After spending years with TV characters and developing genuine care for them, it is hard to say goodbye. That is why there is a lot of pressure when creating a finale episode, especially for a series that has been on the air for a very long time. The pressure combined with multiple storylines that need closure is sometimes the recipe for disaster and the reason why a beloved series can become the object of hostility from fans.

Update December 2, 2023: As the year comes to a conclusion, this article has been updated with even more television series that had disappointing final seasons.

There have been some series that had good endings, such as Breaking Bad and Friends. However, those are still very rare nowadays. The finale of Lost is probably one of the most discussed and, for lack of a better word, hated in the world. Unfortunately, one of the most successful series at the time ended in a way that disappointed most fans. This is only one of the various examples of series that created such intricate stories that it became impossible to finish them with the same level of quality as the previous episodes and seasons. It is extremely difficult to end a complex story in the right way, as these otherwise great shows attest to. Here are some finales that were disappointing to the fans.

15 Girls

Girls was a unique TV series that showed the best and worst parts of being a millennial woman in the mid-tenths in Brooklyn, making audiences understand how love, money, sex, and surviving your own egocentric ideas can become very difficult. The last season was all about these four girls becoming women, and discovering they don’t fit together anymore.

Why It Was Disappointing

Yet the finale is all about Hanna (Lena Dunham who was also the creator and writer) who is now a mom, worried about her son not latching, and who doesn’t speak to most of the other people on the show, making it a very strange way to end the story. The fact that the second to last episode, “Goodbye Tour”, is much closer to the ending audiences might’ve hoped for, makes that ending even more strange and confusing.

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14 Killing Eve

This one was quite weird, just as much as it was a shame. Killing Eve was one of the best shows around when it first aired, and that remained true for about three entire seasons. Then the dreaded fourth season comes around, and we can't just help but wonder, "What the hell is even happening? Do the writers even know?".

Related: The Saddest Movie and Television Goodbye Scenes, Ranked

Why It Was Disappointing

Ignoring the lack of concern for established character traits and pacing issues, what happened (Villanelle's death) was probably the final nail in the coffin for a lot of people. Eve and Villanelle not being able to be together is something we would have been fine with. But, the dizzying race to the finish line and a lazy death thrown in simply for shock value tucked this series goodnight on a bad note.

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13 Scrubs

Scrubs tells the story of J.D. (Zack Braff) and his friends at a hospital through a comedic point of view (including many laugh-out-loud funny fantasies the character had). The show lasted nine seasons, so J.D., who started as an intern, ended up being an attendant and having his own interns. The season 8 finale was the perfect ending for the show. It had closed every story and had given the characters proper send-offs that made sense and were happy ones.

Why It Was Disappointing

The problem was the studio decided to renew the show and retool it, and that ninth season was about a new crop of medical students, making the last season (and episode) much more disappointing, as most of the original cast weren’t even in many episodes of that year. That last season should’ve been a spin-off, and let Scrubs end in season 8, a worthy end that wouldn’t make it into this list.

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12 Lost

The ending of Lost still sends shivers down the spines of hardcore fans to this day, and that is for a good reason. The show took risks that didn't pay off, including time jumps, time loops, and a bunch of other nonsense that just left everyone more confused than where we started off. It was an ambitious undertaking, so it makes sense that the ending was as open-ended as it was. That does not make the ending good though, and people were valid in criticizing it for being wholly unsatisfying.

Why It Was Disappointing

This was not a conclusion, not in the traditional sense. This was a cliffhanger of sorts that we all knew would never be officially answered, and that was why it was oh-so-very disappointing. Lost is still iconic, but not nearly as iconic as it should be, and the ending turning off even the most loyal of viewers could be why.

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11 The Flash

The most recent series to make this list, the final season of The Flash, had a great deal of expectations on it. Not only was it the final season for the beloved series that ran for nine seasons, but it also was the end to the Arrowverse as it was the final series on the CW network after many others had ended. The Flash's final season was filled with odd choices, but the final episode itself was a major letdown.

