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I think there’s two kinds of shows, and this notion is true for one of them.
Burn Notice had a crazy and weird set of dramatic final seasons. I never bothered with them. But previous seasons were excellent things with only a few minutes focused on the central plot of unraveling the Burn, the rest devoted to serials of helping some innocent person evade a gangster. Always enjoyable.
But there’s other shows where all they are building is plot anticipation; just a growing feeling of “I wonder how this will end”. I’ve even become alerted to video games doing this with excessively long running series, or anything touched by the creator of Kingdom Hearts.
Each solid piece of media should have an enjoyable ending to it - even if it’s also building towards future endings.
I mean, a show tells a story with a start, a middle, and an end. Each of these sections rely on the previous one to build a world that the watcher can engage with it. If one of these is bad, it reflects on the entire show.
And out of these 3, I would argue that the ending is most important. The ending is what the entire story has been building to. All interactions and choices made have lead to this one point. And if all of those choices lead to an ending that is poorly made, it makes those choices that the characters made feel pointless. It leaves a bad taste of the possibilities of a better ending for the show.
Its more like “this man stopped ww3 but then in the later part of his life he said he shouldnt have and wants all the insert ethnicity to die a horrible death”, still a legend for stopping the war but maybe that last part is a bit fucked.
enterprise had a really bad ending, because les moonves hated the franchise so he made it a wierd PEGASUS tng sideplot, and it was suppose to have a season 5 to involving the romulan war. nutrek was just terrible from start to finish, animated however was superior to the 3 series, but inferior to old trek.
BSG as well, due to the writer strike, the showrunner forgot about the show and made it a messianic, jesus/god ending. the showrunner hated the sci-finess of the show, so he made them without any advanced tech of the old series.(allegedly the showrunner wanted a mormon themed show.)
Blood of zeus was rushed because netflix cancelled the show.
SPN is another terrible ending, but honestly the show was way past its prime and lifespan anyways.
Well, Alfred Nobel tried to do a uno reverse on this one. And I think it worked!
The last season of GoT invalidated all of the growth that was witnessed in all the previous seasons, ruining the story.
How I Met Your Mother’s last season broke a spell that was over me, thinking that any of the characters were decent people. And allowed me to look at the whole thing without any of the nostalgia that carried me throughout the show. Was a young adult with questionable opinions that got better as I got older. The show seems to have never done so. And so I can say that the bad season did ruin the rest of the show, as I may have never given it a critcal eye if they had written it better.
I remember reading all the alleged leaks on freefolk for s8, couldn’t believe they’d be accurate, some of them just seemed too dumb to be real.
By e3, so much of them had been correct (well, at least from the parts of that episode I could see), I just embraced it. Was a far more enjoyable experience for me, at least got me through the remainder of it. Cracks showed before s8 (once they ran out of book material I think is when it stated), but there was so much dumb shit that final season.
We used to do rewatches, my partner hasn’t touched it since then and has said she probably never will, s8 just ruined it for her (she also leaned into the spoilers after e3)
Except that isn’t the same logic?
A show’s ending is the culmination of its plotlines. A bad ending essentially invalidates all the plot development of the show.
Similar logic applied to a human would be if someone spent all their life trying to cure cancer and told everyone about how they were about to release the cure to then, suddenly, abandon the project, destroy all research so no one else can use it, and fuck off to retire in Tahiti.
And then a brick wall fell on that guy and his sister in Tahiti.
The ending of a series can completely destroy all the meaning and character development of said series.
Or let me put it differently:
Essentially what this is saying is “it’s about the journey, not the destination”, but ultimately it’s a pretty flawed notion. It doesn’t matter how pretty the journey is if you’re going to someplace to get tortured or beaten.
Also, as far as people go; you may cure cancer, but you can still suck. Steve Jobs sucked. He died a stupid death because he didn’t listen to anyone about curing an easily curable cancer. Something which also defined his career, as he never listened to anyone about computers and technology, meaning his stuff sucked all the way up to the 90s.
