Creating a great TV show is hard enough—sticking the landing is even harder. That’s why exceptional series finales are few and far between, and most shows end not with a bang, but a whimper. A list of the most shrug-worthy TV finales could be endless, which is why we decided to focus on the concluding chapters that provoked the most outrage from fans and critics. These aren’t just mediocre last episodes of beloved series—they’re the most hated TV finales of all time. Read on to see if any of the finales that still enrage you made the cut, but be warned there are MAJOR SPOILERS ahead.
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There’s a major misunderstanding when it comes to the Lost finale, which revealed that the characters were in purgatory during the show’s final season—but not throughout the entire series. Nevertheless, enough people were sure the twist was that the characters had been dead all along, and that confusion caused serious outrage.
Imagine spending nine seasons telling the story of how you met your kids’ mother—only for the show to kill her off in the final episode, thereby paving the way for a bait-and-switch that renders the entire series moot. While some fans have come around on the How I Met Your Mother finale, most are still feeling bitter.
Everyone knows the Dexter finale was a disaster, including star Michael C. Hall, who promised fans that the 2021 reboot, Dexter: New Blood, would make up for the original series’ abysmal conclusion. Your mileage may vary on whether or not you think it did, but having the serial killer meet his end at the hands of his estranged son does make more sense than the original run’s final image of Dexter never facing any justice for his crimes and… becoming a lumberjack.
It wasn’t just the finale, of course. The last season of Game of Thrones was so derided by fans and critics alike that it made the series—once appointment viewing—into something people forgot about pretty quickly. And the final episode just underscored all the problems, rushing through plot without any attention to consistent logic or characterization. Bran becomes king? Sure, why not.
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If Dexter‘s series finale earned poor marks for the antihero getting away with it, Seinfeld may have gone a bit too far by leaving its core four in jail. The bigger crime, however, is that the episode just wasn’t that funny, instead serving as an excuse to bring back a slew of recurring characters. (The X-Files tried the same thing in an equally disappointing finale, but that’s been overshadowed by a bad movie and an even worse revival series.)
Is The Sopranos finale one of the greatest ever made or one of the worst? Critical consensus now leans more toward the former, but many viewers were left scratching their heads by the abrupt conclusion. Turns out prestige television is more interested in giving you the ending you need than the ending you want, even if a lack of closure can send fans spiraling (and listening to Journey on repeat).
Like other series on this list, Roseanne‘s misguided series finale was effectively undone by the revival series (which was then undone by its star’s racist tweets). Nevertheless, the original Roseanne finale is notorious for the way it retconned a final season that viewers were already iffy on. Casually killing off Dan? Unforgivable.
If you stuck with Pretty Little Liars all the way through, major kudos for keeping up with the myriad twists and turns, most of which required some pretty serious suspension of disbelief. The big reveal of the series finale—that A.D. was Spencer’s evil twin, played by Troian Bellisario with a British accent—was predictably bonkers but somehow still infuriating.
Yeah, yeah, Blair and Chuck get married, but that’s not the reason the Gossip Girl conclusion is one of the most hated series finales ever. It all comes down to the revelation that Dan is Gossip Girl, a truly baffling twist that—as fans were all too eager to point out—doesn’t really make any sense.
How do you end a series about two best friends? One great way not to do it is to force a friendship-ending fight that ends up lasting two decades. And yet, that is the path Will & Grace chose, dividing the title pair until a flash-forward reconciliation that didn’t really make it any less of a bummer. Thankfully, the reboot retconned the whole thing.
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True Blood was fun at one point, or so they say. The show slid into nonsense so quickly that it was hard to take it too seriously. The finale tried to wrap things up neatly and crashed hard, which shouldn’t have come as much of a surprise. Sookie being forced to kill Bill and then ending up pregnant with a mystery man at her side was just icing on a really disappointing cake.
In defense of Quantum Leap, the show was denied a proper ending when it was abruptly canceled. Forced to figure out a way to end things, the series threw in a title card letting viewers know that the final character was doomed forever. Oh, and as a final indignity—his name was spelled wrong.