Why It Was Disappointing

Despite featuring plenty of the series' most popular villains, they were taken out quickly by a series of relatively new characters. Many of the franchise's legacy characters did not make a return, and it felt like a lackluster ending to both The Flash and the wider Arrowverse. While not the biggest disappointment related to The Flash in 2023, it is odd for there to be two in one year.

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10 Chilling Adventures of Sabrina

Chilling Adventures of Sabrina was a nice addition to the young adult horror series on Netflix. Set in the same world as Riverdale (Sabrina even returned in season 6 of Riverdale), the show was based on a series of Archie Comics and the previous classic '90s show Sabrina the Teenage Witch. The modernized series dealt with various relevant topics such as gender, sexuality, women's rights, and mental health.

Why It Was Disappointing

So, when the last episode has one of the characters dying by suicide so that they can reunite with another character in hell, it felt like a sick joke to the fans and a disappointing conclusion with troubling implications. When Sabrina returned to Riverdale, it seemed like an apology for the poor way of ending her character's story in her own series.

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9 Entourage

Entourage certainly has a complicated legacy, and as a comedy might not have aged the best. Yet at the time of its release, it was an incredibly popular and well-regarded HBO comedy, seen to many as the male Sex and the City. The story of a rising movie star, his childhood best friends, and his agents may not have had the highest stakes. Nonetheless, it made for an enjoyable comedy. However, the final season features many rushed storylines, and the final episode speed runs through many major developments.

Why It Was Disappointing

Everything comes out of nowhere, and despite ending with the characters flying off into the sunset, it felt unearned and incomplete, as if something was missing. Clearly, something was wrong, as four years later, when the Entourage movie hit theaters, every major storyline from the final episode was quickly jettisoned in the opening prologue and forgotten about to get the story moving. While the movie serves as a somewhat satisfying conclusion, the series finale just felt like a big plate of nothing.

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8 Seinfeld

Seinfeld always loved to say that it was a show about nothing where no one learned their lesson. And that was what happened in every episode, as audiences saw the adventures of Jerry (Jerry Seinfeld), George (Jason Alexander), Elaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), and Kramer (Michael Richards), and laughed with them, even if sometimes their idiosyncrasies made them bad people in the eyes of other characters.

Why It Was Disappointing

In the last episode of the show, the whole group is sent to jail after making fun of a man while he’s being robbed, and they don’t do anything to help him. But the biggest sin of the episode is not that they end in prison, but that the last episode is boring and unfunny, bringing back some old guest stars and almost becoming a clip show in the process. The series ending with a sentimental moment would’ve felt false to what came before, but an unfunny, uninspired one was an even bigger crime.

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7 Gossip Girl

To have a secret identity that is only going to be revealed at the end of the show is a big bargain to make. Various series did that, such as Pretty Little Liars (another show set in the Riverdale universe), which had trouble meeting the expectations created after years of following the story. Unfortunately, Gossip Girl wasn't an exception.

Why It Was Disappointing

The main problem was that the gossip girl's identity was switched in the middle of the series because the fans picked up on who it was supposed to be. Not only that, but a lot of the other characters, such as Nate Archibald, had bleak and unsurprising endings that didn't make sense with what the show was about.

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6 The X-Files

The X-Files changed television and became a cultural phenomenon. This sci-fi criminal procedural had nine seasons and a feature film before it ended. Nevertheless, the fans felt that the show had reached its limits (something David Duchovny even agreed with, as Mulder had left the show in its seventh season) and that the ending which was given to long-time viewers did not meet the expectations of what the series could offer.

Why It Was Disappointing

Double identity and unwanted pregnancy didn't sit well with the iconic FBI duo, nor with the audience. The actual original finale of The X-Files was the least-watched finale of any season of the show, which is saying something. The follow-up film after the end of the series, The X-Files: I Want to Believe, was released six years later, and then in 2016, 14 years after the original series ended, it was revived and ran for two seasons, making up for the original's lackluster ending.