What a stupid logic.
Disagreed, there are many shows that spend seasons building on the ending that if the ending is really bad, it makes the rest of the show feel pointless.
GoT comes to my mind with this. The whole show are these giant buildup to the war in the north, the dragons, Westeros power grabs, Jamie’s character arc, children of the forest, and other cool concepts that ended in a pathetic wet fart of a final season. It makes watching the show feel like a waste. when you know at the end its just a wet fart.
Having the white walkers built up as an unimaginable threat for the entire series only to be toppled by catapult Arya was the biggest wet-fart turd on a wagyu steak dinner.
Unimaginable horrors beyond your comprehension Ends up just being some popsicle ass MFs who all die when the lead Mcfrozen nuts gets shanked.
LMAO @ Lead Mcfrozen Nuts!
Grim comes to mind. It ended so abruptly I just regret watching it at all.
Hah! My spouse loved that show, so we watched it together as it aired back then. I wasn’t interested in reading about the show online and such, so when “The End” appeared on our screen, we were both shocked! Wasn’t expecting that!
We did rewatch season 1 recently which had some great moments, but gave up after that.
Ugh why did you remind me of this? Grimm was such a good show only to just fucking nosedive right off a cliff one day.
Really putting the “ass” in comparison there. Also, if a person say… wrote a best selling beloved children’s book series, but then heel-turned into a piece of shit, it absolutely does ruin their entire body of work for a lot of people.
Like, this happens, what is the comic even talking about?
Context can certainly change over time. If Rudy Giuliani died in 2002, he’d be remembered as ‘America’s Mayor’.
How cruel a joke it must be for a God to create beings that crave consistency in a universe where the only consistent thing is change.
Really feels like the comic artist wrote ‘died like an idiot’ to argue against himself in bad faith from the get go
If a show tells you it’s building to something, then fails to deliver, it has disrespected all the time and effort invested.
See:
Lost
Battlestar Galactica
How I Met Your Motherbsg was wierd because the showrunner forgot about the series, and wanted on the ill fated caprica, plus him being a mormon made the whole show wierd, because he wanted a GOD-centric(think any other shows with angels/demons/god related material) ending to the show. the og series never had that kind of crap.
The OG series was also a Mormon analog.
I personally, just ignore the ending, and appreciate the amazing time I had leading up to it. xD
Or when it ends on a cliffhanger just to get canceled. That really ruins how I feel about a show.
both sga and sgu were cliffhangers, sad.
I’m still super salty about SGU, that show was just starting to find itself when they cancelled it.
What no? A show has a narrative structure - buildup to a disappointing end devalues all of that which came before.
A narrative and a person ain’t the same. It also follows that we evaluate them differently
If a story doesn’t have a satisfying conclusion, then I would say starting the story is pointless.
in the same way, if someone cures cancer and fucks one chicken…
I heard it was an osterich. Allegedly.
I think both “the show had 5 great seasons but a terrible ending” is as bad as “the show has 3 bad seasons but the last 2 are great!” are equally bad and reasons that I would not watch something.
It’s not like there aren’t hundreds of other options.
I guess I agree except The Good Place season 1 is a must watch. Later seasons fell off a bit and pushed my suspension of disbelief in places, but if you don’t care about the ultimate plot you can just watch S01 and call it a day.
Babylon 5 was a great show… with this caveat:
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Season 1 is slow and you won’t know how important it is until you watch 2, 3, 4.
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Season 4 is the single best season of sci fi television ever produced, but you have to have seen 2 and 3 to fully appreciate it.
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The reason Season 4 is amazing is because they didn’t know they were getting a Season 5 so they stuffed 2 seasons worth of television into 1.
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Then they got renewed for Season 5 by a different network and were like “Season 5… um… yeah! We totally have a plan for that… Yeah… totally ready to go.”
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