Best Shows With Worst Final Seasons

[DMC]

5 minutes ago, RumHam said:

What's really nuts is by the end we're supposed to be pulling for Dwight and Angela to get married? 

One thing I'll give the post-Carell show is they did a decent job showing that Jim and Dwight's relationship had evolved to actual friendship.  A good example of this is when James Spader plans on having Dwight fired and Pam forces Jim to intervene - even literally fighting Dwight - in order to stop it.

[RumHam]

5 minutes ago, DMC said:

One thing I'll give the post-Carell show is they did a decent job showing that Jim and Dwight's relationship had evolved to actual friendship.  A good example of this is when James Spader plans on having Dwight fired and Pam forces Jim to intervene - even literally fighting Dwight - in order to stop it.

I enjoyed seeing them as friends but I'm not sure they really justified it? Like I think it's right after Michael leaves Dwight is in charge and he's doing all this terrible stuff and Jim is miserable. Then at some point Dwight just becomes less terrible and in the end Jim wants him to have the job. 

[DMC]

4 minutes ago, RumHam said:

I enjoyed seeing them as friends but I'm not sure they really justified it? Like I think it's right after Michael leaves Dwight is in charge and he's doing all this terrible stuff and Jim is miserable. Then at some point Dwight just becomes less terrible and in the end Jim wants him to have the job. 

Well, that was literally one episode where Dwight fires a gun and rather immediately loses the job.  Even at the end of that episode, though, Jim tries to make Dwight feel better even though his behavior had annoyed him.

Another example a little later is Dwight's "doomsday clock," where Pam takes a bunch of them to his farm but doesn't try to pressure Dwight into turning off - instead appealing to their friendship - and Dwight does turn it off on his own accord.  I suppose that doesn't have to do with Jim directly, but they do begin to establish Dwight and Pam's friendship very early in the series (i.e. when Dwight gets a concussion).

[Derfel Cadarn]

1 hour ago, Werthead said:

 

The post-Rob Grant seasons of Dwarf are patchy IMO. Season 7 is terrible, 8 is okay, 9 is unwatchable, 10-12 are surprisingly decent (Dwarf is at its best when it has no money) and the last special from a year or two ago is really awful.

9 is the one that has Coronation Street before veering into a shitty Blade Runner parody, yes? I think they originally intended it to be 10, with a prequel series filling on the gap between it and 8, but never bothered. I took it to a charity shop, and normally I’m all for completeness. Got all the other ones. Kochanski’s actress disappeared without a trace.

49 minutes ago, A Horse Named Stranger said:

I'll add the Original Doctor Who series to the list.

The McCoy Doctor years were hard to watch. 

McCoy’s (and thus old Who) last year was actually the best season in years, I think. 
Original Star Trek’s last season was poor compared to seasons 1 and 2

[Annara Snow]

2 hours ago, Relic said:

Such a great show till midway thru Season 2, when the filler started happening. The BSG jumping into the atmosphere of New Caprica to release fighters and jumping out in S3 is one of the coolest things ever, but nothing else after that worked for me, IIRC. 

I think it was great (aside from a couple of filler episodes in S2) until the end of the New Caprica storyline (3x05) but then the decline started. The final season was such a mess.

[Heartofice]

I can remember the exact point in BSG where I realised something was wrong. Somewhere in Season 3 there is an episode with a boxing match and a rebellion or something (its been a while) and I realised I couldn't be bothered to finish it. This was the show that I'd watched the entire first 2 seasons in just over a day with my new boxset..and suddenly I couldn't finish an episode. The show never recovered from that point and only got worse. The finale is a travesty but it had been going downhill for a while. 

[Nictarion]

Gomorrah 

[Maithanet]

I am a big fan of The Office (US) and I've still never seen the final two seasons of that show.  Seasons 2-3 are great, and there's some decent stuff in seasons 4-5 to go along with weaker episodes, but even before Michael left the show was struggling, and once he was gone it was just unwatchable. 

I watched the series finale episode and it was just WTF is this. 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

Since it's been mentioned, does Dexter actually qualify? I'd argue it has the worst final season and final episode for a show that was once seen as great, but the dip happened for four seasons. It spent several years being terrible. 

[Werthead]

3 hours ago, A Horse Named Stranger said:

I'll add the Original Doctor Who series to the list.

The McCoy Doctor years were hard to watch. 

Season 24 was crap, although probably a slight improvement over the execrable 23. Season 25 was very good (maybe not so much the Cyberman story) and then Season 26 bordered on excellent, and basically provided Russell T. Davies with the template to pick up in 2005. The final story is a "grittier" story set on a London housing estate and touching base with things like racism and shattered teenage dreams. You keep expecting Rose and Jackie to show up.

Of those final eight stories, only Silver Nemesis is really poor, and The Happiness Patrol is dumb for a kid but quite amusing as an adult when all the satire on Thatcher's Britain becomes clearer. Battlefield is kind of dumb but also quite good fun (the last stand of the Brigadier!). And Remembrance of the Daleks and The Curse of Fenric are stone-cold classics (and bookend Sophie Aldred's quite remarkable improvement as an actress across two seasons).

1 hour ago, Heartofice said:

I can remember the exact point in BSG where I realised something was wrong. Somewhere in Season 3 there is an episode with a boxing match and a rebellion or something (its been a while) and I realised I couldn't be bothered to finish it. This was the show that I'd watched the entire first 2 seasons in just over a day with my new boxset..and suddenly I couldn't finish an episode. The show never recovered from that point and only got worse. The finale is a travesty but it had been going downhill for a while. 

