It's mind-boggling how much Benioff and Weiss dropped the ball on the final two seasons of GOT. It's hard for me to even re-watch clips of the early seasons on YouTube because of how much I know its going to take a turn for the worst. The sad part is the production value and actors were still on their A game.
In contrast, I can rewatch practically anything from BB or BCS.
100x this. I am used to reading the traditional “write it in full once with a definition” for further use, eg. Breaking Bad (“BB”), but find lots of people on Hacker News just assume that everyone knows the acronym and several times a week find I have to search for a definition. It impedes understanding for what?
I feel the same way about Game of Thrones. I really loved the first few seasons, but I can't bring myself to start rewatching them as I know where it inevitably goes.
It's even worse than How I Met Your Mother in my opinion, for two reasons - first , GoT is much more focused on a long running story, making the conclusion more important. But more importantly, HIMYM is a sharp decline; you can simply skip the last two episodes and have a perfectly fine ending. GOT just declines ever more, making it hard to set a point at which to end the show.
They took many of the elements that made the first seasons so good and completely reversed course on them. Two that stand out are 1) anyone can die at any time and 2) these characters are really far apart geographically and it takes time for them to get anywhere, and things will happen to them along the way.
The last two seasons suddenly all of the main cast had plot armor and could teleport anywhere they wanted.
> It's mind-boggling how much Benioff and Weiss dropped the ball
Watching it, at times, I remember getting the visceral feeling that those who were the driving force behind the greatness of what the show was, had just lost interest; had new projects in mind and were just phoning it in for GoT, in the end.
Maybe they just ran out of ideas? These two didn't even write the original stories; the author George RR Martin did, but he didn't finish the story before they got to season 7 or 8, so they made up all the last stuff themselves without him.
Even if they had written the screenplays themselves, that's no guarantee of future quality. I can think of two cases with movies where the same people made horrible sequels: the original "Highlander" was great, for example, but the same director (and story writer) did the sequel and it was horrible. Similarly, "The Matrix" was revolutionary, but the same two brothers who wrote the story and directed did the sequels, and they weren't that great (though arguably not the huge drop in quality between Highlander 1 and 2).
The quality of Game of Thrones directly maps to how much source material they had to adapt.
The show runners have taken all the heat, but the fact is GRRM knew he needed to wrap up the novels before the show caught up. He wrote many blog posts about it. Unfortunately, it’s clear now that he never will.
Expecting the show runners to finish a series that even the original author can’t is just unreasonable. To that point they had writing credits on The Wolverine and a couple other shows.
But according to popular internet sentiment, Benoif and Weiss are to blame, not HBO or GRRM for leaving them high and dry…
It highlights what a good screenwriter Martin is. He writes for the screen in his novels (and this is good) so much so that it doesn't engage with my imagination at all which is actually what you need for television!
Obviously he has a good imagination and it's this that the other writers couldn't replicate. Maybe the imaginary is harder to capture in a screenplay compared to literature. Fascinating topic.
I just finished watching it for the first time. Start to finish.
I didn’t hate the ending. Season 5 was the worst, and the whole, “I’m going west of Westeros because that’s where the maps stop” was some weird nonsense, but otherwise it fit the general theme of the show.
Missing a couple great finales: The Americans and Justified. I want a finale to provide closure, to tie up most loose ends, and to send the characters off to a fitting future or end.
Also, my disdain for Lost has no bounds. I watched it in real time and want every minute back. I've never felt so ripped off by a show, ever. It turned me off watching most shows in real time ever again. I usually wait for series to conclude with rare exceptions.
But I'm also the kind of crazy person who reads the last chapter of a book first before deciding whether to read the whole thing.
I see we’re kindred spirits. Everyone talks about Vince Gilligan or David Simon. But no hats raised for Graham Yost.
As far as LOST goes, I enjoyed the ride up until that very last episode, much like Battlestar Galactica. It’s a pity but I bet I could watch it all again and just skip the last ep and fill it with my head canon.
I think Better Call Saul is the better show. I really enjoyed it. And Rhea Seehorn was totally robbed of an Emmy.
My problem with Lost is that we were promised something better but it turns out the show runners were just yanking our chains. They have no more idea what really happened than the rest of us. I'd almost rather them say: yes, everyone really is dead, it was all purgatory just like everyone thought from the beginning. Ugh even thinking about it is raising my blood pressure.
