive leaps in logic just for the sake of rushing to the abrupt conclusion. A significant number of fans thought it was somehow an even worse finale than the already reviled original conclusion.
- Dinosaurs: While the extinction of the Dinosaurs was a Foregone Conclusion many viewers had hoped or assumed that the extinction event would be generations after the show's events. Instead, Earl accidentally ends up causing the Ice Age, leading to the inevitable deaths of the entire cast. Needless to say, not many were keen on a lighthearted Sitcom having such a bleak ending.
- Doctor Who: The 13th Doctor's run was divisive overall, but even many fans who otherwise liked Series 12 turned against it when "The Timeless Children" aired, because it reveals the Doctor is not an ordinary Time Lord but a mysterious immortal who the Time Lords experimented on to get their regeneration abilities from. This reveal, while enjoyed by some fans, infuriated several more, with entire video essays on YouTube dedicated to arguing why the reveal doesn't work. Common complaints are that it is a massive retcon to a decades-lasting franchise that strips the Doctor of their status as The Unchosen One, contradicts canon and creates many plot holes, turns the Time Lords into frauds, undermines the Character Development of the first Doctor, and generally comes off as disrespectful to the franchise and its history.
- The Event tried to set up an epic Jigsaw Puzzle Myth Arc about an Alien Invasion of Earth, but wound up bungling the setup so badly that it got cancelled after one season, just as it was Growing the Beard and finally moving into the proper meat of the story. You could watch it... if you don't mind sitting through hours of build-up only for the show to end right at the most dramatic part.
- Forever Knight ended with the main characters seeming to both die. Nick accidentally drained Natalie and didn’t want to make her a vampire. Nick instead asks LaCroix to stake him and the last thing we see is him lifting the stake up to do it. How the series ends tend to overshadow everything else if this ever gets brought up in conversation.
- The final episodes of Game of Thrones are widely disliked for abruptly turning Daenerys Targaryen into an unhinged and merciless tyrant, and retroactively framing her series-wide character arc into a Protagonist Journey to Villain plot—which most people viewed as coming out of left field with no real set-up. Relatedly, fans generally found the conclusion to the series-wide struggle over the Iron Throne (i.e. Westeros transitions to an elective monarchy, and Bran gets voted king because he has "the best story") to be deeply unsatisfactory, and largely out-of-step with the themes of the show; furthermore, numerous previously-beloved characters' final fates completely discard most if not all of their Character Development received throughout the series and bring their personal arcs to incredibly unsatisfying conclusions, most infamously Jaime Lannister and the aforementioned Daenerys. While the later seasons are generally agreed to have suffered from a general decline in quality, the ultimate ending is particularly singled out for criticism, with many fans and critics feeling that it permanently tainted the show's legacy—resulting in Game of Thrones largely falling off the cultural radar after it ended, despite being one of the biggest phenomenons of the 2010s. That being said, the prequel House of the Dragon ended up being a massive success regardless, showing that the franchise was not done entirely.
- Gilmore Girls's original ending in season 7 left things fairly resolved on a positive note, but the fact that it (along with season 7) wasn't written by creator Amy Sherman-Palladino left a good portion of the fandom wondering what her true ending could be and only begrudgingly accepting it for what it was. Come 2016, and Sherman-Palladino revived the series to give it the ending she always wanted it to have. Most fans were happy with how Lorelai and Emily's story arcs concluded, but the fact that Rory ends up pregnant and likely to repeat her mother's mistakes, and that Jess may or may not still be pining after her like his uncle did with her mother, made most fans go bananas and declare the revival's ending non-canon.
- The final episode of Ghosts (UK) seems to have divided the fanbase. It ends with Alison and Mike leaving Button House believing it will be easier for them and their newborn child. Those who dislike the episode felt that the ending made the previous season finales in which they decided to stay redundant, that it was rushed and that it focused too much on side characters rather than the ghosts.
- Heroes has an alienating season rather than series finale (the latter of which fans have little objection to, aside from ending in a hook for a season 5 that didn't happen, and Heroes Reborn doesn't count). While some diss the first season's conclusion (which would have wrapped the story up to that point and started an anthology format with a rotating cast... if not for how season one's characters instantly became popular, so new plots for them had to thought up on the fly), there certainly was a whole lot more disappointment with the anti-climactic season 2 finale that serves as a culmination of severe Seasonal Rot caused by a writer's strike, rushing to close plot points while leaving a few dangling. And it only got worse from there.
