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

[Ivan Daniloff]

Charisma is a weird case. She apparently brought her acting coach to set for YEARS, which, sure—she didn’t have experience, unless you count Baywatch and something called a “leasing agent.” But after five or six seasons, you’d think she could deliver a line like “I'm the dip” without needing a scene study. Apparently not. Whedon likely had a spreadsheet of reasons to fire her.

She had a specific energy Buffy and Angel needed—Joss always struck me as network television’s answer to Paul E. Dangerously: casting people who had no business acting and taking huge gambles. That’s probably why she got the part in the first place.

I agree that the acting coach coming with her day after day is unreasonable. I am not familiar with the term “scene study” but I do know that anything that adds time to the shoot, as having a coach around may have done, costs money and pisses people off. Even if she were running lines in her trailer with the coach, it’s just another body crowding the set of a low-budget show. (And let’s remember that these were WB/CW shows, where the acting quality was highly variable.)

So my question is—why didn’t someone tell CC’s agent that it had to stop? She got her option picked up season after season, with a raise each time—why not just negotiate then? Instead, he picked an almost comically villainous reason and time in the actress’ life to kick her to the curb. I don’t get it.

 

[Town Drunk]

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.

I hated Connor. So a guy kidnaps you, and raises you in a hell dimension. Doesn't even pretend to be your dad, admits you have another father, but he's such a bad guy that he had to bring you to a hell dimension to escape him. Get out, meet your dad. He's actually nice and loving, and everyone seems to like him.

Does an angsty teenager get mad that his life was a lie, or blindly believe that being raised in hell was great and that your real dad, who you've never seen do anyting bad, is the asshole?

What a terrible way to rush a child arc, and what a terribly written charecter. He is just an unlikable little bastard at every point. Wesley would have killed him to spare everyone else if he was on the show, because it what was needed to be done.

 

[Captain Syrup]

Instead, he picked an almost comically villainous reason

Greenwalt left Angel after season three. He also happened to be Charisma's biggest advocate. After that, things got strange.

The show was largely Greenwalt’s baby, and Whedon seemed more focused on Firefly which was canceled almost immediately. Oops. Whedon then came crawling back to Angel and demanded an early renewal. WB responded by canceling the show. Whedon has said he was surprised Angel lasted as long as it did.

I think he was still bitter after the Buffy cancellation/renewal mess and mentally checked out. The reason it hit the fanbase so hard is that Whedon was sold as a genius who was always three steps ahead.

I hated Connor.

Entire season of him trying to murder Angel while the rest of the cast inexplicably keeps letting him crash at their place? At one point, Angel even throws him out, which briefly feels cathartic, but of course Cordelia shows up at Connor’s gross flop house and has sex with him for no discernible reason.

In hindsight, Angel just got too crowded. Maybe they were trying to mimic Buffy where even the walk-ons had arcs. But on Angel, once they moved past the main trio...Yes, everyone loves Amy Acker, but even Fred knew she was a third wheel. Love Lorne, but by season five it was clear they’d squeezed every drop of usefulness out of him. Adding Harmony was a mistake. She should've just shown up in the s5 premiere then betrayed Angel in the finale like some "falling cow" Earthworm Jim side character. That would’ve ruled.

 

[Tor Lugosi]

Speaking of Angel and Whedon, I always hated his original smug, condescending attitude towards the finale. Which was essentially, "Heh, you thought that was a cliffhanger? Did you even actually watch it? It was obviously a conclusive ending." And then a few years later he wrote the 'After the Fall' comic series, which picked up immediately after the season five finale.

 

[Irregardless]

didn't he also get his dick shot off at the end? they really wanted that feminist power fantasy.

We don't know if it was shot off per say, but it was specifically stated that he did get shot in the dick. Semantics, I know, but the difference between "Yea he got shot in the dick, but a doctor fixed it and he's fine now" and "Yea she shot his dick off and now he doesn't have a dick" is pretty huge.

Like you said though, very obvious and cringe feminist power fantasy, the worst part of it being that nothing Joe did pointed to him deserving that. Like yea, he murdered women, but it wasn't over some "she won't sleep with me" incel shit, it was because the nigga had the whole "dark urges" trope and the way he resolved conflict was through murder. He also murdered plenty of men as well. But yea, Joe never raped any of the women and actively was on the feminist bullshit talking shit about other dudes being pieces of shit for how they treat women and I think verbally being against incel type stuff, so it was just very weird and retarded to shoot his dick off and obviously was some dumb bitches idea of how a man should be punished for ever doing something wrong to women.