It's so cool to see Person of Interest on the transcendent finale list!
I'm in the middle of a second watch through, 10 years on. For a show originally penned around worries about the post-9/11 surveillance panopticon, it's still disturbingly timely, albeit in a much weirder modern world than could have been imagined then.
If you've never seen it, but read HN, would recommend.
Definitely don't research the plot on the internet before watching! And give it until the end of season 2 before you throw in the towel... it ends up being about very different things than it starts about.
I'll second this. It is a show that I think slightly suffers from having to make 20+ episodes a season (besides the last) so at times certain episodes will feel like they are filler. Unlike many other shows though it ended just about when it should which I think is why it made this list.
I’m surprised that Sopranos made the transcendent finale list, and equally surprised that Six Feet Under didn’t make it (and isn’t even in the review.) Six Feet Under wrapped everything up so perfectly. The Sopranos, as much as I enjoyed it, did not have a finale that lived up to the show.
It would have been an invalid article had it not included The Sopranos! The Sopranos did have the perfect ending. It's been debated and will continue to be debated till the end of time, and I loved it.
My take: life continues and Tony keeps doing what he's been doing, which fits the entire theme of the show: The more things change, the more things stay exactly the same.
Funny - I heard about the finale before I saw it, so I figured there would be a lot of ambiguity, but it was quite obvious to me that it was “lights out” for Tony so to speak. I suppose that speaks well for it that we are able to take our own meaning.
Scrubs is a funny one. It's both disaster and transcendent. Everything about Season 9 is garbage, but up to that point it was a fantastic show. And Season 8 has an incredibly well-done, moving, funny finale. I highly recommend anyone watching this show for the first time simply stop at the end of Season 8.
"Season 9" is a spin off. I don't care if they still had a few of the OG cast pop in, when you have a whole new main cast and a whole new premise, that's a different series
Fun analysis! Some thoughts and subjective opinions.
- Westworld's very poor showing helped me realize what I think the major flaw is in this analysis, which is that it doesn't properly capture shows that have been on the decline for a while. In Westworld's case, the season scores are as follows: S1 8.86, S2 8.38, S3 80.25, S4 79.38. As you can see, there is a consistent decline from beginning to end, not just a disappointing ending. The series average is propped up by a very strong first season and goes downhill from there. Not sure how to best adjust the calculation to try to take this into account.
- I found The Expanse ending disappointing because it ended mid-plot (which is less excusable than GoT since the authors actually finished the book series), but I also understand that they had to end it somehow and did pretty well with what they had. As a note to anyone that is enjoying The Expanse show but maybe hasn't finished it, I would definitely recommend stopping now and reading the books first, then watching the show. The books actually have a complete arc, but also the first six books pretty closely match the series, so if you watch the show first those books will be a bit of a slog to get through. Doing it the other way I think will work much better, because although you'll know the plot of most of the show in advance, the space battles and other visuals are so cool that it is still a fun watch. Then you can just kinda imagine what the rest of the books would look like if the'd actually made them into the show.
- Ozark being in the Disaster Finale surprised me – I thought the ending was good (if not great). I guess viewers were hoping for a Breaking Bad-tier ending (given the subject matter and strong rest of the show) and so were let down.
- Agree with the author that Lost is a surprise "satisfying finale". It is definitely in my top 5 most disappointing series endings (alongside the unsurprising disaster finales of GoT and Dexter).
- Big Bang Theory had a finale that seemed right in line with the rest of the show, surprised by the delta that puts it into Transcendent territory. I have a sneaking suspicious that non-fans may've been watching other random episodes and rating them (negatively), thus dragging down the season average by a good bit. But non-fans would probably not be tuning in for the finale, thus leaving that score to be entirely dictated by fans.
I simply refuse to accept The Sopranos as a quality finale. I don't care how pretentious people believe it has aged, it's just a crap way to end one of the all time greats. Total cop out.
I watched the show about ten years after the finale aired and I was shocked to see the finale get such a negative reaction—it's probably my favorite show ending I've ever seen. The combination of "Don't Stop Believing" and the cut to black is unmatched. I don't know what you mean by "cop out"—what ending would you have preferred?