It was actually a conscious choice to not have Tom Welling‘s Clark Kent wear the Superman suit throughout Smallville‘s series finale, instead opting for a shot of it at the very end. Fans wanted more, however, and maybe DC Comics TV shows have learned from the backlash: The finale of Gotham had an aged-up Bruce Wayne in full Batman mode.
A surprise death. Some questionable morals. And a total lack of accountability where it mattered. Anyone who was counting on 13 Reasons Why to reverse course or at least reckon with the mistakes it made along the way was disappointed by a conclusion that further exposed the emptiness of the series.
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Remember when Charlie Sheen’s catchphrase was “winning!” following his very public erratic behavior and firing from Two and a Half Men? That ends up being the punch line to the series, sandwiched by two separate gags of a person crushed by a falling piano. Even fans who had put up with years of questionable choices were turned off by the series finale’s bizarre coda.
There’s just something about Showtime series. As with Dexter, Weeds decided to end without the comeuppance that its lead character so richly deserved. Also like Dexter, Weeds is supposedly coming back, so perhaps there’s a chance to finally give it a proper ending.
Listen, fans may love tuning into high-stakes genre series where major characters are killed off left and right, but that doesn’t mean they’ll accept any character death. And The Originals‘ choice to end with both Elijah and Klaus dying did not sit well with the most loyal viewers, many of whom were hoping they could at least imagine the latter ending up with Caroline.
Another antihero, another lack of consequences. But the bigger crime the House series finale commits is letting the title character fake his own death and then ride off into the sunset on a motorcycle. What happened to the Sherlock Holmes-inspired medical drama viewers had fallen in love with years prior?
As with some other inclusions here, Reign suffered from a late cancellation, which meant the writers had to work quickly to wrap the story up. In the case of Mary, Queen of Scots, that meant ridiculously speeding through a couple decades of imprisonment and ending with her execution. Viewers knew there would never be a happy ending, but that fast-forwarded history lesson made for a brutal finale.
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Netflix’s bleak drama about a “normal” family laundering money for a drug cartel proved its critics right with its series finale, which offered shock in the form of two deaths but not much substance. First, the show kills off Julia Garner’s fan-favorite character Ruth, then the whole thing ends with a cut to black that implies that the Byrde’s son Jonah kills Mel, the private investigator onto their crimes—both amounting to a “so what?” among some fans.
While some found the series finale to the long-running and hugely successful CBS sitcom to be sweet and satisfying, others were disappointed by its treatment of the show’s women characters, particularly Penny. Both she and Amy are revealed to be pregnant by the end of the show, but while Amy also gets to win the Nobel Prize along with Sheldon, nothing significant happens in Penny’s professional life, and the show seems to ignore her earlier declaration that she didn’t want to be a mother. TBBT was never particularly feminist, but still, many fans hoped for better than this.
Killing Eve began with a killer concept and an even better cast, but the series about an international assassin and the MI5 agent who becomes obsessed with her ended on a bum note. After Eve and Villanelle finally consummate their relationship and Villanelle dispatches the Twelve, Villanelle is taken out by an unseen assailant, leaving Eve screaming in anguish. The “twist” was slammed as cliché by many, not just because it’s a typical spy movie move, but also because it feeds into the “bury your gays” trope, whereby LGBTQ+ characters are unnecessarily killed off after achieving some amount of happiness.
Speaking of “bury your gays,” it’s perhaps not surprising that The 100, which got slammed for killing off Lexa immediately after she and Clarke got together, also caught flak for its series finale. The dystopian series is supposedly about teenagers being forced to create a society and grapple with conflict and compromise, but it pulls a bait-and-switch at the end, allowing Clarke’s friends to refuse “transcendence” and stay on Earth with her while everyone else bounces, essentially creating a utopian bubble. What was the point?!
It’s not that the series finale for Showtime’s gothic horror series Penny Dreadful is bad—what infuriated audiences is that they didn’t realize it was the series finale until it killed off lead character Vanessa Ives and threw a “The End” card up before the credits. Eva Green’s Vanessa always seemed doomed, so her death doesn’t feel like a betrayal. Without any warning, however, it was pretty jarring. A reboot series, Penny Dreadful: City of Angels focused on a completely different story.