Sorry for replying to such an old post, but I just found this thread and have to vent about the Man in the High Castle.

I'm an autist who loves alt history scenarios, so I was really hopeful for the show (despite knowing the current socio-political climate we live in). Season 1 was great and then every season after had almost nothing happen in it, so that somehow despite nothing happening for two and half whole seasons, the final episodes still felt rushed with a lot of plotlines ending unceremoneously or just completely forgotten about.

I never get to talk about just how fucking terrible that show became....
Me and my wife started watching it right before season 3 came out and like you said season 1 was great, season 2 was ok, but holy fuck man, then you get to season 3 and suddenly everything is gay, multiple characters who had been a part of the show up until then are now suddenly and openly gay with no prior hints mind you, just suddenly gay and it's treated like it's no big deal. Also a whole bunch of degeneracy comes out of nowhere, like prior to season 3 nobody was really gay and there wasn't too much degeneracy, but for whatever reason we get to season 3 and we're suddenly being shown that it's just a normal thing for German elites to go to Diddy parties where everyone is bisexual, and I guess nobody gives a shit? Just retarded.

 

[Iron Jaguar]

Seinfeld, obviously. Imagine making an ending deliberately antagonistic to your audience. Possibly the most Jewish thing one could do.
Better Call Saul ending was lame.
The Black List really spiralled into Woke retardation in the last few seasons, having tiny Pooners playing Russian mobsters etc, but ending the show with the implication that Red is actually a TransMan and Elizabeth Keen's mother is fucking retarded.

 

[Captain Syrup]

When I was a kid, I was irrationally devoted to The Pretender. The premise: a kidnapped child genius escapes an evil think tank and uses his intellect to assume a different job every week while solving crimes. His name always changes, except it doesn’t.

At the time, I thought it was a wholly original idea. In retrospect, it was The X-Files meets Quantum Leap with the occasional Renegade ripoff, usually within the same episode. (Seriously—one episode is just Renegade.)

It all culminated in Isle of the Haunted, a made-for-TV movie that decided ghosts and ancient scrolls were just sitting there, unharvested. Turns out the think tank may have been founded on blood magic and the protagonist might be Jesus. Maybe.

As a teen, I thought that was awesome. Now, I feel like I am having a stroke. When I rewatched it as an adult with friends, their first reaction was: “Wow, this is stupid as hell.” I've never regretted a childhood interest faster.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

Seinfeld, obviously. Imagine making an ending deliberately antagonistic to your audience. Possibly the most Jewish thing one could do.

How was it antagonistic to the audience? It's not like the show ever tried to portray the main characters as something else than assholes. They pretty much get punished for shitty behaviour, you'd think people will count it as the opposite.

 

[Tasty Tatty]

What a terrible way to rush a child arc, and what a terribly written charecter. He is just an unlikable little bastard at every point. Wesley would have killed him to spare everyone else if he was on the show, because it what was needed to be done.

I don't disagree that the writing was bad.

I did like that he exists in this universe, but not that he was the focus of Angel importance.

I would have made him be a baby more time to make Angel's sorrow deeper or make him disappear more time. Then return and his arc is that he grows into being an important part of the team as they can use something of their own vampire slayer.

Say, he's been during S3 and leaves. The season has it's own villain that isn't Connor or the guy who kidnapped him. Then make teen Connor come back as a cliffhanger. Next season is Connor accepting that Angel is his father and, by the end, he joins by helping Angel investigations to kill the Big Bad. The W&H deal is then about Cordelia, not Connor.

 

[Captain Syrup]

How was it antagonistic to the audience? It's not like the show ever tried to portray the main characters as something else than assholes. They pretty much get punished for shitty behaviour, you'd think people will count it as the opposite.

I’ve never gotten the hate for the Seinfeld finale. They get arrested the second they leave New York, because of course they do. Nobody dies: Jerry loses his show, they do 12 months in jail, and they end up exactly where they started.

I would have made his arc is that he grows into being an important part of the team as they can use something of their own vampire slayer.

Honestly, I hadn’t thought about Connor from Angel in years, and now I regret breaking that streak.