One of the biggest problems in Season 3 was the time-skip, which actually happened in the Season 2 finale. But the New Caprica storyline was pretty good and everyone was under a lot of stress so you kind of rolled with it. And then afterwards you had everyone acting very-out-of-character (Adama and Roslin felt like they'd swapped places, Lee was either a pacifist or a genocidal maniac depending on what day of the week it was) and they kept promising they'd explain it with the flashback episode to what happened during the break on New Caprica. But all the boxing episode established was Starbuck and Lee screwing around behind their partners' backs, and Roslin and Adama getting high. It was very weird.

[WarGalley]

Bloodline Season 1 was superb (and worth watching despite the later seasons). It starts to go downhill about halfway through Season 2. Season 3 is just a total mess.

[JGP]

Yeah yo. First season of Bloodline hit me as a kind of falling fable. I dropped off part way through S2, I think, or maybe I rode it out. 

If Ozark was done right now, no renewal? That'd be the one for me. 2nd Season was good enough to keep me hanging on, but last we got. Kinda almost made me angry, honestly. Just horrible.

 

edit: great topic, btw Relic

 

[A Horse Named Stranger]

1 hour ago, Werthead said:

Season 24 was crap, although probably a slight improvement over the execrable 23. Season 25 was very good (maybe not so much the Cyberman story) and then Season 26 bordered on excellent, and basically provided Russell T. Davies with the template to pick up in 2005. The final story is a "grittier" story set on a London housing estate and touching base with things like racism and shattered teenage dreams. You keep expecting Rose and Jackie to show up.

Let's agree to disagree on the virtue of the McCoy era. Personally I think Colin Baker's years as the Doctor were/are underappreciated. I know, this is a minority opinion. For me McCoy (and Capaldi for New Who) were easily the worst years. Anyway, without wanting to derail the thread and turning this into another version on the awesome/awfulness of the Swanshank Redemption, let's just agree to disagree. And let other people have a go with their suggestion on good series with bad final seasons.

On that note. Torchwood Mircale Day was pretty awful. I like the premise/idea, but the execution was pretty bad. 

[Ramsay B.]

5 hours ago, Nictarion said:

Gomorrah 

I instantly thought of this when I read the thread title, most likely because of how recent it was. As time passes the more I think about the last season the more I dislike it. It’s not even close to the standards of the previous seasons(especially the first 2)in basically every way. 

[WarGalley]

I was going to ask as I haven’t even gotten to Season 4 yet but that is very disappointing to hear about Gomorrah.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

This one breaks the rules a bit, but follows the general premise. Summer Heights High was one of the funniest things I saw while in college. It's a single season run, but it had two spinoff series, both which were terrible from what little I saw and read about.

I wonder just how offensive that show is now given it cannot have aged well. 

[dbunting]

Hard topic for me because most shows mentioned lost me (pun intended) well before the final season. Lost, Dexter and The Walking Dead being the obvious ones. I can't think of one that for me, went out so poorly ONLY in the last season, that it ruined my view of the show.

[Rubicante]

Game of Thrones sucked from season 2 on.  Even season 4, which a lot of people say is one of the best seasons of the show, failed at properly conveying some of the best moments from ASOS.

The Oberyn and Mountain duel was atrocious.  Good if you like 70 camera cuts in 60 seconds.  

The Tywin, Tyrion and Jaime confrontation falls completely flat without the truth regarding Tysha being revealed.

Stannis saving The Wall occurs in like 1 minute, and somehow portrays Stannis as the bad guy in the situation.

Brienne fights the Hound for some reason.

Joffrey’s wedding occurring during the day and outside seems totally wrong atmosphere wise, and nowhere near the magnitude of how presented in the books.

Anyhow, I loved the first three seasons of Arrested Development, and gave up on the fourth season four episodes in. I couldn’t believe how bad it was.

Battlestar Galactica should have ended when they found the “first Earth”.  Would have been such a grim ending for such a grim show.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

25 minutes ago, dbunting said:

Hard topic for me because most shows mentioned lost me (pun intended) well before the final season. Lost, Dexter and The Walking Dead being the obvious ones. I can't think of one that for me, went out so poorly ONLY in the last season, that it ruined my view of the show.

Skimming through I don't think anyone mentioned TWD, which should be a first ballot mention and I say that quitting in S4 when the one girl kills her sister and tries to kill an infante and they have to shoot her. S1-3 were great, but at that point I had to eject. Sounds like all I missed was more torture porn. 

[Cashless Society]

The final two seasons of Mad Men were pretty lacklustre for me, I felt that everything I needed to know about the characters was accomplished in the first 5 seasons.

Sherlock? Does anybody even remember that this show existed?

Killing Eve got progressively worse as the seasons went on, I haven't even seen the final season it got so bad.

Westworld is another show that got exponentially worse with each season, glad it got put out of its misery. 

Peaky Blinders was very repetitive in its narrative arc, I stopped at after season 4.

The Good Wife lost all its steam by the final season, although you could clearly see this was the case during the back-half os Season 6.

Dr House was fun for the first 4 seasons, had hit or miss episodes in later seasons and had an atrocious final season.

11 hours ago, DMC said:

Anyway, while GoT and Dexter are the go-to mentions here, I've always found it interesting that most of my favorite comedies this century went on way too long.  Parks and Rec, 30 Rock, The Office (US version), even Weeds and now Arrested Development (if you could its Netflix return).  All of them were really shadows of their former selves by the time they ended.  Archer and Always Sunny promise to join these ranks...if they ever end.

What ?? 30 Rock had one of the greatest final seasons ever put to screen.