My Top 6 Worst Television Series Finales of All-Time

As some of you may have read from my previous post I loved the ending to LOST but I'm sure there are plenty of people out there who were disappointed, even infuriated. It got me thinking about the television series finales that wanted to make my head explode like an oxygen deprived Vilos Cohaagen in Total Recall. And since everyone always does a top 5 or a top 10, I thought I'd do something different and do my top 6 all-time worst television series finales. So without further ado:

#6 The X-Files

The groundbreaking Fox television show created by Chris Carter burst onto the scene when I was just entering high school. I was immediately caught up in the tight, face paced scripts, the creepy stories, and the engaging characters Fox Mulder and Dana Scully. By the ninth season however the series had pretty much worn out its welcome but I hung in there. The series finale was a convoluted, tepid, and unsatisfying end to one of the best shows of the last quarter century. A military trial, the smoking man in a cave destroyed by a fighter jet's missile, Mulder and Scully having boring pillow talk in the final moments, and an episode that raised more questions than answers. Fortunately for the show the creators of the program made a second X Files film that was so bad it made the series finale of the television show look like the last episode of MASH.

#5 ALF

Growing up in the mid to late 80s it seemed like everyone was a fan of the brown haired, cat hungry alien from the planet Melmac. Watching Gordon Shumway (ALF's real name for those in the know) and his weekly antics with his adopted Earth family the Tanners, was a delight for me and my family. It is a tragedy that after 102 episodes ALF ended the way it did. About to be rescued by survivors from his home planet (including his believed lost love Rhonda) ALF is instead captured by the Alien Task Force and the episode ends with a "to be continued...." tag line. Um not so much. The series was canceled and even though the producers had a verbal agreement to do one more episode to resolve the cliffhanger, NBC never made good on its promise. Instead fans of the show were left pondering the fate of ALF and were later subjected to the horrible television movie Project ALF which wrapped up exactly nothing.

#4 Seinfeld

There are so many classic moments in this series. Whether it was being a "master of your domain", examining the problems with "shrinkage", or watching George trying to get bread from the "soup Nazi," this show almost never failed to entertain. I say almost because unfortunately the series finale was WEAK. While the premise had the potential to be funny (a group of former people from various episodes that Kramer, George, Elaine, and Jerry had wronged testifying at a trial) it fell flat on its face. You would think that with such classic characters at the trial like "low talker", Babu, Dr. Wexler, and others, the series end would be festooned with laughs. Alas the last episode proved to be painful to watch and inexplicably the four are sentenced to a year in jail. Crazy Joe Davola should have just killed this episode before the director yelled "action."

#3 The Sopranos

I followed this series off and on until I finally got back into it with my then fiance (now wife) Megan. Since the airing of "Made in America" three years ago many have come around on the controversial ending to the mafia based HBO drama. I am not one of them. What a jip. Silvio Dante is left in a coma, Phil gets whacked, and Uncle Junior gets left at the state mental hospital? WTF? But the worst part, of course, are the closing scenes. Six seasons of blood, greed, murder, sex, therapy, family, humor, and betrayal come down to a Journey song and an abrupt cut to black? This series deserved better and so did its fans.

#2 The Incredible Hulk

When I was five years old I had two obsessions when it came to television: The Dukes of Hazard and The Incredible Hulk. Watching the late, great Bill Bixby hulk out from week to week into the green Lou Ferrigno was awesome. I watched as reporter Jack McGee constantly chased after Dr. David Banner in his dogged pursuit of finding the Hulk. I listened as Joe Harnell's "The Lonely Man" played hauntingly at the beginning and end of the program. There were some excellent episodes including "Kindred Spirits" where Dr. Gabrielle White Cloud (played by a young Kim Cattrall) discovers a hulk-like metamorphosis at the dawn of man, or "Dark Side" where Bixby's character experiments with a mood altering chemical with psychotic side effects. Yet the series finale ("A Minor Problem") left the audience hanging like a WWII paratrooper dangling from a church steeple. The episode was a major problem for me (pun definitely intended) and had David fighting deadly bacteria in a deserted town. Banner's antagonist McGee was not in the final episode and the audience is left with Banner uncured and McGee no closer to finding out who John Doe (David Banner) really is. I'm sure this series finale made a number of fans want to hulk out.

#1 Quantum Leap

Up until LOST, Quantum Leap was my all-time favorite television show. The premise was awesome. A scientist named Sam Beckett (Scott Bakula) is lost in time after a botched experiment and has to "put right what once went wrong" in the past hoping that he would eventually get home. There were so many fantastic episodes that dealt with issues like race "The Color of Truth", the death penalty "Last Dance Before an Execution", rape "Raped", gay rights "Running for Honor", and even the Kennedy assassination, "Lee Harvey Oswald." As a Don Quixote type character, Sam was someone you rooted for and someone you ultimately wanted to see get home. After all the crap he went through and what he did for others I felt like that eventually he'd at LEAST get to go home. I couldn't have been more wrong. The series finale was quite good actually up until the final moments. After Sam leaps into himself at the exact moment of his birth and saves several miners in a local town, he then leaps to April of 1969 and informs Al's wife (Al is Sam's best friend and is able to help out in Sam's leaps by appearing as a hologram; Al is Sam's only link to Project Quantum Leap) that Al is alive and in a Viet Cong POW camp but that he is coming home. This saves Al's marriage. However, the screen then fades to black and states "Dr. Sam Beckett never returned home." This may have been the first time in my life I wanted to break the television. I felt totally betrayed. Here I had invested five seasons into this show and I'm rewarded with this? Why didn't the producers just kick me in the nuts with an iron toed boot while they were at it? To this day that series finale still infuriates me and it's been 17 years! What a colossal disappointment.

Well there you have it. Thanks for reading my scathing examination of botched television series finales. I promise soon that I will sweeten things up with a list of my favorite television series finales.