You’re right, his character arc is basically a straight line from unstable mess to... unstable mess. Vincent Kartheiser does solid work, especially when he’s ready to go suicide bomber in the finale, but the character is dead weight. No redeeming traits, no real usefulness, and somehow still incredibly annoying! (Yes, he kills Jasmine but she was already nerfed.) If you're going to have an evil teammate, they should either have a personality or serious firepower.

 

[Hijo de D. Woodchucks Jr.]

The Black List really spiralled into Woke retardation in the last few seasons, having tiny Pooners playing Russian mobsters etc, but ending the show with the implication that Red is actually a TransMan and Elizabeth Keen's mother is fucking retarded.

That show was borderline schizophrenic by the later seasons. I particularly liked that it's never fucking foreshadowed properly, and multiple times show that Red was a separate person from Keen's mom. Then they shoehorn that reveal in the most incomprehensible way... then ignore it after Keen gets McLeaned.

The actual ending is also extremely fucktarded. After everything is said and done, Red gets gored by a bull in the last few minutes of the finale. That's it, show's over.

 

[The Nothingness]

The third and final season of Into the Badlands through in so much new lore that it didn't have time to breathe (even with more episodes than the previous seasons). New characters got little development before they were killed off and other established characters were done dirty. The finale felt rushed and ended on a cliffhanger that will never be followed up on.

 

[Captain Syrup]

Lois & Clark: Frog Wife Boogaloo

0:17

It got bullied into the same Moonlighting death spiral: get the leads together, then spend the rest of the series inventing brain damage-tier soap opera excuses to keep them apart. I mean real cursed stuff. Famously, a clone of Lois who is part amphibian and has to eat frogs. Dean Cain got deceived by a slime-fetish LexCorp experiment, and the plot was obviously dogshit, but Teri Hatcher treated it like she was in a Tennessee Williams play.

And by the time they finally got Lois and Clark married (via literal divine intervention) they had to film it like a hostage video. L&C was supposed to be “hip,” but within a season it was back to sitcom logic from the Reagan years, right down to the guest stars that made Hollywood Squares look like the Met Gala!

And that’s why nobody talks about it any more. It gets mentioned about as often as The Greatest American Hero: fondly by a few, forgotten by most.

 

[XYZpdq Jr.]

Lois & Clark: Frog Wife Boogaloo

1000050112.mp4

It got bullied into the same Moonlighting death spiral: get the leads together, then spend the rest of the series inventing brain damage-tier soap opera excuses to keep them apart. I mean real cursed stuff. Famously, a clone of Lois who is part amphibian and has to eat frogs. Dean Cain got deceived by a slime-fetish LexCorp experiment, and the plot was obviously dogshit, but Teri Hatcher treated it like she was in a Tennessee Williams play.

Ver archivo adjunto 7468096

And by the time they finally got Lois and Clark married (via literal divine intervention) they had to film it like a hostage video. L&C was supposed to be “hip,” but within a season it was back to sitcom logic from the Reagan years, right down to the guest stars that made Hollywood Squares look like the Met Gala!

Ver archivo adjunto 7468098

And that’s why nobody talks about it any more. It gets mentioned about as often as The Greatest American Hero: fondly by a few, forgotten by most.

there's a copy of Earnest Saves Christmas taped off tv that I run in my "giant pile Christmas shit" that has an ad for Lois and Clark
they have very nice chemistry and it makes me wonder how the show holds up

this also makes me wonder how the show holds up, but in the other direction

 

[Captain Syrup]

I don’t need to explain why Sherlock sucks. It’s like Minions memes, you know why. You had Benedict Cumberbatch playing Doctor Who but more condescending, which makes sense when you remember that Moffat both wrote and basically thinks he is The Doctor.

"The Final Problem" is a TV Hiroshima, the Shun Goku Satsu of prestige BBC. Every dumbass twist hits at once and the show flatlines. So we find out that Redbeard, Sherlock’s beloved childhood dog, was never a dog. It was a ginger kid. Drowned by Sherlock’s sister Eurus, who, of course, no one ever thought to mention. She’s also smarter than Isaac Newton. No, really, that’s said out loud. She can brainwash people by looking at them. This is never explained because Moffat thinks "explanation" is for the emotionally weak and sexually impotent.

Eurus has been locked in an asylum so secure it might as well be Azkeban, except she can leave whenever she wants, mind-control the entire staff, and stage elaborate murder puzzles. She’s also secretly running Moriarty’s empire / plan via pre-recorded video one-liners.

