10 TV Shows With the Worst Series Finales of All Time

The Walking Dead Universe was overrun by spinoffs and planned projects by the time the original show ended, and because of those announcements, fans knew that many of the core characters — Daryl (Norman Reedus), Maggie (Lauren Cohan), Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), Rick (Andrew Lincoln), Michonne (Danai Gurira) — would survive to go on to lead other series. AMC was so intent on hyping up the franchise’s future that they forgot to keep up the life-or-death stakes.

That infamous cut-to-black in the middle of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” may have been ballsy at the time, but in retrospect, that abrupt ending is just frustrating. We’ll never know who came in through the front door of the diner as Tony (James Gandolfini) and his family had dinner, and maybe that uncertainty was the point, but the writers shouldn’t have needed a gimmick to depict the danger the Sopranos were in.

Instead of focusing on a satisfying conclusion for the characters that remained, Two and a Half Menproducer Chuck Lorre used the show’s finale to get revenge on a body-doubled Charlie Harper — and former sitcom lead Charlie Sheen, by proxy — by dropping a piano on his head and appearing on screen to say he was the “winning” one. It was just a childish grudge match, and we begrudge it all.

The castaway drama “lost” much of its fervent audience in its latter seasons as the island’s mysteries piled on, the mythology grew more mystical, and flashbacks became flash-forwards and then “flash-sideways.” And the polarizing finale — emotional though it was — answered so few of the questions that a 12-minute epilogue on the DVD set had to tie up loose ends.

The revival series Dexter: New Blood course-corrected its predecessor’s series finale, in which Michael C. Hall’s Miami-based vigilante serial killer mourned the sudden death of his sister and then vanished in a hurricane, only to pop up as a lumberjack living a lonely life on the other side of the country. Perhaps that coda was meant to be a poetic punishment for the character, but it felt like a cop-out.

Fans of the original Quantum Leap probably would have preferred no closure at all to a tacked-on title card both depressing — viewers learn that Scott Bakula’s Sam Beckett never returned home — and misspelled — the title card says “Sam Becket” never returned home. This was one quantum leap that didn’t stick its quantum landing.

Think Cristin Miloti’s Tracy was the mother of this sitcom’s title? Sure, but she’s been dead all along, and Ted (Josh Radnor) went back to Robin (Cobie Smulders), who had broken up with an embittered Barney (Neil Patrick Harris), as this sitcom’s ending revealed. Much to the dismay of fans, the How I Met Your Mother finale ditched out so much of the characterization the show had crafted in service of some eleventh-hour shocks.

How better to end a Star Trek show than with a finale focusing on two characters from a different Star Trek show? Unfortunately, The Next Generation’s William Riker (Jonathan Frakes) and Deanna Troi (Marina Sirtis) dominated the Enterprise finale’s story. Capt. Jonathan Archer — played by Scott Bakula, a veteran of bad series finales — and his crew deserved better, which co-creator Brannon Braga admitted more than a decade later.

If you’re gonna have a series-long mystery — in this case, the identity of the blogger outing Upper East Siders’ secrets — then you’d better have an answer in mind from the start. Instead, this finale revealed in ret-conning fashion that Dan (Penn Badgley) was Gossip Girl, hand-waving over all the times Dan looked shocked by Gossip Girl blasts, even when he was alone and didn’t need to keep up pretenses.

The plastic water bottle visible on screen in this series-ender was just emblematic of how rushed and sloppy the whole final season seemed. So many fan favorites got endings they didn’t deserve: Cersei’s (Lena Headey) death felt unceremonious, Dany’s (Emilia Clarke) downfall and Arya’s (Maisie Williams) departure felt uncharacteristic, and Bran’s (Isaac Hempstead-Wright) crowning was just perplexing, as if the writers chose the next leader of Westeros by lottery.