Underhated TV finales - What ending you were the only one dissapointed at?

[Fatsuit Shinji]

Thank FOX for extending House well beyond anyone in the studio and cast wanted. As the only thing FOX cared was the ratings and revenue the show was getting.

Say what you will about the Seinfeld ending, but Jerry Seinfeld had known about and saw other series extended beyond their used-by dates. And took the opportunity to end his series before that also happened to it.

 

[BubbaRobot887]

Blake's 7.

I know the writers were trying to make a point and they thought there was a chance at a season 5, but after everything that happened in the past four season I think I would have liked something better that Avon thinks Blake of all people would betray them to the federation and then everyone gets killed off.

I feel like they should have either gone with the Avon thinks Blake betrayed them angle or everyone getting shot, but both together feels a little silly and like the writers were trying a little too hard to either do the ultimate cliff hanger or a bleak ending and it just doesn't feel like it was the way the show was intended to end to me.

 

[BrunoMattei]

it wouldn't have aged well, its a lot like HIMYM, it was barely tolerable at the time and the woke critics would have destroyed it if it lasted longer than it did. the chinese stuff and the browncoats and the weird western stuff would have been prime meat for think pieces if it became popular.

I hate to say it but I did used to watch Buffy. I lost interest in season 2 or 3. But in my defense it was because Sara Michelle Gellar was hot and it was the 90s and we were starved for any horror content.

I did get into Angel and followed that up until the last season or two with Evil Inc.

 

[Get the rope Macaulay!]

Thanks FOX for extending House well beyond anyone in the studio and cast wanted. As the only thing FOX cared was the ratings and revenue the show was getting.

genuinely shocked Fox hasn't convinced them to bring it back, although i'm also shocked Stephen Fry never did a guest role as some idiotic fop.

Like you can easily make a revival season "House is finally free from prison/granted parole because of a medical emergency and is now under house arrest with X. He has delusions of his old dead buddy, who he talks to instead of bouncing shit off of other medical personnel" you can determine who to bring back from the old cast but overall its house being house, maybe you have some bit about him being in prison so long and needing to get caught up to speed on stuff or all the doctors are now of a new gen and he's the old school dude who doesn't need to ask a computer or AI to figure out a diagnosis.

 

[General Emílio Médici]

I was gonna say Last Resort but honestly the entire show was one long lost opportunity that threw away a perfectly good political thriller and wasted it. I half suspect Obama was involved in getting it fucked over but that might just be the A&Nigger in me seeing shit where there is nothing.

The show was about a US Nuclear Sub going rogue after a mission to Pakistan. They are told to pickup a few navy seals off the coast of Pakistan and a few minutes later they get told to nuke Islamabad and a few other cities. This seems very weird to both the Captain and pretty much the entire crew, especially since the order is coming from a backup system meant to only be used if D.C. is gone instead of the regular channels. When the Captain demands confirmation the Defense Secretary (not the President) removes him from his post and others the new Captain to do it. When the 2nd in command, now Captain, also demands to know tf going on and why they are being told to go from 0 to 60 the connection cuts and they start being attacked by another US Nuclear Sub, who almost sinks them and who does nuke Pakistan.

Long story short they survive, flee to Diego Garcia and the Captain announces to the world he wants a explanation. This starts a massive international crisis as he says if anyone tries and invade Diego Garcia he will nuke them, and he fires a warning nuke at D.C.

For starters the show was 13 episodes long, including the pilot. They literally cut a season in half middle way through filming and writers had to scramble to fix it.

Thank to that the final episode rushed shit, and tried to solve the plot of the show in a few minutes of exposition which were WOEFULLY, HILARIOUS rushed and explained very little of the obviously complicated political shitshow going on that led to the setting of the show in the first place. It is never really explained what the fuck went down in D.C. that led to this sort of Banana Republic shit going down and the resolution comes down to one woman who announces to the media she has proof of the coup attempt to the media.

 

[Fatsuit Shinji]

genuinely shocked, Fox hasn't convinced them to bring it back, although i'm also shocked. Stephen Fry never did a guest role as some idiotic fop.

Hugh Laurie, in particular, wanted to get off from playing House for basically the second half of the series. So he took the diplomatic route* by jacking up his price tag for each and every season. Until FOX finally got the hint and coupled with the continuous drop in viewership end the series.
*Actors and creators like Mike Judge under contract use this method as to not burn bridges. Since the pay hike is a subtle method to tell the networks they want either leave and/or the show to end. Kelsey Grammer also done this to end Frasier, and that network was more amicable to end it sooner, with a better ending and possibility of a renewal later.