I wanted to see where The Wire landed. Season 5 was the weakest but also rounded out the series by showing several cycles completing. Perhaps not the best, but in some ways the most important?
Better Call Saul half-ruined the drama genre for me. Watching anything else and I ask myself why they can't make it slower and more well-paced like BCS, make it subtler and more contemplative like BCS, make it faster and more suspenseful like BCS. And all of that is with BCS having to work as a prequel, it is just poignant how long we will have to wait for another Jonathan Banks monologue or a Tony Dalton looming terror over the whole season. I half-wished the show never exist in the first place.
> I can't think of a television reboot that has reproduced or outshined a series' foremost iteration.
Futurama I think is the exception that proves the rule here for maintaining quality. Keeping the core writers and deliberately not flanderizing the characters seems to be the key here.
Sabrina is the gold standard of a reboot that surpasses the original.
> Futurama I think is the exception that proves the rule here for maintaining quality.
Sadly the reboot has terrible ratings, at least according to IMDB.
I haven't seen the second half of the _true_ last season (from 2013) of Futurama, nor have I seen the reboot. I feel if I never watch the _true_ final season it never really ends.
Should've restricted it to (prestige) dramas, as there is a world of difference between Game of Thrones or Mad Men and, say, Big Bang Theory. For instance, where's the greatness of The Shield? Or the controversy of Battlestar Galactica?
What’s nice for dour ending enjoyers is you can stop watching in Granite State if you want that cabin ending, assuming you’re willing to ignore the last 5 minutes or stop at episode end with the assumption being the episode ending is a call out of Walt’s hubris never letting him give up as a “Bolivian Army” ending before his demise. [1]
The show still works thematically like that, BCS largely doesn’t really care about how Walt croaks, and El Camino works equally well with “and Jesse tried to escape again, but this time got away with it”.
Just finished s1. I never really rewatch immediately, but I feel like I kind of need to for this show. There was so many small details I likely missed, but there were a ton I did notice that puts a spotlight on the attention to detail and storytelling they have. And that's just s1, I've heard 2 and 3 are the really good ones.
Absolutely right. Most of us who were watching the show as it was released felt the first season was good and hewed closely to the book which was also good. But then seasons 2 and 3 are gobsmackingly good. Every episode is important and pertinent, and ideas and themes flow like water. I envy you getting to enjoy it for the first time!
yes! Especially since The Office and Brooklyn Nine-Nine both made the cut, and are very related shows.
(The Office finale is one of my favorite finales ever. While both are great, I'd probably say P&R beats Brooklyn Nine-Nine, though neither is on the level of The Office.)
I really enjoyed this, well done. I love that there were surprises like the LOST finale not being as bad as you thought (statistically).
Some obligatory personal hot takes:
- the Scrubs finale should be considered the last episode of season 8 (which was great). Season 9 should be considered a spinoff series.
- The Blacklist recently aired the series finale and I would consider it a disaster finale. It has ruined the series for me, and I no longer recommend it to friends.
- I think most comedies aren’t ruined by a series finale. That’s probably due to the character over plot idea, as there usually isn’t a storyline I’m dying to finish.
I'm in the minority of people who enjoyed the LOST finale.
In the end, for me, it was about the characters. Not the mystery.
And the finale was about seeing the characters off.
... I know, I'm terrible at being a nerd. :(
PS: But then, I also loved the Seinfeld finale. For me, it peeled the curtain back a little more and showed they were in fact, awful, neurotic people who were the source of the very craziness in their lives that they spent so much time bemoaning.
> That’s probably due to the character over plot idea, as there usually isn’t a storyline I’m dying to finish.
Yes, but how you handle your characters can still be very important. There are shows where the ending is simply a good episode, sending some loved characters off - like The Big Bang Theory. The ending itself is not that great of an episode on the tin, but the viewer has come to love these characters and having a great ending for them is important.
And then there are endings like How I Met Your Mother, which manage to cast the the whole series in a worse light. It would be the counter-example for ruining a comedy with the finale.
Overall, comedy endings are probably simpler than most, but you can still make a lot wrong.
LOST’s finale _was_ bad. And what’s crazy is they had the makings of a great one all ready to go. It almost feels like they drew the finale out of a hat or something that they passed around the writing table. It’s.. an ending, but not nearly as satisfying as it could’ve been.