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5 Sherlock

BBC's Sherlock had what many people consider the best Sherlock Holmes portrayal. However, the intricate cases, incredible cinematography, and the duo that's impossible not to love, Watson (Martin Freeman) and Holmes (Benedict Cumberbatch), didn't hit the mark in the finale - and the last season of the show overall. The finale episode is about a new and worst enemy, Eurus, Sherlock's sister, who has been in prison for most of her life, as she's as smart as her brother, but without any emotional tools, so she doesn't mind killing people.

Why It Was Disappointing

The whole story might be the worst in the series, as it feels that it comes out of nowhere and doesn't fit with the rest of the episodes. The series has not been technically canceled but also has not been renewed by the channel. There is still hope that these actors might make a comeback and finish the show as it should end: with something only Holmes could come up with.

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4 Roseanne

Roseanne was a great series that focused on the struggles of a low-income family. It was funny, relatable, and occasionally heartfelt. There was nothing like that on TV back then, and all the characters in the family were greatly drawn, and had a great mix of being funny, mean, and yet they loved each other. Unfortunately, in the finale season, it took a major nose dive, jettisoning the relatable working-class plots with a storyline where the family won the lottery.

Why It Was Disappointing

The storyline involving Dan Conner cheating on Roseanne was also a controversial one that felt out of character, and to make matters worse the finale revealed that most of (if not the entire show, it's actually unclear), were actually a novel that Roseanne had written and that Dan had actually died of a heart attack. The ending felt like a betrayal of everything audiences had grown to love about the series over the previous eight seasons.

The finale and every development in it were so poorly received that when Roseanne was revived in 2018, every reveal was ignored and joked about as never having happened. Like many series on this list, Roseanne's revival seems to be an attempt to rectify the mistakes of a bad series finale.

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Related: These Are the Best Reboots and Remakes of Canceled TV Shows, Ranked

3 Dexter

Dexter quickly became the world's most loved serial killer. So, after following the various characters and the progression of Dexter's arc in particular for eight seasons, the ending was extremely disappointing to the fans. There was no real payoff for the protagonist, the actual decisions and plot were extremely illogical and improbable, and most of the storylines that happened throughout the entire show didn't close.

Why It Was Disappointing

The ending felt incomplete and a bad goodbye for this series, especially the Dexter lumberjack final image. It also didn't help that a week after the finale, the series finale of Breaking Bad aired, which made Dexter look worse by comparison. Dexter: New Blood brought back the main character, but also didn't end in a way that made the long-time fans happy.

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2 How I Met Your Mother

How I Met Your Mother had everything in its favor: the characters were compelling, the jokes were funny, and the audience developed a close relationship with the group of friends over nine years. They had running jokes, romantic stories for Ted, hilarious moments from Barney and Robin, and one of the best married couples on TV in Marshall and Lily.

Why It Was Disappointing

After focusing the entire last season on a couple that ultimately just broke up in the last episode merely for a plot twist, felt lacking from the other stories on the show, and even seemed like a cheap bait and switch. If that wasn't enough, the reveal at the end that the whole show was all about dating Robin again, and getting his kids' approval was baffling, especially when the last season had such a good work of making audiences fall in love with the mother. The finale didn't meet the expectations it created after such a long run and cast a shadow over the legacy of one of the great 21st-century comedies.

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1 Game of Thrones

Game of Thrones was a cultural phenomenon, maybe the last water cooler show ever. It made stars of many of its actors, got audiences invested in dragons and almost zombies, and destroyed their hearts with many surprising, twisty, deaths. So, the series was probably the most anticipated last season in modern television's history. Unfortunately, most fans disliked the entire season and hated the last episode.

Why It Was Disappointing

From significant character changes that didn't make sense with their arcs and motivations in previous seasons to some harsh decisions about the iron throne, the Game of Thrones finale was a deeply messy way of ending one of the biggest fantasy shows ever made. The author of the novels stated that he was not extremely present in the later seasons (and hadn't even written the books they were supposed to be based on), and it shows.

While the final episode of Game of Thrones certainly left fans disappointed, it certainly didn't kill the franchise goodwill, as the prequel series House of the Dragon has been a major hit for HBO. Game of Thrones might be the best example of even a bad ending not entirely ruining a series' legacy, although it certainly leaves a bitter note to end on.

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