- How I Met Your Mother's finale. Barney and Robin divorce after only three years of marriage; Barney goes right back to his womanizing ways until he fathers a daughter with one of his one-night stands; Tracy (a.k.a. the Mother) is revealed to have died in 2024; the kids encourage Ted to go after Robin yet again. The meltdown among fans and critics was big enough to make the news and is likely to haunt the series for years to come, although some fans were mollified by the alternate ending released with Season 9's DVDs, which amends the ending by cutting out the last scene and adding some new narration from Future Ted. In the alternate ending, Ted and Tracy are both still alive and very happy in 2030; while Barney is still divorced and has a lovechild, Future Ted implies that he and Robin will find their way back to one another.
- Joan of Arcadia suffered a lot of Executive Meddling in the second season, mainly using techniques to try and make it more marketable for teens, such as Joan getting missions from God to learn about herself rather than making the world a better place, and Adam cheating on Joan for the sake of melodrama. Fans were not happy about this, and although the season finale does imply that there is a bigger threat coming for Joan to deal with, the show did not manage to get a third season.
- Both the TV ending to Kamen Rider Zero-One and the ending to its post-series movie duology got a lot of flak. The TV ending leaves too many things unresolved and lets several villains off far easier than they should have been, while the actual ending seen in the films kills off most of the cast and sets the status quo back to being slightly worse than when the series began.
- The Killing Eve fandom was not happy with Villanelle getting shot and drowning at the end.
- Lois & Clark: The series was cancelled after the 4th season ended on a Cliffhanger, with the newly married Lois & Clark finding an infant at their doorstep, and a note claiming that the child belongs to them.
- Lost, what with the fact that the ending chose to go for a more metaphysical angle, with several of the questions being unanswered.
- Lucifer (2016): Season 6 pissed off fans with the Star-Crossed Lovers Bittersweet Ending where Lucifer becomes a Hell therapist and has to abandon Chloe for the rest of her life which many fans regarded as a pointless Cruel Twist Ending that contradicted the themes of the series and made the last 2 seasons pointless (given Season 4 already ended with a Star-Crossed Lovers Bittersweet Ending that most fans thought it made more sense.)
- Malcolm in the Middle: In the Series Finale, Malcolm gets offered a lucrative job that would allow him to skip college and become rich, but Lois and his family force him to pass up the job because in Lois's words, "Malcolm needs to actually crawl and scrape" to actually be a good person. Audiences are divided as to whether Lois was actually right or if she was once more being a Control Freak who refuses to accept responsibility for her lot in life.
- Mortal Kombat: Conquest, an already highly-contested and relatively obscure loose interpretation of the popular video game franchise, gives a mother of a depressing end with the series' Big Bad, Shao Kahn, killing all of the protagonists. The fact that it also came out around the time the game's popularity (at the time, anyway) was beginning to wane, especially with it being a one-two-three punch of the lukewarm reception of the fourth game and the embarrassing bomb that was the sequel film also ensures that even the most hardcore fans stay away.
- Power Rangers Dino Charge has a particularly infamous finale: the Rangers' plan to destroy the Dark Energem backfires spectacularly, creating a black hole that sucks in and destroys the Earth. Then the Rangers suddenly gain the power to time travel and go back to the prehistoric ages, where they defeat Sledge and his crew before their battle with Keeper ends with Sledge's meteor collection hitting the Earth. As a result, the Rangers return to a present day where dinosaurs never went extinct...but everything else remains more or less the same, somehow. While later seasons would establish Dino Charge as an Alternate Universe much like RPM to avoid Continuity Snarl, fans' opinion of the season remains soured thanks to its bizarre, anti-climactic ending.
- Princess Agents ends with Chu Qiao and Yuwen Yue falling through ice and sinking into a frozen river. Chu Qiao starts to swim to the surface, Yuwen Yue sinks deeper... and that's it.
- The final episode of The Prisoner (1967), "Fall Out", was so confusing to audiences that Patrick McGoohan had to go into hiding from fans who hounded his home looking for answers and clarification.
- Profiler ended on a season cliffhanger—the Big Bad for most of the final season has been killed by another bad guy, of unknown motives, who is in the middle of carrying out his scheme.
- Quantum Leap: The original run of the show was forced to Wrap It Up in a single episode due to a sudden cancellation notice. The result was the episode "Mirror Image" which has the main character, Sam Beckett, realize that he has subconscious control over his leaps, and all his leaps were done out of a desire to make the world better. Sam decides to use his newfound control to leap to 1969 and let Al's wife, Beth, know her husband is still alive and to not get remarried, despite Sam knowing this will likely cause him to never meet Al. The episode then cuts to a black screen with text that says "Beth never remarried. She and Al have four daughters and will celebrate their 39th anniversary in June. Dr. Sam Becket [sic] never returned home". Many fans were dismayed at the idea The Hero never achieved his Happy Ending for rather vague reasons, to the point several viewers insist that while Sam Becket never made it home, Sam Beckett did.
