Ask Lemmy

It's Game of Thrones, by far.

And they can't use the excuse that they ran out of material and had to write their own ending. Tokyo Ghoul Root A did it to moderate effect, and Fullmetal Alchemist (the first one from 2003) did it extremely well. They just couldn't write worth a damn so they said Fuck It and flipped the table. They'd already made their money from it. They had good options and they walked right past them. I guess they just wanted it to be a surprise?

LOST gets an honourable mention for being so weird. But I feel like they painted themselves into a corner, though that's no excuse. Again looking to anime as the standard bearer for storytelling others should be measured by, Assassination Classroom painted itself into a tighter corner. (Long story short, alien blows up the moon and threatens to blow up Earth if humans can't kill him in a year... but only some students are really allowed to try and he can only be harmed by rubber bullets and knives that wouldn't harm a real person — traditional weapons, whatever you can think of, have no effect. Oh, and he can also move at, like, the speed of light, squared, or something dumb like that. And holy crap what a stupid ending, but... they made it work. It's still stupid, but it worked better than the LOST ending, and the LOST writers had a lot more space to work in.)

Lost

Everyone was very shocked back in the day at the ending of Seinfeld.

The Bob Newhart Show famously ended the series by saying the whole show was nothing but a dream.

Controversial as in it ruined an otherwise great show? Dexter.

Something that I don't see mentioned a lot outside of fandom, even though apparently the show was quite big after Netflix picked it up. Lucifer arguably started going downhill in S3, mostly because Fox execs wanted to turn it into a soap opera. Which of course failed, so they dropped the show altogether, only for Netflix to "save" it.

I put that in quotation marks because I kind of wish they just let the show die at the cliffhanger instead of letting the narcs in charge run it into ground. Narcs being the two lapsed Catholic showrunners. The show was still salvageable by the end of S5, but S6 retroactively destroyed everything, making it unwatchable for half of the fandom, while the other half was vaping copium.

I'm not going to write the synopsis, because fuck that burning cesspit, but these are some of the issues with it:

• abuse apologia and perpetuation of generational trauma "for the greater good" in a universe with an omni-potent god
• uncontested sentiment that bio children are worth more than adopted/step-children
• sex shaming
• rampant misogyny
• glorification of suffering
• hamfisted tragic ending clumsily masked with a "bittersweet" wrapping
• plus many more very Christian sentiments that nobody asked for (except for the part of the fandom that can't separate their religion from a TV show).

I have never watched GoT, so I'm not a good judge on this, but not a negligible part of the fandom claimed the Lucifer season/finale was worse. So there's that.

I personally think it’s a great ending, even though it was intended to be a cliffhanger for the next series before cancellation, but a lot of fans didn’t like the ending of Quantum Leap where it was said that Sam never made it home.

imma go with sopranos.

Dexter. I noped out after the Season 3 finale where they (John Lithgow's psycho killer character) killed his wife. My gf kept watching, and was predictably pissed when they killed the sister in the series finale. I laughed like hell. I will not be watching the reboot.

Supernatural, yes we know should've ended as long time ago. But the last episode was strange, the prior episode should've been the end. It's a glorified run of the mill episode

Dark.

I was super invested in the show, the concept of time travel and how everything (or anything) is connected (or not) if time is not linear. The end just ruined the whole flow. In my head, I actually have a different ending, which I can elaborate if anyone cares.

sgu, sga, sg1 was past its prime and needed a ending as the people working on the show felt it.

both sgu and sga were cliffhanger endings that unfortunate problems like mgm losing money and bankrupting to lower vierership and cancellation. according to the showrunners, and writers they were going to be more arcs being revealed if they continued the next season for both shows.

Warehouse 13 for me, only good part is the meta speech at the end by one of the actors angry about the end being here so suddenly

Can we mention Farscape? Without the movie it was a massive let down, with the movie it became an impossible mess. Either way, an incredible let down.