 

[Tasty Tatty]

I did get into Angel and followed that up until the last season or two with Evil Inc.

People hated S5, but I liked the premise, not the execution. It was when Angel makes a deal with the devil to defeat it and makes some good, only to realise at the end that he was in fact playing by their rules, so he had to destroy it from within.

They fucked up that. And then cancellation didn't help much to have a proper ending.

It's S4 that's truly, truly wrong and a mistake altogether. They destroyed Cordy's development and growth and Connor as a character with potential. There were so many other ways to get to Jazmine that don't involve what they did. That poisoned what we got for S5.

 

[Ivan Daniloff]

People hated S5, but I liked the premise, not the execution. It was when Angel makes a deal with the devil to defeat it and makes some good, only to realise at the end that he was in fact playing by their rules, so he had to destroy it from within.

They fucked up that. And then cancellation didn't help much to have a proper ending.

It's S4 that's truly, truly wrong and a mistake altogether. They destroyed Cordy's development and growth and Connor as a character with potential. There were so many other ways to get to Jazmine that don't involve what they did. That poisoned what we got for S5.

Whedon firing Charisma Carpenter for being fat after having a baby was the first step in his eventual downfall. Carpenter pretty much started shitting on him immediately and kept it up until eventually he got metooed and shown the door.

His metoo stuff boiled down to him fucking much younger quasi-subordinates—maybe sexist, not even slightly illegal, and ridiculous for him to get canceled for imo. By contrast, Whedon firing an actress for having a baby does step up to the line of discriminatory behavior AND is intensely sexist. So he got his just desserts for that eventually.

 

[Tasty Tatty]

Whedon firing Charisma Carpenter for being fat after having a baby was the first step in his eventual downfall. Carpenter pretty much started shitting on him immediately and kept it up until eventually he got metooed and shown the door.

His metoo stuff boiled down to him fucking much younger quasi-subordinates—maybe sexist, not even slightly illegal, and ridiculous for him to get canceled for imo. By contrast, Whedon firing an actress for having a baby does step up to the line of discriminatory behavior AND is intensely sexist. So he got his just desserts for that eventually.

He was just an asshole, but that ain't illegal. What he did to Charisma OTOH was.

It wasn't even that hard to adapt the story around her pregnancy. She could have still got pregnant with Jasmine without Connor being part of it, that way you keep Connor as a character as well. I don't hate Connor, I hate that Angel's role was just to conceive Connor and at the end, he was just sent away from the story after he became a terrorist. It was so bad they even destroyed Darla's sacrifice that redeemed her as a character. It was for nothing.

Whedon was apparently so, so mad with Charisma being pregnant that he absolutely destroyed his own show.

 

[BrunoMattei]

People hated S5, but I liked the premise, not the execution. It was when Angel makes a deal with the devil to defeat it and makes some good, only to realise at the end that he was in fact playing by their rules, so he had to destroy it from within.

They fucked up that. And then cancellation didn't help much to have a proper ending.

It's S4 that's truly, truly wrong and a mistake altogether. They destroyed Cordy's development and growth and Connor as a character with potential. There were so many other ways to get to Jazmine that don't involve what they did. That poisoned what we got for S5.

I liked the idea that the Antichrist is a black chick and tells the conspiracy theorist that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. That aged well.

Then again, if the Antichrist is a black chick that believes the official narrative by the U.S. government doesn't that imply that the opposite is true?

Charisma Carpenter... God damn, I was so thankful for her Playboy spread. And even more so when she did the movie Bound.

 

[Tor Lugosi]

Not exactly a finale to the series but since people have already mentioned Person of Interest, I found it extremely underwhelming how they killed off Maritine(the blonde samaritive operative chick)
https://youtube.com/watch?v=KJxBjtOJIIcAll this time she's been built up as this antagonist foil with Reese's operative skills and Root's bullshit man machine meld and then she dies with zero fanfare or effort to Root who at the time was already chained up to a hospital bed.
I mean I was already sick of Root at that point but god damn you couldn't find any better way to write that character off?

The show got fucked over hard by a change of leadership at CBS. The original plan was for six seasons, which the production crew felt confident they were going to get since the show had good ratings and the top brass at CBS liked the show a lot. Then, towards the end of season four, the change in leadership at CBS happened and the new top brass weren't happy that the show's audience was mostly older demographics, so they only gave Person of Interest one more season. Then that season got shortened into a half season... and the retards at CBS *also* wanted there to still be stand-alone episodes, despite it being the final season.

