5 beloved shows with endings everyone hated

The fifth and final season of Stranger Things is about to air after what seems like an eternity of waiting. Star Finn Wolfhard (Mike) revealed to TIME that, prior to beginning work on the season, everyone was “pretty worried” that the ending would get “torn to shreds,” as happened with Game of Thrones when it ended in 2019. “[W]e’re all walking into this going, ‘We hope to not have that kind of thing happen.’”

I’d hate to think Stranger Things would end like that, but there have been quite a few shows over the years with spectacular runs that fell flat at the finish line, so anything’s possible.

Dexter

Watch Dexter on Paramount+

For eight seasons, fans were thrilled with the adventures of Dexter Morgan (Michael C Hall), by day a Miami criminologist and by night a serial killer who only kills other serial killers. The show scratched a persistent itch: people love brutal crime stories but don’t want to feel complicit in brutal crime. The solution is a brutal criminal who only kills other brutal criminals.

Maybe there was no clean way out of that loop, but the ending didn’t have to be this terrible. After losing his sister, Dexter Morgan fakes his own death and abandons his son and love interest to live in the Pacific Northwest, which ends the show without resolving much of anything.

People hate the ending of the original series to this day, but Dexter is back in the good graces of viewers again, thanks to the sequel show Dexter: Resurrection. Hopefully, they don’t botch the ending this time.

Lost

Watch Lost on Hulu

Lost was a mystery box show, meaning that the main reason a lot of people watched was to find out just what the hell was going on. What was the nature of the island where everybody crash-landed? What was with the “flash sideways” segments where we saw the characters in some kind of purgatory-like afterlife? The series finale had to solve these and other mysteries to everyone’s satisfaction.

That was probably too much to ask. Casual viewers thought the answers were too complicated, and hardcore fans didn’t think they were complicated enough, not after they’d spent years analyzing every frame and coming up with elaborate theories.

Opinion on the finale has softened a bit over time, as new fans discover the show on streaming services and can binge it straight through, meaning there’s less time to build expectations the finale doesn’t meet.

How I Met Your Mother

Watch How I Met Your Mother on Netflix

Lost and Dexter were serialized dramas with long-running plotlines to wrap up; they didn’t do it well, so it makes sense that people were mad. But How I Met Your Mother was a sitcom about wise-cracking yuppies; how did it tick everyone off?

Because it was a sitcom with a long-term hook: fans were promised from the start that we would eventually meet your mother, that is, meet the mother of the children that Ted (Josh Radnor) talks to in the framing story. And we finally get to know her in the final season: she’s Tracey (Cristin Milioti), and in the finale, we learn she’s dead and that Ted is now with his true love, Robin (Cobie Smulders). The show technically made good on the promise of its title, but spiritually it felt like a rushed rug-pull.

The series finale of Seinfeld, another sitcom, was also controversial when it aired, but Seinfeld was never building to anything, so who cares if the ending is lackluster? But with How I Met Your Mother, fans felt like they’d been taken on a nine-season con.

Battlestar Galactica

But Battlestar Galactica on Amazon Prime Video

The Sci-Fi Channel scored an unexpected hit in the 2000s with Battlestar Galactica, a revival of the 1970s series about humanity at war with intelligent machines of our own creation. Oops. The show was cerebral, exciting, and unpredictable, but it got a bit too ahead of itself in the series finale, which ended with the remnants of humanity forsaking all technology and settling on a new planet: Earth.

While you could understand why we wouldn’t want to use technology anymore after creating a race of killer robots, the resolution felt too easy and absolute, especially given how granular the storytelling had been leading up to it. It also brought in some heavy supernatural and religious themes that, while not utterly out of nowhere, were hard to swallow after four seasons of military sci-fi.

But Battlestar Galactica was small potatoes compared to our final entry.

Game of Thrones

Watch Game of Thrones on HBO Max

Game of Thrones was a high fantasy epic that absolutely dominated pop culture for nearly a decade, made people feverishly excited to see the ending, and then disappointed them so hard that the cast of Stranger Things is scared to this day. I’m not sure we’ll ever see anything like it again.

After six-plus seasons of detailed plotting and carefully crafted character arcs, fans did not like how the series finale ended things in a pat, perfunctory way. Daenerys Targaryen, whom fans had been rooting to take the Iron Throne for years, goes crazy and dies in the space of two episodes. Bran Stark becomes the new lord of the Seven Kingdoms, seemingly out of nowhere. It all felt way too tidy for a show that had made its name on being dramatically and thematically messy.

Game of Thrones has attempted a Dexter-like comeback with the prequel show House of the Dragon, which has had mixed success. They’ll take another stab at it this January with A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, which looks promising.

Whither Stranger Things?

Finn Wolfhard was afraid that the final season of Stranger Things would get the Game of Thrones treatment, but that was before he read the scripts. When that happened, he says, “[w]e knew that it was something special.”

So it sounds like Wolfhard’s fears were allayed, but whether audiences like the show is up to us, not him. I’ll be watching the final season of Stranger Things when episodes start to drop on November 26, and I expect it to go over well. But could it crash and burn? (Ahem) Stranger things have happened.