- Ragnarok (2020) ends with the revelation that all the supernatural things were Magne's schizophrenic delusions. This is considered a giant Ass Pull while also poorly handling the subject of mental health.
- Revolution added three more plot elements for every plot point it addressed directly, reminding viewers unfavorably of Lost.
- Roseanne also had a variation of the All Just a Dream ending which pissed many fans off to no end and has been the biggest barrier of entry for new fans. When the series was revived decades later, the ending was immediately retconned.
- Scrubs: Season 8 ends JD's story (our protagonist and narrator for the entire series) on a high note and was intended to be a series finale. Season 9, however, revamps much of the cast (Turk and Cox are still regulars, others are relegated to guest stars), changes the setting, and has a different focus (med school). Series Creator Bill Lawrence initially wanted to rename the show to make it clear that this was a new beginning, but this was nixed by the network. Even fans who were accepting of the new direction and characters felt turned off by the fact Season 9 had No Ending with all the new arcs set up receiving no conclusion as a result of cancellation. This has caused many fans (even those who liked Season 9) to recommend newcomers stop at Season 8.
- Seinfeld: The series finale is infamous for this, as the protagonists are convicted and sent to prison for being jerks. It doesn't help that much of the second half of the episode is a Clip Show, as various characters testify about the protagonists' misdeeds throughout the series. This might not have been terrible had the previous two episodes not also been clip shows, meaning that three of the series' final four episodes are mostly just old reused footage.
- She-Hulk: Attorney at Law: Several viewers who were otherwise enjoying the show felt turned off by the series' ultimate resolution in "Whose Show Is This?". The finale in question has Jen, who had to team up with Hulk and even Titania to defeat the HulkKing, use her Medium Awareness to escape Disney+ and breaks into Marvel Studios forcing the writers to change the ending of her show due to perceiving having to work with the other characters as stealing her thunder. Many felt Jen having her Happy Ending delivered on a silver platter, instead of having to work for it undermined all of the drama and character building that occurred throughout the show.
- Sherlock: After a divisive third season, the final one, which opens with the death of Mary Watson is generally agreed to be a major dip in quality (with a rotten score on Rotten Tomatoes from both Audience and Critics). In particular, the finale revolves around the convoluted backstory of Sherlock and Mycroft's even more clever sister and her last-minute redemption.
- Sliders, thanks to some of the most notorious Executive Meddling, lost the intellectual "what-if" in favor of "movie ripoff of the week" and bridge dropped almost the entirety of the original cast, many in quite mean-spirited ways. This leads to potential new fans being warned not to get involved with the property at all, as they can only be disappointed.
- Sleepy Hollow: After a well-received first season that was praised the most for having a well-developed black female lead (Abbie) who had great chemistry with her white co-lead Ichabod, the second season made the baffling decision to sideline Abbie in favor of Ichabod's family/relationship drama to the point where Abbie's actress decided to leave the show which resulted in Abbie being Killed Off for Real at the end of the third season. Disillusioned fans abandoned the show in droves and nowadays, hardly any of them will recommend watching the show except for maybe the first season alone.
- Soap was written with a five-season story arc in mind, but was cancelled after Season 4, resulting in the show ending on several cliffhangers (specifically, Chester finding his wife and son in bed together, Burt being ambushed by a political enemy and Jessica about to be executed by a firing squad). The show did get a spin-off, but it did nothing to resolve these cliffhangers.
- The Sopranos is particularly controversial with its abrupt smash cut to black. This may depict Tony's death, but it's left very ambiguous and up to the viewer's interpretation. During the original airing of the final episode, angry viewers actually called their cable companies to complain about their signal cutting out, while David Chase received many, many accusations that he inserted the No Ending as a petulant "fuck you" to the audience for, in his view, siding with Tony for too long. Binge-watching the second half of season 6 makes it much less ambiguous, with the clues to Tony's POV murder being very clearly laid out, which might have been less obvious to viewers who watched it week to week.
- Stargate SG-1 - They sort of resolve all of the main story arc by the end of season 7, and a later episode breaks the fourth wall to say that fans felt they phoned it in for season 8. Still, it ends with a Grand Finale that takes out virtually all major galactic threats for good. The real break is seasons 9 and 10, when they introduce a new set of villains, which are something of a retread of the earlier ones. They were even going to rename the show Stargate Command when season 9 began to try to emphasize how different it was, but rather than make a sequel/spinoff, the network felt more viewers would stay if they kept the name intact. The actual final episode isn't really a finale at all (the writers assumed they'd get at least one more season), so they had to wrap things up with two DTV movies.