IMO, they should’ve finished the show with the two realities we were witnessing being two realities created post explosion. No nonsense about Limbo or whatever. If you feel the ending is the good reality, so be it. If you feel it’s the bad one, cool too. If you feel it’s both, also great.
The show is largely about faith and consequence. So make the finale about it too.
You are giving that show wayyy too much credit. (Bonus points: read the JJ Abrams interview about the magic box on his desk)
It was clear to me by the start of season 3 that the writers had no plan, that they were making it up as they went. That is why they had filler episodes, one which introduced new characters only to kill them off at the end with 0 impact on the overall plot.
The finale was more of a Rorschach test for what you thought the show was about. I even tested a friend of mine on this, making a convincing case about how the whole show was the Island bringing to life the gay subtext between Jack and Sawyer. (She is still raw about that)
I think the best way to understand the finale is with a Nihilist bent: it's whatever man.
> Lawrence considered the eighth season to be the end of the show Scrubs, going so far as to ask ABC if he could change the name to Scrubs Med School. ABC declined, but Lawrence still advised fans to treat it as a new show, even putting a caption under the "Created By" on the X-ray in the opening sequence saying [Med School]
So the showrunner treated it like a spinoff but the network wanted to keep the name.
- Satisfying Finales: endings that more or less meet viewer expectations.
- Disappointing Finales: a conclusion that falls short of previously established show quality but is not so bad as to retroactively render prior viewership a waste of time.
- Disaster Finales: an ending that is so terrible it begs the question, "What were the writers thinking?"
Note to the author: run this through spell check again, saw a few spelling errors (e.g. Saitsyfing)
The heading made me immediately want to read this article in hope of sharing my ongoing grief at the terribly, criminally disappointing finale of Game of Thrones.
And yes it was included as the golden standard of beyond terrible in section 4, “Disaster Finales: So Terrible It Hurts”
A problem shared is a problem halved (or doubled or something). I feel some comfort here.
Imagine, though, how bad George R R Martin must feel?
If anyone wants to discuss the LOST finale, I'm here for it.
Let's start with the obvious:
They were not dead since the plane crash.
Basically every mystery was explained.
JJ Abrams only had input for the Pilot and very little afterwards. So no magic box bullshit.
Of course the writer were "making it up as they go", they didn't have a 6-years plan. But the themes and motives were there since the beginning. (in fact you can read the early outlines here: https://www.reddit.com/r/815/comments/13kr6ua/the_black_box/).
LOST was all about the characters _and_ it had a compelling mystery. It was perfect. Also it's one of the few media to get Time Travel 100% right (as in: internal logic).
As for the Game of Thrones -- that's exactly what JRRM envisioned. At some point he sat together with GoT storywriters and producers and laid off all the plans, how who dies, and of course the finale.
I think the finale was awesome -- what a nice populist autocratic ruler may become. That sometimes life is not what you want it to be, and you cannot change it. That your favorite characters don't always win.
PS: I only regret they pictured protagonist Tyrion (the dwarf) somewhat nice. The whole GMMR's idea was that his character was repulsive, incredibly ugly, but did good things all the way. That would stand off from pretty much all the movies, when I can tell who's who from the first minute (good are cute, bad are ugly).
The "end result" is not quite the same as what they mean by finale.
The shortcuts taken in the final season of GoT, my word, are unforgivable when placed alongside the care and detail taken up to that point. By the pace of the series up until the start of the final season, there should have been two more seasons to do it "properly".
The decline of Daenerys deserved detailed, focused nuance as power and inherent genetic disposition combined to corrupt and disconnect her completely from reality. And Jon Snow's slow drawn-out torture as her decline played out, should have been comparable to Theon's at the hands of Ramsay.
It could have been beautiful.
Edited to add: It may have been the final two seasons that were greatly accelerated, not just the last. I can't remember, I don't want to re-visit the series because of it.
and they needed to be full seasons and not the shorter and shorter seasons they were running towards the end. 8 episodes was too short (and the production schedule far too long) let alone 6 episodes.
Perfectly eulogized by the pitch meeting guy: “sorry, just not enough time!!!”
top comment: > You wanna know how bad season 8 was? We are in The middle of a long quarantine, and not a single person I know is rewatching this show.