Not sure if the end of season four, where Martine's death happens, got changed but I always suspected it did since they unceremoniously kill off a lot of supporting cast.

 

[Commander X]

Airwolf.

Yes, Airwolf, it was kind of before my time, but it has popped up in reruns over the years, and there's always home-video options...Jan-Michael Vincent was an actor capable of excellent work, who also led a very troubled life, and his work and life were brutally derailed by alcohol and drugs.

Among the problems behind the scenes was that thanks to his booze and drugs problem, Vincent had become more and more difficult to work with. So, how bad was it? Well in the 1980s, when the powers that be with the studios, networks and production companies would do their best to sweep their stars' problems like that under the rug, out of the sight of the press, Vincent had become so bad to work with on the series (and getting arrested four times didn't help either) that to show him how thin the ice he was treading on was the producers and network straight-up ran a hitpiece on him.

In TV Guide.

 

[Green Man]

My pick - Prison Break, but if you consider everything past the second season a finale. Third season sucked ass, fourth - sucked what was left of ass, finale - the only good thing about it was that it was over, TV MOVIE FINALE - OH, FUCK OFF ALREADY. I didn't even bother with season five since it would go from Michael being terminally ill to cured to ill to dead and now back to alive for some fucking reason.

I was okay with Season 3 for the most part, yeah the concept was fucking stupid and probably borne of "well the show's called Prison Break, we need our characters to break out of another prison or the title doesn't make sense!" [which they obviously later pitched out the door] but some of the dynamics and characters present at the prison in Panama [IIRC?] made it work. After that though, I don't think I've ever seen a show fall off a narrative cliff that hard. All of this overcomplicated shit with the company and conspiracies and whatever the fuck else. The only other show that went from being must-see every week to not even worth taping for me that quickly was The Walking Dead after season 1.

I also don't remember liking those last couple seasons of House all that much but I don't even fucking remember the finale, so it must not have been particularly memorable. For another contemporary Fox show, I remember my sister hating the finale of Bones for some reason, but I never got into that show too much so I never saw it. Oz's finale seemed like it was rushed out the door and the anthrax in the mailroom was their way of very hurriedly trying to wrap up a shit-ton of characters arcs with little effort. Vern Schillinger got killed with very little build up which was retarded after he'd been the primary antagonist for the entire series, not to mention being a stand out character.

It's not exactly underhated per se but nowadays I do see a lot of people [especially Redditoids] trying to rehabilitate the Seinfeld finale into some genius brushstroke, I just don't get it. It was basically a glorified clip show episode with a plot loosely tying it together and in syndication it comes directly after two previous clip show episodes. They claim that it's "genius" because all of the main characters get their "just desserts" for being such shitty people over on Reddit and I don't get that either. Maybe it's because Redditoids are obsessed with "empathy" and calling things "wholesome" but really at no point were any of the characters that bad as people. Most of the bad shit that they did wasn't intentional and I have never been able to see these characters as inherently immoral. Plus the part of the finale where they're filming/laughing at the fat guy getting robbed was pretty out of character anyway and comically evil compared to their typical behavior.

Speaking of both Seinfeld and Oz though, that fucking SNL skit which was a Seinfeld/Oz crossover was fucking hilarious:

 

[TheBallPit]

I wanted to make a follow-up post to my Airwolf writeup, as I made a raft of annoying factual errors.

• Scott was introduced in season 2, not 3, and remained a regular (barring a few episodes) until the end of the third season.
• Airwolf didn't have Gatling guns, but rather unspecified very large machine guns - a primary gun and two smaller ones in a trio cluster on each side.
• Archangel was played by Alex Cord, not Eric Cord. Eric Cord is the name of John J. York's character in the 1987 Werewolf TV series. I have no idea why I got them confused.
• Dominic wasn't killed in his signature stars & stripes helicopter, but an ancillary yellow & white one that was presumably owned by Santini Air.

(I need to quit composing these essays when I've only had a couple hour's sleep.)