Sherlock also receives a little girl distress call from a crashing airplane. That’s also Eurus. But another Eurus. Inside her brain. One trying to stop the other. Eventually Sherlock defeats her with hugs. No really. And despite the killings and the Jigsaw murder house she built for her brother, she gets forgiven by literally everyone.

 

[Juan But Not Forgotten]

True Detective Season 1. Up until the last episodes it was a masterpiece. Then the ending ruins all the mysticism built up by revealing it was all human larpers rather than cthulu esque cult, and the final villain was a fat autist.

You just don't get it. The whole show is about people being the source of evil. Not the Devil or Carcosa but typical human vices. "Man is the cruelest animal". I don't know why people hated season two for everything but being the same thing, just more down to earth. Same circle of corrupt rich assholes, same stuff with sex cult, same "the old case comes to bite them in the ass" and every character is fighting their own set of demons. I bet if they hired PIzzolato again these days he would make a season about a certain... Island. And all the people who traveled there.

 

[Captain Syrup]

Life on Mars (US)

Colm Meaney’s in it? Sure, I’ll bite. Star Trek neuron activated.

But then they reshot the pilot and replaced him with Harvey Keitel, one of our most forgettable famous actors. He’s supposedly in a few Wes Anderson films, but I remember none of it. I think they dropped Meaney because the lead made him look like a toddler in comparison, but Keitel was like 800 years old.

ABC pulled the plug and the writers went, "oh it was all a dream”, except worse, because it's on a spaceship headed to Mars under the supervision of "President Obama."

Then it ends with some open-ended bullshit. Why don’t Cobb’s kids age?!

 

[Garnet123]

Eurus has been locked in an asylum so secure it might as well be Azkeban, except she can leave whenever she

Eurus is a variant of River Song, then? With the viewer constantly being told that she is oh so badass, cleverer than anyone, disgustingly smug, better than the Doctor in everything the Doctor does, imprisoned in a high security prison that she keeps walking out of whenever she fancies ...?

 

[Calandrino]

I’ve never gotten the hate for the Seinfeld finale.

It's not funny.

 

[Captain Syrup]

Jesus Christ.

I remember being pissed when Smallville drifted from “teen Superman investigates Buffy-adjacent high school” to Party City Justice League cosplay. I wouldn’t have minded so much if it hadn’t been a bait and switch. It kept running on the fumes of people who liked the actors or just needed some DC content in the Bush years.

Just so you know what kind of dogshit we’re dealing with here: Season 10 sets up Apokolips and the New Gods, like they’re gonna pull off Infinity War on a Nikelodeon budget. And if you’ve ever seen one of these pre-streaming superhero shows, you know that means absolutely no fights. CW was uniquely bad at this. They’d hype up Zod or Doomsday or Brainiac for ten episodes and then Clark just shoulder-checks them into a JPEG explosion and it’s over in three seconds.

Darkseid is no different. Instead they have Clark fight haunted Men's Wearhouse mannequin John Glover, a guy who’s already been killed off on the show twice. First they bring him back as an alternate universe version of himself, but his organs are swapped around, so now his heart is on the right side of his chest. Then they bring him back again as a Darkseid possessed vape demon. Meanwhile, his bastard child Tess is holding down the fort at LuthorCorp. She might be the most "nothing" character in TV history.

---

The big finale:

Clark spends most of the finale standing around while other characters monologue about how great he is. Michael Rosenbaum (Lex), who very clearly peaced out the second he saw where the show was going, gets glued back together like Frankenstein. And the final missing piece? His 60-year-old dad’s heart. Which (minor issue) is from a mirror universe where the valves are backwards or something.

Clark punches Old Man Glover into a tractor or something in the cursed barn where every major plot development happens, then he shoves Apokalips off Earth’s orbit like he’s unclogging a toilet. We went from "maybe he can jump really far" to this. Even though he’s never once demonstrated the strength to lift more than an F-150.

Bo Duke gives him the Superman suit like it’s a graduation gift, but, oops! He can’t actually wear it because the CW didn't want to get sued by Warner Bros. So instead of putting it on, he just flies straight into the ceiling while hugging the suit, like he’s trying to fuse with it via osmosis.

Tess gets shanked by Lex, but not before she scratches him with some kind of comic book herpes that gives him amnesia. Now he doesn’t remember anything from the past 10 years, aligning him with comic book canon. None of this mattered. Please leave.