The Worst Final Seasons of Otherwise Great TV Shows

What’s worse than your favorite show ending on a terrible finale? Ending on a terrible season. Sitting through a bad episode is one thing, but having to come back week after week to watch a story you used to love drive itself into the ground is a unique form of voluntary torture. It’s tough for any TV show to wrap things up in a way that satisfies everyone, and the more popular it is, the more people it has to impress. And the more people notice when it fails to deliver.

It may feel like more and more TV shows are fumbling their endings these days, but this is far from a unique phenomenon. The nature of most TV shows is to go on until they can’t, which means that when it comes time to wrap things up, sometimes it’s sooner than anticipated. When this happens to a big prestige series that a lot of people have invested a lot of time into following for years, everybody’s mad. There are a lot more big prestige series these days, and it seems like very few of them have been able to land on all four feet.

Maybe TV shows aren’t supposed to have a perfect ending. Maybe it was about the journey more than the destination. Still, it’s nice to have a good ending, but it’s also a difficult thing to pull off. Sometimes shows misjudge what their audience wants, or refuse to give in to their viewers’ demands in favor of some bigger idea, or simply have no clue how to tie up every loose thread in a neat little bow. From ill-fated revivals and finales that pissed off their stars to huge trainwrecks and perplexing arcs, these are the shows whose final seasons stood out for being uniquely terrible.