Hard to overstate how bad hbo fucked up there, I wish they’d have thrown it away and just reshot it with a team who wanted to be there.
(the directors needed it to be over so they could go do Star Wars… and Disney was so dismayed with how unprofessionally they’d handled it that they took Star Wars away from them lol.)
Modest proposal for y'all: each season finale of GoT is an opportunity for great branching discussion about how the story should best develop from that point on!
For example: once John Snow's been stabbed, he's really dead, and replaced by the faceless man, working on orders for the Bank of Braavos, all are fooled by the statagem, except for one spunky skilled sister of his... What happens next?
Here's your rewatchability!
I'm not entirely sure why they got rid of him at all: they could have simply re-cast him. Yeah, it'd be a bit jarring, but that's exactly what they did with Avasarala's husband. The replacement actor didn't look or act anything like the old one, and seemed 20 years younger too. Surely they could have found a replacement for Alex's actor that was closer than that?
Its not terribly different from the books. The plot is only really getting started. IMO they still need to give the actors another couple years to get older for the next chapter of the story. They really are old farts for the next part.
The double negative (hasn't, not) makes your comment a bit confusing.
You're saying there is talk of something to cover the final 3 books? Do you have any sources on this?
I haven't seen anything about this online besides one thing I saw, but can no longer find, something along the lines of "we're not done with the Expanse universe yet", but I may be misremembering.
Naren Shankar and the cast have said pretty much that same thing and Wes Chatham said something around the lines of "there's more in the works", but that is it. My comment was around the fact that there hasn't been anyone saying anything negative around it's future, so we can presume they're still trying.
Expanse was apparently axed at end of s6 because of budget reasons from one Reddit comment thread I came across a few years ago, someone quoted something along the lines of "Internally it was called 'The Expense" because of how much the show cost to make". Makes you wonder if someone else would be willing to put up the money for new stuff. But then again you have shows that cost multiple millions per episode these days.
I just did watch the episodes on TV when I had the time, so I'm not really deep into it. From looking it up the ending I mean is called "Sleeping in light" so Season 5 i guess?. I think I need to do a rewatch and watch it properly this time.
As context afaicr, they were expecting to be cancelled after season 4, so wrapped up the big arc.
Then unexpectedly got a season 5, but weren't sure if there would be a season 6, so ended up hedging their bets with an odd season (compared to the others).
And then the post-show movies provided a few more opportunities, but never evolved into follow-on series.
Not quite; the plan was always to go for five seasons, but the PTEN network closing up shop put season 5 at risk.
Sleeping In Light was always intended to be the finale; once season 5 got secured they shot another episode (which was also great) to act as season 4 finale.
The uncertainty with season 5 did play havoc with the pacing of the arcs. Season 4 did have to cover a lot of ground to get the most important arcs to close, so parts of it feel rushed, and vice versa the beginning of season 5 takes a while to get back to speed. Sigh.
When I read your article title, "Dexter" popped immediately into mind. When I had finished watching the finale of Battlestar Galactica with my kid, they turned to me and said, "At least it had a better ending than Dexter!"
Any data on the number of votes for the finale vs. average episode votes? I wonder if there might be any correlation showing that voting on the finale was made only by the most persistent of fans that may impact the findings.
The most unsatisfying finale of any show or season ever was Stargate: Atlantis.
This show ended in a dead-on cliff hanger, leaving the whole story in an open end, just because they wanted to get people into watching the remake cinema movie.
It was a fantastic first season. But it aired a year and a half ago and there is still no release date for season two, so any hype has subsided quite a bit. Season two was reportedly filmed in April/May of last year.
Yeah, Enterprise had its issues (especially the awful theme music at the beginning), but overall was pretty enjoyable to watch and had likeable characters, unlike Discovery.
Am I the only one in the world that watched GoT purely for the sex, violence and escapism and just thought it was popcorn and didn't care if the finale sucked?
It's mind-boggling how much Benioff and Weiss dropped the ball on the final two seasons of GOT. It's hard for me to even re-watch clips of the early seasons on YouTube because of how much I know its going to take a turn for the worst. The sad part is the production value and actors were still on their A game.
In contrast, I can rewatch practically anything from BB or BCS.