To make amends, here is some trivia about season 4:

• Season 4, interestingly, has its own IMDb entry. The main Airwolf entry only covers seasons 1 thru 3. This is a little odd and I don't know of any other show separated like that on the IMDb.
• The production budget for each episode during seasons 1 thru 3 averaged a little over $1 million. Season 4's budget was around $300,000 per episode...and boy, does it show.
• Michelle Scarabelli, probably best known as Susan Francisco in the Alien Nation TV series, played Jo Santini, Dominic's heretofore-unmentioned niece. She witnessed Dominic go kablooey and became the female mainstay, like Scott before her.
• Geraint Wyn Davies of Forever Knight fame was also thrown into the season 4 mix as the wisecracking Major Mike Rivers. His character is the one that single-handedly found "the lair" in which Hawke and Santini had hid Airwolf (a cave-like void somewhere in Monument Valley). Keep in mind that The Firm never stopped looking for the chopper and devoted quite a few resources towards its retrieval, so the idea that this lone guy deduced its location after a few Google searches is absurd and peak TV lazy hand-waving.
• SUPPOSEDLY the production no longer had access to the modified Bell by the time season 4 entered production and had to "make do" via Hollywood trickery. However, in a few episodes, including season 4's premiere, we do see the helicopter in all its glory via new footage with the new cast, so I'm not entirely sure this is true. I'm aware that a series as complex as Airwolf probably necessitated that multiple fabrications of the Bell's exterior was required for various shots, but we see what looks like a complete aircraft, so I dunno. The interior shots were simply an assortment of individual sets built for seasons 1-3 that were reused for season 4.

To address Commander X, yes, Vincent was a PITA to work with given his major alcohol issues coupled with multiple DUI arrests during Airwolf's production. He also had a quick temper. However, he reportedly had a photographic memory and could memorize his lines with just one script readthru. He was also a legitimately great actor and delivered the goods when required (e.g., he had a tremendously chilling "murder face" that he projected when obliterating show enemies). He broke his neck in a car crash in 1996, which also affected his speech. He then had to have his right leg partially amputated due to peripheral artery disease complications. He died in 2019 from cardiac arrest.

One last tidbit - ironically, Vincent held a helicopter license in the 80s and was a chopper mechanic in the California Army National Guard. His character is shown as being able to fly both rotor and fixed-wing aircraft.

JoBlo recently posted a nice retrospective of the series that also touches on season 4, for anyone interested:

What Happened to Airwolf? (1984-1987)

 

[Rebel Wilson]

I hated the ending to Succession and i feel like if it had gotten another season (/tv/ joked it was soft cancelled) i think it might have had a better ending. The creator and Jeremy Strong really pushed the idea that Kendalls story was a Michael Coreleone downfall story and the final 3 episodes really pushed that. That he was going to sacrifice everything and everyone around him to get a job he really shouldn't want. His empire of dirt so to speak. Become the CEO of a dying media empire that carries his name.

And then the ending comes and the final climax at the board meeting goes over like a wet fart and none of the setup has any payoff. He gets billions in a hostile takeover and the final scene is him staring at the sunset. Just really felt like a lot of wasted time. I can go back and watch shows like the sopranos and mad men even if i don't particularly like their endings, but ive never rewatched an episode of Sucession since the finale.

 

[pikachudidnothingwrong]

Supernatural's whole last season (last few actually) was pretty fucking retarded. Certainly felt like a late minuet whim after everything with god and his sister, the blackness. (not darkness but the place/thing that gods, demons and angels go to) As someone who actually enjoyed the Chuck angle throughout the series. (so much about the world, fictional and real would make sense) That ending choice was disappointing.

 

[Samuel Fuller]

That all sounds much better than Firefly

A kick in the balls from someone wearing golf shoes is better than anything related to Firefly.

 

[Fluffy_1488]

The ending of Yellowstone was fucking trash, low effort, woke, rushed, under thought, didn't care, no respect for audience. I mean it's about as bad as it can get. To top that off we got like 15 seconds of Lainey Wilson's ass in the whole final season.

 

[pikachudidnothingwrong]

The ending of Yellowstone was fucking trash, low effort, woke, rushed, under thought, didn't care, no respect for audience. I mean it's about as bad as it can get. To top that off we got like 15 seconds of Lainey Wilson's ass in the whole final season.

Never forget he narrative in the media about the main alleged demographic for the series. I wouldn't discount anything as lazy, bad writing or simple subversion of expectations.

 

[Rebel Wilson]

The ending of Yellowstone was fucking trash, low effort, woke, rushed, under thought, didn't care, no respect for audience. I mean it's about as bad as it can get. To top that off we got like 15 seconds of Lainey Wilson's ass in the whole final season.

Jamie and Beth were supposed to destroy everything around them in their quest for revenge and kill one another in the finale, preferably dying in each others arms or a mexican standoff. No other ending made sense to me. I will die on this hill.

@pikachudidnothingwrong you're right, every "convservative" country music lovin' skank I know lived vicariously through Beth's girlboss bitch conduct.