20 TV Shows That Failed To Stick The Landing
The great TV fumbles, from The Walking Dead to The Boys.
It's a tricky business, making a TV show. Because it's such a long-form piece of storytelling, taking years to move to the finish line, there are so many things that can go wrong, stopping any series from completing its run in the originally intended way... or the way desired by fans.
Over the years, the greats have had no such issues - or, if they have, they've overcome them. Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, Mad Men, The Wire, Succession, all of these and more knew how to end on a high.
The same cannot be said of the following shows, many of which were, at their best, television dynamite until they tripped at the final hurdle. Others, meanwhile, were never allowed the chance to realise their potential, because they dropped the ball straight out of the gate and never found a way to pick it up again.
With that in mind - from popular dramas that couldn't tie up their loose ends to sitcoms that attempted to shift focus at the final second to wonky results - here are the biggest TV shows that failed to stick the landing...
20. Marvel's What If...?
It's frustrating, really, that Marvel's What If...? ended up such a massively anticlimactic mess.
On paper, an animated TV series exploring possible alternate fates of everyone's favourite superheroes and villains sounded great. In execution, though, things were never clear, every episode being brought to life with unimaginative animation and what-if scenarios which were never all that interesting to begin with.
Some work, like an alternate reality in which Peggy Carter becomes Captain America, but who wanted to see Happy Hogan play Die Hard, or Iron Man meet the Grandmaster from Doctor Strange?
It was all a bit odd, truth be told, and odder still was how every character was voiced by someone new (Tony Stark with no RDJ? Criminal). It also didn't help matters that during its three-season run Marvel's What If...? attempted to link all its episodes together into one, interconnected narrative.
It needed to be fun, inventive, but What If...? was never more than forgettable and overstuffed.