Worst TV show finales: A data-driven look at the biggest letdowns (according to reviews)

Is there anything worse than when the closing credits begin to roll, and you’re left with a void where your favorite TV show used to be? How about when that exact show you’d dedicated half your waking hours to ends with a 5 star flop? It’s the TV equivalent of a bad breakup, leaving you feeling a mix of disappointment, confusion, and a large helping of sadness.

As we anticipate the final series of ‘YOU’ and ‘Squid Games’, and potentially some anti-climactic finales, it got us thinking, which TV show finales are the all-time worst? To uncover the most infamous endings, we dove into over 50,000 IMDb reviews, hunting for those reviews with keywords like ‘disappointing,’ ‘boring,’ and ‘trash’ (among others). Warning: spoilers ahead!

Key Findings:

• Sex Education ‘Episode 8’ is ranked as the #1 worst TV show finale, with 86% negative wording
• Sherlock ‘The Final Problem’ ranked as the #2 worst, with 64%
• Lost: The End; Part 1 & 2, and How I Met?Your Mother: Last Forever: Part One & Two, tie for third place, both with 63% negative wording
• Brooklyn Nine-Nine and Friends ranked as the best TV show finales, with only 4% negative wording in their reviews

Debating TV show finales has turned into its own spectator sport, and saying goodbye to a beloved series can be a bittersweet experience. As the saying goes though, all good things must come to an end. While crafting a memorable finale for a mediocre show is challenging, it's all too easy to botch a great one. We’re diving into IMDb’s 30 most popular TV show finales, so grab your popcorn and join us for the ride.

Taking the top spot is Sex Education: Episode 8. After four solid seasons, the show rang the school bell for the final time. It’s fair to say the writers had a big job in tying up the loose ends of characters who’ve gone through an adolescent journey over the past five years. Unfortunately, unlike the success of Otis and Maeve’s clinic, this finale didn’t quite hit the mark. With 86% of reviews featuring negative comments, it’s been dubbed the worst finale of all time. One reviewer described it as “anticlimactic and unsatisfying,” while another called it “an embarrassment of an ending.”

In second place, we have Sherlock: The Final Problem, with 64% negative wording featuring terms like ‘disaster,’ ‘disappointing’, and ‘trash’. Not only did the finale fail to impress critics, but it also saw a significant drop in viewership, with over 3 million fewer fans tuning in to see the series conclude. The most frequently used negative term was ‘disappointing,’ with 35% of reviewers expressing this sentiment. One particularly scathing review labeled it as the “worst Sherlock episode ever.”

Finishing the top three is a joint tie between Lost: The End; Part 1 & 2, and How I Met Your Mother: Last Forever: Part One & Two, both with 63% negative wording.?

All 121 episodes of Lost recently landed on Netflix, stirring up a mix of excitement and disappointment among viewers. Particularly those who are hammering the 1* button in the IMDb review section. From smoke monsters to polar bears on a... tropical island? The weird and wonderful 6 series of Lost certainly had viewers in a chokehold, until that final episode. 30% of reviews included the words ‘disappointed/disappointing’. With a review declaring ‘Years later, this ending still annoys me’.

How I Met Your Mother, 9 series later finally came to an end with its ‘Last Forever’ two-part series. While Ted may have found love in the season finale, viewers were left nothing but heartbroken. The controversial ending rocked the boats of many viewers, and faced its fair share of criticism, with viewers predominately left feeling ‘disappointed’ (32%).

The grand finale:

Finales, finales, finales... the realm of rushed relationships and frustrating cliff hangers. Wrapping up years of plotlines into a dissatisfying ending seems to happen time and time again, leaving viewers mournful of their favorite series. So, here’s to another decade lost to rubbish endings and happy never afters.

Methodology:

By using IMDb’s Top 100 Most Watched TV Shows list, we were able to scrape the 30 most popular finales. We scraped over 50,000 reviews for the most common negative words, which included; ‘rubbish,’ ‘disaster,’ ‘boring,’ ‘garbage,’ ‘terrible,’ ‘disappointment/disappointing,’ ‘trash,’ and ‘waste’. The results were collated, and the percentage of negative wording was compared to the total reviews.

Data was collected August 2024.

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