I don’t mean seasons that ended on a cliff hanger and never got picked up.
I mean series that actually completed their run.
On a very dissatisfying or worse not.
I was never invested enough in a series over a run of years,
But recall mentions of St. Elsewhere, Lost, SciFi channel Battlestar Galactica, etc, over time.
If Game of Thrones goes down in flames, it will be the first time I have watched a series from first year to last year and got hosed.
Other series, I may have caught a few seasons but never kept up with them over the years, missed a bunch of episodes, etc. Stuff like ER, Friends, Seinfeld, Miami Vice, I never got through. Even series that I liked because they were from a big franchise when I was a kid, and remember coming out when I was an adult, like Deep Space Nine and Voyager, I never quite kept up with. Stuff like X-Files that was popular I also kind of stopped watching after a few seasons.
So,
What series did you watch over years and stuck with it did you feel like you got shafted at the finale?
Hands down the Sopranos, followed closely by Deadwood.
The Soprano’s simply going black, as if the viewer was whacked, was just f-ing stupid and a bunch of writing thinking they were clever. It was the most appalling lack of talent and ideas on a once great show that was already slipping and grasping at straws.
Similarly Deadwood, was nothing but buildup, a few minor incident and then the main antagonist simply leaves town. WTF, are you kidding me? Could have possibly been the best HBO series ever produced but it just went nowhere, as if they shut down production.
And of course every single Battlestar Galactica that ever existed. The 70s vintage where it was like they ran out of video tape and just called it a day.
Then the complex reboot with a conclusion that seemed like a fan script from a 6th grader. And don’t even get me started on Blood and Steel Part I with no Part II ever done even though it looked like “third time is the charm and they are gonna finally slam dunk this series for all time.”
Lost.
I really enjoyed that show even though in the middle it got kind of odd and off track. And just when they seemed like they were getting it back in the right direction and I was enjoying it at the end the last episode ot two just blew it.
Almost wish I never saw the last episode and just left it as a cliff hanger.
Honestly I thought St Elsewhere had a brilliant end.
But for me it was The L Word. It could have been a brilliant final season but just didn’t pan out.
I can’t really name any one show but shows with oodles of sexual tension that never comes to fruition anger me. Just let em bang get married and find a house in the country
Actually that didn’t bother me. He used his one wish to help his friend keep his wife whom he sacrificed and stayed captured to save Sam’s brother. It was a brilliant call back most people missed.
It was next level Doc and Marty type stuff.
JAG pissed me off with the coin toss.
Oddly enough, Flashpoint went out on a high note.
But The Unit was always a tease until Strike Back. The Unit made me sooooo mad. 10 minutes of guys killing Charlie or Achmed with SR-25s while mix and matching camo to 40 minutes of wives and their girl problems that nobody cares about
I of all people used to be mad for years about Firefly but really it was too ahead of its time and if it kept going Joss Whedon’s white guilt would have ruined it. Especially considering how the whole premise is about Unreconstructed Confederate veterans in space saying Eff The Man who are the space ChiComs.
It was glorious to see first run even if out of order.
I was kinda pissed that Brisco County Jr didn’t take off.
Also Friday the 13th the series. I LOVED it as a kid. It was genuinely creepy and I remember reading in Fangoria how they planned to finally have Jason in the finale but it never happened.
ETA and War of the Worlds. It had the Mexican dude from Predator as the Colonel overseeing a covert war against aliens. It was like X Files but not homosexual. More than a few times they whipped out M60s and CAR-15s with like old Vietnam War starlight scopes to kill aliens who seemed to prefer UZIs. Then it got lame and stupid when they tried to make it post apocalyptic but not really. Lame.
They had a Ranch where the black nerdy dude was trying to perfect energy weapons and the aliens took to grave robbing to find hosts.
Farscape.
I’m not talking about the “cliffhanger” ending to Season 4 just before SciFi cancelled it either. I’m talking about the “Peacekeeper Wars” miniseries that came out sometime later to try and wrap up the loose ends that were left hanging at the end of Season 4.
I appreciate the effort by the cast and crew of the show but the miniseries missed the mark quite badly.
Inconsistent special effects, weird character performances, plot holes…it was not great when it first came out and has, in my opinion, aged much worse than the series itself has.
Sons of Anarchy (AKA the All About Gemma Show) ended poorly too in my opinion, but that show was on a severe downward spiral from about season 5 on I think, so I was basically hate-watching it anyway.
I mean, during Jax’s death ride even the CGI crows were bad, and that forced Jax-as-Christ imagery…come on! And there just happens to be bread on the side of the highway? What?
“But muh symbolism!”
Although the fact it was probably Vic Mackey from The Shield who ended up (inadvertently) killing the protagonist was amusing.
Its been a while But I remember the semi post apocalyptic show Jericho being a tremendous let down. A few great seasons of build up with good characters then apparently the plug got pulled and there was a giant rush to wrap it all up.
Jericho. In a perfect parallel universe that show would have run longer than all the other series put together.
The good news is that the fan uproar caused them to go back and make a handful of episodes to "sort of " end it when it was canceled abruptly.
Trouble is, they got over-optimistic and ended it with a looming civil war about to start in the hopes that the show might be picked up for movies or more episodes.
That just meant that the abrupt cancellation cliff-hanger was replaced by the hope for future shows cliffhanger.
Not really an ending in my book.
The original ending to the X-Files. You call Mulder and Scully more-or-less being “on the run” an ending?
But that’s not all.
Somehow I knew that even when the cigarette smoking man got incinerated in the cave that he’d be back.
He was.
Luckily the “ending” to the revived series was a little more satisfying. The cigarette smoking man is finally dead…oh wait…
The episodes with him in Vietnam trying to save his brother, but not saving his Friend from becoming a POW stand out to me decades later as some very well done TV.
Tied in, poignant stuff like that may be common and expected now, but was very unusual then.
Plus a hot redhead photojournalist and stoner MGs
That was supposed to be a cliffhanger season finale.
The series was canceled and they tried to whip up a series finale out of it at the last minute.
While it sucked,
That kind of falls into the shitty last episode cancelled show category instead of intended, planned finale that sucks.
I believe that is what happened with Deadwood also.
(Never saw it when it was new)
They were not getting another season and tried to pull a finale out of their ass, per friend’s that we’re fans and following it when new.
I agree that Lost is the best/worst one that fulfills the criterion of the OP here, but I’m still really pissed about the abrupt and unceremonious ends to Jericho, Revolution and Invasion. WTH? They just went away. No closure.
Are you kidding? The wife and I almost dropped that series several times, but ultimately stuck through it. When the finale ended, we just sat there going “WTF?” for about a half hour. It was bloody awful and stupid.
Deadwood was bad, but understandable. The Sopranos was just weird and stupid.
I agree on Revolution too, just abrupt like Deadwood.
One I haven’t seen mentioned yet is the sitcom How I Met Your Mother. The entire premise of the 9 season show was simple, how the narrator met his kids’ mother. They blew that one really bad and everyone who watched it was pissed.