- Stargate Universe: SGU was plagued with issues from the very start, and the steadily dropping ratings convinced SyFy to cancel the show after its second season. As a result, the second season ended on a major cliffhanger, since the writers had assumed they'd have a third season or at least a movie to resolve the remaining plot threads.
- Star Trek:
- Star Trek: Voyager: The series finale, "Endgame", is quite controversial as it has Janeway use a device to wipe out the Borg Queen and most of the Borg collective despite characters like Picard, Hugh, and Seven of Nine proving it's possible for Borgs to regain the humanity. It would take until the release of Star Trek: Picard, nearly 20 years later, to confirm that Janeway hadn't committed complete genocide on their race. Furthermore, the series ends right when the Voyager reaches Earth. No epilogue, no reunions with their loved ones, no parting of the ways, no "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue, nothing. Seven years of trying to return home, and the most the viewers get in finding out what's next for the cast is the sudden romantic pairing of Chakotay and Seven of Nine getting dropped on them.note Old viewers are likely to warn new ones not to get invested in pairings like Janeway/Chakotay and Doctor/Seven for that reason, which is ultimately fixed with Star Trek: Picard pairing Seven with Raffi Musiker instead.
- Star Trek: Enterprise: The series finale, "These Are The Voyages...", is infamously loathed by Trek fans due to the fact that's essentially a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode featuring the Enterprise cast, showing Riker and Troi watching a holographic recreation of the show during the events of the TNG episode "The Pegasus", despite the fact that both Jonathan Frakes and Marina Sirtis had noticeably aged since TNG's original time. Notably, producer Manny Coto stated that he personally considered this episode to be a coda rather than the true finale of the series, with he and fellow series producer Mike Sussman considering "Demons" and "Terra Prime" that precede this installment to be the actual finale. It didn't help that series creators Rick Berman and Brannon Braga, who penned the episode, originally described "These Are The Voyages..." as "a valentine to all the Star Trek shows" before going back on that sentiment years later.
- St. Elsewhere was one of the first television series to do this, ending with an All Just a Dream revelation. The show was notable for lots of other things in its day, including being one of the first medical dramas, laying the groundwork for all future shows in the genre. However, the twist ending of its final episode and the Tommy Westphall Multiverse Hypothesis
theory that resulted from it have completely overshadowed everything else about the show since then — therefore making it not very appealing to new viewers. - While an unsatisfying winner can taint a season of Survivor (examples being The Australian Outback, Samoa, Kaoh Romg and Game Changers), none hit as hard as these two:
- The finale of Season 35, Heroes vs. Healers vs. Hustlers, threw a last-minute twist at the very last Tribal Council to save a contestant who was already a major Elimination Houdini and went on to win the game instead of several Ensemble Darkhorses, turning a previously acclaimed season into Seasonal Rot.
- Even more controversial is Season 38, Edge of Extinction, in which a castaway who was eliminated third rejoined the game at the final five with an idol (meaning he only had to survive two regular Tribal Councils and was protected for one of them), and also wins the game, angering fans of even more Ensemble Dark Horses who believe he shouldn't have won and that the game was rigged for the Edge of Extinction returnee.
- The TV series adaptation of The Tripods was cancelled after just two seasons, despite being based on a book trilogy. As a result, the series ends on a massively depressing cliffhanger (which was also completely original to the series).
- Tru Calling was royally Screwed by the Network, only getting a six-episode second season, and then getting cancelled before the final episode (which itself ended on a cliffhanger) even airs.
- Twin Peaks, which also suffered from Seasonal Rot in the second season, both of which resulted from Executive Meddling. The writers had no intention of solving the main mystery of the show (Laura's murder), but were forced to come up with a solution by the network anyway. Then the network proceeded to order another season, even though the writers didn't have any plans beyond that. This caused massive amounts of Mind Screw, Kudzu Plot, and The Chris Carter Effect.
- The 2019 revival of Veronica Mars had mostly positive reception. However, it received massive backlash from fans for the last ten minutes of the final episode in which Veronica's love interest Logan is killed in a bombed car shortly after their wedding.
- The X-Files: Even attempts at Conclusion in Another Medium didn't go so well (the series ends with the protagonists "waiting" for a future cataclysm; the second movie was an unrelated plot that preceded this disaster; the supposed third movie to finally give closure languished in Development Hell; and while there was an Un-Canceled tenth/eleventh season miniseries, it started off retconning most of the built-up series mythology and itself ended on a Gainax Ending cliffhanger).
